Are there any bad words left? Is profanity now just part of the daily discourse? Yes to the latter, no to the former. The bad words are now for conceptual things, like Zionism or capitalism or any of the various -phobias that are not, in fact, phobias at all. But the effenheimer, the king of all the naughty words, is not only normalized, it’s absolutely essential to prove you are a real person with strong emotions about Things.

Kamala Harris may be the first veep to drop the F-bomb in a public setting. Speaking at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies Legislative Leadership summit — which is quite distinct from the Indo-Asian American Center for Legislative Senatorial Leadership Scholarly summit — she said:

“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f***ing door down.”

Wow, she’s real! She’s just like that woman in the TikTok video who sat in her car and complained about the f***ing cost of f***ing living and how the eff is someone supposed to get a muddereffin’ house when the f***ing cost of a f***ing McDonald’s f***ing hamburger is five f***ing bucks I mean eff my life.

It’s tiresome and ugly, and hence you are not surprised when the Irish Eurovision contestant, a gaunt, ink-spattered nonbinary queer witch named “Bambie Thug,” uses a string of predictable profanity to complain about the presence of the Israeli competitor. Ugly people use ugly words in ugly tones to say ugly things. What’s amusing is how they still — in the f***ing year of our Lord 20-f***ing-24 — think that the Very Naughty Word conveys some power to indicate conviction or outrage. It doesn’t. It just means that the sum total of your intellectual opinions can fit on a fortune-cookie message with room left over for the lucky numbers.

You would’ve been shocked to hear the Israeli Eurovision singer use the word, because she seemed to embody a different set of values: actual, empirically verified beauty and grace, as opposed to Bambie Thug’s transgressive mish-mess of hideous hair, costumes with so many sharp protrusions you hope her valet is up on her tetanus boosters, makeup that looks like she suffered an attack of St. Vitus’s dance while holding a mascara applicator, and enough piercings that you could make her fly into the wall by turning on a powerful magnet a block away.

But beauty is suspect these days. People who tire of profanity and civic uglification are probably Actual Nazis, you know. If you say you wish the public discourse were more civil and articulate, and you’d prefer if we did not regard college students screaming anti-Jew couplets as an articulation of a coherent political philosophy, then you’re tone-policing. You’re ignoring the important issues of the day in favor of archaic, bourgeois ideas of public civility.

Well, yes. Yes, I am. Because the alternative is: (a) slurs deployed to assert moral superiority and end debate, because only a Zionazi genocider would argue that they weren’t a Zionazi genocider, and (b) believing that moral authority resides in the side with the most annoying chants. We are dealing with people who shriek “The people — united — will never be defeated” and think it’s a rhyme.

But what of Trump? Yes, he encouraged a crowd to use the S-word at a recent rally. He said that everything Biden and the Left touches turns to . . . and he let the crowd fill in the blank with the S-word. He then said they shouldn’t say that word, not very nice. Very Trumpian, to get the desired reaction and then theatrically disclaim responsibility. It was not nice.

Accurate, though.

If anything, he gave new life to the second Very Bad Word and thus revealed the divide of our age: The Left says “Eff you,” and the Right says “Your accomplishments are sh**.” One is full of hate, aggressive, invasive; the other is a vulgar critique that equates the opponent’s ideas and results with an odorous fly-blown heap.

Perhaps in the coming days of street brawls at the conventions, the sides will know each other by their letters. Masked soy-fed Antifa crews wearing “F” in reflective tape, and the burly men in Harley T-shirts wearing “S.”

Eventually the pendulum swings back. In 2032, we might hunger for a leader who says “gosh” and “golly.” We can only f***ing hope.