'Newt' and other friends - Newt Gingrich; Manners

National Review, July 31, 1995 by David Klinghoffer

``Newt Gets Nasty'' (Newsweek) ``Newt's Unruly Army'' (Time) ``Newt's Budget Inferno'' (The New Republic) ``Righter Than Newt'' (The Atlantic Monthly) ``Newt's Ethics'' (NATIONAL REVIEW) ``How Can They Lose in '96? With Newt as Speaker, for Starters'' (The Nation) NOW THAT ALL of America is on a first-name basis with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, it is as good a time as any to reconsider the practice of addressing and referring to total strangers, and people we know but not well, by their Christian names -- a habit that lately has gotten completely out of control.

As short a time ago as the mid Seventies, when I was in elementary school, it never occurred to us kids to address our parents' friends, much less our parents, as Helene, Alan, or Dick. Twenty years later, visiting a youngish married couple and their little girls, aged 3 and 5, I found myself being referred to by my last name. ``Rachel,'' the father would say to the 5-year-old, ``please pass Mr. Klinghoffer the potatoes.'' I wondered why this made me feel distinctly uneasy, and realized that it's because it has become so rare to hear yourself addressed formally. Certainly that's true at home, but also in business settings. At work, I frequently receive phone calls from publicists or would-be writers who, though we've never spoken before, feel free to start off the conversation with a hearty, ``Hi, David, how you doin'?'' Or worse, ``Hey, Dave, it's Bobby at XYZ Public Relations.'' For someone with a first name capable of being diminutivized, there is nothing more annoying than to have a complete stranger address you by that diminutive. Salesmen, calling me at home, regularly take this liberty: ``Dave, this is Pete at MCI, do you have a minute or should I call back later?'' The use of first names in conversation with strangers has become a good deal more common than it was a decade ago, when one began hearing complaints about it. What has gone unremarked is the increasingly common -- and equally irritating -- use of first names in referring to strangers, especially celebrities, with whom you or your audience will never so much as exchange a word. No doubt the practice took root in Hollywood, where every cash-register attendant at Starbuck's will talk unabashedly about how he's going to get Michael (Ovitz) to represent this screenplay he's been working on, which is the perfect vehicle for Jack (Nicholson) and Whoopi (Goldberg). The custom then migrated east, so that it has now overtaken discussions of politics in New York and Washington, and elsewhere for all I know. Newt Gingrich is by no means the first politician to discover he's got a lot more intimate friends (and enemies) than he had previously realized. It was with a certain degree of irony that people began referring to President and Mrs. Reagan as ``Ron and Nancy.'' With a little less irony, talk turned in 1988 to ``George and Barbara'' and in 1992 to ``Bill and Hillary,'' with still less.

When we ask why people talk this way, it becomes obvious why they shouldn't. The uncontrolled use of first names shares a certain moral perspective with, of all things, the animal-rights movement.

When you say that animals should have the same rights that people do, you blur a distinction that was absolutely clear to previous generations: the distinction between animals and people. The animal-rights crowd seeks to set men on a moral level with their pets; and, as Rabbi Daniel Lapin points out, the attraction of doing that is obvious. If we are animals, then no more can be expected of us morally than you would expect of your Chihuahua.

While the protectors of animals seek to ``liberate'' monkeys and dolphins, at a deeper level they want to liberate people -- from the burdensome moral responsibilities that come with being human.

What's that got to do with addressing people by their Christian names? The answer is that the proper use of family names was once a custom that preserved two other distinctions that were blatantly obvious to our grandparents. One is the difference between social classes. A wealthy man might feel comfortable addressing his servants as ``John'' and ``Mary,'' but they wouldn't dream of calling him ``Robert.'' More important is the difference between adults and children. Up till about thirty years ago, the only group of people in America who without exception addressed each other familiarly was children. Everyone else at least began an acquaintance on a formal basis. Children were, and of course still are, introduced to each other as ``Johnny'' and ``Betty.'' Just as the philosophy of animal rights puts humans on a level with cats, the trend toward first-names-only puts adults on a level with kindergarteners. What follows from this should be obvious. Both animal rights and ultra-familiarity are emanations of liberalism, an ideology that, since the 1960s, has had as one of its principal goals the liberation of men and women from traditional ideas about how an adult human being should behave. But how to achieve that end? One option is to openly attack the whole notion of traditional morality. That strategy has been tried since the 1960s, with some success. The other, more indirect options are to undermine the belief in humanity as a class distinct from animals, and to undermine the belief in adults as a class distinct from children.