The lovely person

National Review, Dec 28, 1992 by Florence KIng

WE'VE HEARD much about "Bubba" recently, but in the vast storied realms of Southern antonomasia, Bubba is not terribly important. What Americans should contemplate is the South's sobriquet for a certain type of woman.

We call her a "luhvly puhson."

Southerners don't go in much for gender-free language, but the Lovely Person is the exception that proves the rule. "Lovely Person" and "lovely woman" are not synonymous. The latter has sensual connotations, and the Lovely Person has finished with that, if she ever started, and acquired a more rarefied image, so calling her a "person" signifies the complimentary kind of indeterminate gender associated with awesome mythological figures and angels.

Nobody ever sat me down and explained what a Lovely Person is, but somewhere along the line Southern osmosis kicked in and I just knew, the way I just knew the difference between a good ole boy and a redneck, or the subtle social gradations of ordinary, common, and trash. Thus, when I read Gone with the Wind at the age of eight, I understood that Scarlett O'Hara's mother was a Lovely Person: "To Ellen, mares never foaled nor cows calved. In fact, hens almost didn't lay eggs. Ellen ignored these matters completely."

There are nicey-nice women everywhere, but in the South, where fire-bells in the night ring a little louder, the Lovely Person is Lord Chesterfield in Depends. To her way of thinking, life is a menopausal bladder that must be rendered comme il faut come hell or high water.

So that ye may know her, the Lovely Person has a signature sentence that she uses to stop people before they get to the juiciest part of the latest gossip, or whenever any conversation gets too interesting. Probe a subject that fascinates the vast majority of humankind--Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, the Donner Party--and the Lovely Person will flutter her fingers delicately as though fanning an unpleasant odor, and murmur with gentle reproachfulness: "I don't want to know."

She follows that with, "Let's talk about something pleasant," which is why the Arabs upset her so. Judging from the baroque bloodthirstiness of their political rhetoric, there isn't a Luhvly Puhson in the entire Middle East. It was bad enough when they called us the "great Satan" and predicted that "Everyone who conspired against Iraq is moving toward a black end, to the hell of oblivion, ruin of present and future," but what really made Arabs non-puhsons in her eyes was the Iraqi mother's vow: "I would cut off the head of my baby and swallow it if it would make Bush lose."

The Lovely Person prefers headlines like the one I recently clipped for my files: "The Bonding Power of Andrew: Hurricane's Rampage Added Strength to Family Ties." Chances are a Lovely Person wrote it, because it is no longer necessary to be a rarefied Southern female to qualify for the sobriquet.

A country that calls Andy Rooney a curmudgeon can't take much unpleasantness. Americans are turning into Lovely Persons quicker than you--or even I--can say "son-of-a-bitch." As soon as the election was over, pundits began flagellating themselves over the way they had covered it, and came up with self-assessments that sound just like the Lovely Person tamping down her dinner table.

Fred Barnes was condemned for his "chilling hostility" to Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group. Sam Donaldson was "snarlingly rude" to Cokie Roberts on This Week with David Brinkley. I found both of these exchanges to be merely vigorous, but other words used to describe the campaign coverage include flay, icy, savage, and that stepfather of all television images: threatening.

Even speaking in a manner described as "crisp" is cause for alarm in Lovely Person America, where "demanding" means punctual, "cold" means efficient, and "obsessive-compulsive" means neat. Our favorite word is "vulnerable." If I'm vulnerable and you're vulnerable, we're all okay-- which is why the words "human error" make any catastrophe acceptable, especially when Dan Rather brings them out in that gulpy voice he uses to make himself sound large of soul.

Lovely Personhood is the driving force of our age. Political correctness is Lovely Personhood. The uproar over negative campaigning is Lovely Personhood. The moral collapse known as "growing in office" is Lovely Personhood. And the quintessence of Lovely Personhood is self-defeating guff about a "kinder, gentler" America.

LOVELY PERSONS are everywhere nowadays. Some merely say nice things as the easiest way out, like the husky young Marine interviewed by CBS after Hurricane Andrew. Asked if he was surprised to find himself helping hurricane victims instead of fighting, he replied that he had joined the Marines "to travel and to be part of humanitarian relief."

Other would-be Lovely Persons are motivated by narcissistic challenge-- like Oxford's Bill Clinton, who "befriended the curmudgeonly former sergeant major of artillery who was the British school's porter," according to the Washington Times.

Having myself become a target of "threatened" professional extroverts since my misanthrope book came out, I know all about this trick. I can just see First Bubba honing in, extending himself and going out of his way, all the while thinking: "If I can crack this nut I must really be a Luhvly Puhson."