Wilted collars - Column

National Review, May 16, 1994 by Florence King

|TO AMERICANS," wrote Randall Jarrell, "English manners are more frightening than none at all." It's true. We hate good manners; they make us feel shut out and held at arm's length. We would much rather be at each other's throats, which at least has the advantage of resembling a hug. Given a choice between the starched collar of respect and the rump-sprung britches of love, the American fashion has never been in doubt.

Manners have always co-existed uneasily with our national purpose. Cherishing the canard that nobody is better than anybody else, we enshrined informality so as to put people at ease instead of in their place, until we concluded that it is impossible to give offense in a democratic society. Then along came the multiculturalists, who said, "Offense is a group thing, and you'd better understand." We understood perfectly: if it's not bigotry, it's not rudeness. Now we are so busy being sensitive that we have become barbaric.

Mouth-slapping cereal commercials give us a view of food inside the actor's mouth, and "Washington apples, they're as good as you've heard," presents crunch after crunch after crunch, until the last cruncher catches the drip with his finger and licks it off with a loud slurp.

Now to the other end. The Odor-Eaters man mourns, "My feet stink!" Macintosh has a file-compressing software called "Stuffit." The "Marvin" comic strip contains regular references to "poopy diapers." A typical Metro headline reads: "Dog Owners Warned to Scoop Poop." A laxative commercial features a constipated construction engineer worried that the little pill he took will "kick in" while he is on top of his half-finished skyscraper, and ABC News ran an interminable segment about odors in the shuttle toilet, which, we were needlessly told, "smelled like a men's room."

Being earthy is like being satirical. The satirist needs a like-minded audience of co-conspirators who are secure enough not to take everything literally; they cannot be incorrigible romantics or nervous status seekers. Successful earthiness likewise demands a unified outlook. A British historian's deadpan description of the Tommy's standard laxative in Victorian India--"a spoonful o' gunpowder in a cuppa 'ot tea"--is funny because everything is all of a piece, but American diversity, with its goal of "inclusion," has no common ground but the lowest common denominator. That we have become the land of the bathroom joke was a foregone conclusion.

Our vocabulary of manners has shrunk. Every review (except mine) of H. L. Mencken's diary contained the sentence, "His racism is inexcusable." But nothing else is inexcusable, and anyone who uses the word about a lapse in etiquette is told to "lighten up." A nurse who does not first-name her ninety-year-old patients is punctilious, which now means cold. As for civility, it is rarely used in its broadest sense; usually it crops up in arguments about arguments, as in "civil discourse," when pundits fret about the proper way to be rude on Crossfire.

We lighten up in the wrong ways, at the wrong times, in the wrong places, with the wrong people, and call it inclusion, when in fact it is a faux pas most grievous. Having a Tomb of the Unknowns insults the Unknown Soldier because more than one destroys the whole concept. Fiddling with holidays to create three-day weekends institutionalizes disrespect. Rush Limbaugh, anxious to prove that conservatives practice inclusion, interrupts a respectful young caller with, "You don't have to call me sir." Why not? A brilliant man and natural leader who is admired by millions certainly should be called sir.

THE PURPOSE of manners is to make life serene for those about us. The most ignored form of civility nowadays is being clear and concise. Atlanta lawyers used to say that it was impossible to misinterpret a Will written by Eugene Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell's father. "In drawing a Will," he always advised, "just look after the grammar, and the law will look after itself."

So will the manners, but democracy makes Druids of the intelligent. Some of our most intelligent people, at least in terms of raw IQ, are young male technologists known as computer jocks. Having grown up hearing that "everyone is equal" when they know perfectly well everyone is not, they get even by writing User's Manuals that no one can understand. A badly written User's Manual can cause literal accidents, but when it makes people feel stupid it can also cause figurative accidents, harder to define but just as damaging. The contempt that fairly oozes out of these impenetrable oak groves is rudeness incarnate.

The current state of American manners makes me feel as if I were trapped in a Brueghel painting of a rustic kermiss in full swing--peasants, peasants everywhere and much the worse for drink, grabbing food and each other and gnawing on both with untrammeled gusto. God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.

When loutishness becomes the rule, the people who suffer the most are women, for whom manners originally were devised. Instead of identifying with the scum of the earth, feminist should reflect that a bold peasant, their country's pride, when once leashed can never be denied.