The Decline of Manners

Ben Franklin kept his beaver hat on

Civility has always been in danger in America, because thoughtless new citizens usually figured they had to express their new sense of independence by being overly contemptuous of the "higher orders." There's even a marvelous episode in John Adams' European diary in which he records his refusal to bend a knee to a Spanish bishop when he comes upon a religious procession.

And Ben Franklin became something of a success d'epater by keeping his beaver hat on in Parisian salons. He cranked up the Quaker custom of non-deference into a self-promoting posture during the waning days of the Ancien Regime. And that canny observer (if lousy novelist) James Fenimore Cooper wisecracked in his Notes of an American that Jacksonian Americans no longer used the term "servant" any more but instead substituted the euphemism "help," on the grounds that such service was voluntary and in any case temporary, as yesterday's maid was very likely to be next year's matron. Upward mobility has a way of engendering instant arrogance.

My thinking in these crucial characteristical matters has been heavily influenced by two events that took place over 30 years ago. One was the Allstate insurance agent in East Lansing, Michigan, who had the temerity to call me "Pat" two minutes after launching into his spiel for auto insurance. (Incidentally, I have responded to this indignity of calculated affability by telling a few intimates to call me "Patrick" or "shithead"--whichever feels more comfortable at the time--and I try to counter the tendency by calling all but a few intimates by their last names. This is harder to do with women, but so be it.)

The other watershed event was my reading of a seminal essay in the New Republic by Morton F. Cronin called "The tyranny of democratic manners." In it he explained how the "good Joe" boss first-named all his "help" until they crossed him, at which time he lowered the boom of their last name on them. The essay is classic and deserves to be read by all serious Americans as part of their intellectual preparation for life.

Poor Mr. Cronin, if he were writing his essay today. He'd have to produce a more apocalyptical title, such as "The disintegration of democratic mannerlessness" or "Who the f--- do you think you are, ass----?", so precipitous has become the decline--nay, collapse--of our manners since the liberating 1960s.

The best place to study such a devolution is in our modes of public transportation. Let me begin with Amtrak, when I spent an "All Aboard" fare during Christmas in an itinerary that look me from San Francisco to Seattle, St. Paul, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Los Angeles and back to San Francisco. So we're not talking regional aberrations. We're discussing a national crisis. And we're not focusing either on the disarray of the lower orders--that will come when I discuss the situation on Greyhound Trailways. For the most part, well-heeled well-educated folks take their trickling treks in Amtrak. Yet even there, rampant slobbism rules.

Take the matter of letting someone pass in a crowded, narrow train aisle. The nuns at Holy Rosary taught me two things about riding the Michigan Central. Always step aside for the older or for the gentler sex. And always thank someone when they step aside for you. On Amtrak, no one--I mean, no one--ever said "Thank you" when I stepped aside, unless they were over 40. Indeed, the young'uns don't even see you as they madly dash down the aisles. Step aside? Never. They are solipsists without any sense of otherness.

On New Year's Eve there was an instructive episode. A skateboard-toting early teener, who had been beering illegally and who clearly hadn't learned how to drink (let alone think) civilly, was clogging the staircase of the exit when the train approached the San Antonio station at two o'clock in the morning. A woman attendant, eager to discharge her disembarkment duties, in desperation ordered the young punk, "Move it!" At this injunction the drunken skunk looked around in amazement at the other about-to-disembark passengers and said in utter disbelief, "She was ordering me around." The help just didn't do such things in his native Tennessee.

I counseled him by suggesting, "Maybe she noticed that you have extremely bad manners." He dealt with this commentary by blueing the air with foul language.

Now, here's a complication. A week later, I entered the toilet of the Oklahoma City Sheraton, behind two young men and one old one--one of the young ones was a dead ringer for the skateboarding teener. Even though the young men were first to the urinal, they held back, deferring to our gray hair. I commented on this civility and complimented them for their fine manners.

It turned out that in this culture, which only recently insisted on separate toilets for black and white--no matter what their ages--youth treats age with respect. I like that. Not because I'm getting older by the minute, but because throughout the millennia this has been a hallmark of civilization.

But don't get your Okie hopes up too soon. Come back on the train with me between St. Paul and Chicago, as I was trying in the prime seat to watch Tom Hanks in Big on video. One 11-year-old with an attention span measurable only in nanoseconds started putting his feet on my chair.

I told him to lay off and move on if he wasn't interested in the movie. He upped his anti. He started lobbing fruit at a sibling across the aisle. I raised the voltage of my rhetoric, to the brink of vulgarity. He retreated temporarily. I was really into the film, and was taking fairly extensive notes. He witlessly interrupted, "Hey, you're really interested in this movie, aren't you?" I nearly slugged him. Only his tender age saved me from an assault rap on the spot.

After a lunch break, I continued my research. My next informant was a dazzling blonde reading radical Margaret Randall's book of poems. She had placed her lovely legs high on the windows of the Lounge Car. I excused myself: "Pardon me, I'm doing a sociological study about people who put their feet on furniture in public accommodations. My question is, do you think people do it more because of age or gender?"

She blushed beautifully-and took her well shod feet off the window. It turned out she was a joint English/women's studies major from Macalester College in St. Paul, the alma mater of both my eldest son and only daughter-in-law, both of whom display excellent manners because their mothers saw to it that they did.

My lovely informant tartly told me she was more an English major than a women's studies one. Yet she argued that men were greater feet-on-the-furniture offenders and much less likely to say "Thank you" when someone let them pass in the train. (I tested her hypothesis and, lo and behold, a black girl and an Asian girl did say, "Thank you.") She was reading a leftist poet, Margaret Randall, and she had advanced opinions in general. But even she was corrupted by the erosion of civility.

But compared with the median Greyhounder, she was a veritable paragon. Let me tell you about the leg (make that legs!) between Albuquerque and Oklahoma City. Make that Amarillo, since I deplaned there instead of overnighting as I had planned, because the three-year-old in the seat across the aisle kept kicking me. Literally. Her mother occupied the inside seat, with a babe in arms, and she let her tyke run up and down the aisle ad libitum, kicking me every time she climbed back into the saddle of her seat.

After five kicks in the first hour of the trip, I enjoined the overpassive Mom: "Lady, please tell your kid to stop kicking me." She didn't say a word, glowering as if she had been hassled, not me.

That was the least of it. On a New Orleans-El Paso leg, an Appalachian mother alternated with two styles of children non-rearing: First she would let the kid run free, and then she would beat the stuffings out of it. With language that made this former sailor flinch.

On a bus from Pensacola to Miami, I was astonished and ultimately levitated by the marvelously nurturing child-rearing practices of the Nicaraguan refugee parents--the men, especially. They fondle their children like angels, instead of beating them. I wish I could say the Appalachian mother was atypical. Alas, not. Black and white, from every part of the country, working-class mothers are creating a tidal wave of unnurtured children. They're not raised, they're reared--as in a kick in the ass.

Everybody professes to be mystified by outbreaks like that of Patrick Purdy in Stockton. He's no mystery. He was an unnurtured child. Unnurtured children become beasts as chronological adults. Our country is awash with walking, talking time bombs.

Can anything be done? Not quickly. And not easily. The Chinese have a proverb: You can't carve rotten wood. Unnurtured children turn out to be rotten wood. Latchkey children are undernurtured--quality time be damned. Single-parented kids are undernurtured, no matter how logistical the swapping of child into two part-time residences. Street children are by definition unnurtured.

But we must not make the mistake of thinking our problems are centered there.

A whole generation-maybe two by now--have been "raised" by the TV nanny. Their narcissism in the train is the space bubble that accrues from years and years of solo televiewing. Sorry to be simpleminded about it, but we must learn from the Nicaraguan peasants in this instance. Those Central American refugees' children are going through a hell in their flight from their homeland. But as with Jesus's flight into Egypt, they are blessed with attentive mothers and fathers.

We are talking about the unintended downside of commercial culture. We Americans didn't know 30 years ago that McDonald's would destroy the family dinner. It just did. We didn't foresee that the liberalization of divorce laws would unleash hordes of unattended children. It just has. We fatuously believed that Disney sentimentalism and violence-saturated popular culture (flip sides of the same counterfeit coin) wouldn't generate consequences. We were wrong.

The way back to civility must begin with a recognition that bad social ideas have generated bad social consequences. The first step back is to exorcise those spurious notions. The second is to be careful the next time we jettison millennial old traditions of family nurturing and stability.

Ironically, those "hordes" of Asians and Central Americans with those undisrupted family traditions may set the example we need to edge back from the abyss. For make no mistake about it: The erosion of civility is not just a matter of bad manners on the bus and train. It is an outward sign of an inner lack of grace that could do us all in, permanently.

From Welcomat, March 22, 1989