The hall monitors of the corporate media are regular Miss Manners acolytes when Donald Trump fires off some inane insult, such as calling California’s Governor Gavin Newsom “Newscum,” but when neocon chickenhawks, staggering like blood-starved vampires at a quarter to dawn, libel the patriot Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian asset, the etiquette police stand down.
Trump’s nomination of Gabbard to ride herd on the intelligence agencies (abolition would be better) and the McCarthyite response thereto by the nuts and Boltons came shortly after I had rambled on about “civility” at the annual conference of the Front Porch Republic, held this year in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the city that gave America Gerald R. Ford, Amway, and director Paul (Hardcore, Blue Collar) Schrader.
‘Twas a superbly thought-provoking and convivial gathering, as always, though attendance was somewhat lower than usual. Perhaps timid souls were kept away by Gerald Ford Derangement Syndrome?
In his journal, my late friend and congressman, the noble Barber B. Conable, was restrained in his assessment of Ford’s intellect—“I have never had any illusions about his brilliance”—but he judged the 38th president “a loyal, decent man doing his job as well as he can and working very hard at it…. Virtually everyone [on both sides of the aisle in Congress] thinks of him as a personal friend.”
That’s a lot better than being “feared” or whatever passes for political manliness with the keystroke belligerents of the Revenge Right.
When the word “civility” appears in elite discourse it is almost always with reference to politics rather than everyday life. While the hail-fellow-well-met demeanor of Gerald Ford is preferable to the boorishness of an Adam Schiff, I think we get this completely backwards.
Lese-majeste toward a President is a social crime—unless the President is Trump—but if politics is the “systematic organization of hatreds,” per Henry Adams, then why should we demand civility toward these manipulative middlemen of hatred?
Those who hold to the Mark Twain definition of patriotism—“loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders”—are oft reluctant to kiss political ass. As Ernest Hemingway groused, “A writer is an outlier like a Gypsy…. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.”
William Saroyan, the Armenian-American novelist, and James Thurber, the purblind creator of Walter Mitty, refused to shake FDR’s hand at a Hyde Park reception. William Faulkner rejected an invite to dine with the Kennedys because the White House, he said, was “too far to go for dinner.” The poet Robert Lowell declined to read at Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House Festival of the Arts, and his fellow invitee Dwight Macdonald showed up but passed around a petition denouncing his host’s foreign policy.
Lady Bird Johnson, her husband’s beard for the corrupt communications empire that made the Family Johnson a fortune while Lyndon labored in “public service,” was outraged by this insolence.
Similarly, these days we are supposed to feel sorry for the object of the 1960s taunt “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” but I feel worse for Danny, the kid down the street who at the age of 21 was killed in Quang Nam province.
Note that the aforementioned acts of defiance—or “incivility”—were directed at the president of the United States, not these writers’ neighbors.
That’s not me. I can’t be rude, even to politicians. I am of the Talking Heads/“Psycho Killer” School: “I hate people when they’re not polite.” If I met Lenin I’d probably just smile weakly and say, “Hi, howya doin’?”—and I despise “Imagine” more than any other song. (Homonymic gags work better on the ear than the eye, but what the hell.)
Should Pat Tillman’s mother behave civilly toward Dick Cheney? One thinks of the look of horror on Jimmy Stewart’s face when he realizes he is shaking the reptilian hand of Mr. Potter, the man responsible for his father’s death, in It’s a Wonderful Life.
I speak with reference only to wielders of national power, not precinctual custodians. My wife was our town supervisor for nine years, and we remained on good terms. We even shook hands with some frequency. (Not as often as I’d have liked….)
Today, I joke with our state assemblyman, I drink in cheerful fraternity with my pal the retired judge, and I’m amused by my long-dead relative, the Democratic-machine Irish mayor of a Hudson Valley city.
They’re politicians, but none of them sent young boys to grisly deaths. Neither has, nor will, Tulsi. So treat her like a lady, as the Cornelius Brothers sang, but feel free to treat George W. Bush like a man responsible for half a million deaths.
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