Sailing To Oblivium: June 19, 2017

My late father-in-law always claimed it started after World War Two. I think the first tangible sign was when we started letting boys wear baseball hats to the supper table. Now we let grown men wear cowboy hats during memorial services.

It is this lack of civility and the abandonment of even the barest hint of social propriety that has washed over our nation like a noxious flood. It leads to women wearing the white dress of virginity to their fifth wedding. It leads to individuals wearing shorts to funerals. It leads to such acts of tackiness as putting dark meat in a chicken salad. Where have our standards of decency gone? Is classlessness the new etiquette?

We see it manifested to extremes now as individuals block supermarket lanes while talking on their cell phones, sometimes discussing, in a loud voice, intimate details that would embarrass a confessional priest. Oh, and our politicians. Let's not forget them. Just today, E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote an interesting piece about the loss of civility in the national political arena.

Civility is not merely disappearing in our lives. It bespeaks, to many at least, a sign of weakness that, somehow, makes the practitioner of it a limp-wristed pansy. A beloved and highly popular TV character’s favorite phrase is, “Never apologize. It’s a sign of Weakness.” Wow. That one will get you far in life.

That’s actually a line lifted from a John Wayne movie She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, from 1949. It was more or less a stupid line then as well as now. A better one would be “Never explain. Your friends don’t need it and your enemies wouldn’t believe it anyway.” That’s a line from a long-forgotten episode of the TV series Four Star Playhouse, delivered by the late David Niven.

I bring up films and TV shows because that is where we seem to get our behavioral guidance these days, not from Grandma’s knee but from professional wrestling shows. Too many people don’t stop, it seems, to consider one thing. As David Letterman pointed out once, these incidents at pro wrestling matches in which one of the wrestlers is removed, bloody and unconscious, from Madison Square Garden, and rushed, via stretcher, to the emergency room, are not, for some reason, reported in the next day’s New York Times. One has to wonder why.

It seems that things no longer have to be real in order to be true and effective. Maybe that is intended. Maybe it serves some insidious purpose to downgrade reality in the minds of our people. It did occur to me once that the main difference between a video game and real war is a sucking chest wound.