Oregon Humanities

The Great Civility War

Let us all be civil, or I’ll beat you to a pulp.

Todd Schwartz

It was the most civil of times, it was the least civil of times; it was the age of politeness, it was the age of boorishness; it was the epoch of concern, it was the epoch of who cares?; it was the season of hybrid, it was the season of Hummer; it was the spring of Obama, it was the winter of hate speech. We had everything selfless and respectful before us, we had nothing but louts and SOBs before us; we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

With apologies to Mr. Dickens (or not: screw him), we have arrived at simultaneously the most and least civil moment in our history. A moment when a roomful of even relatively evolved people will react with discomfort to an off-color joke about people of color—and a moment when those same people have no compunction whatsoever about loudly ignoring each other as they blather into their cell phones.

We have never been more concerned about the feelings of minority groups, the disabled, and the disadvantaged. Yet we have never been less concerned about the feelings of anyone with whom we share the road, the restaurant, the Internet, or the movie theater.

Political correctness holds such sway that holidays go unnamed for fear of insulting or excluding anyone. Every ATM cheerfully offers to speak Spanish. Schools won’t use red pens to correct papers, because little Ethan or Emily might have their self-esteem bruised. People don’t fail tests; they earn improvement opportunities. No one is “poor,” but many are “socioeconomically disadvantaged.” People are “mobility challenged” or “vision challenged” or “hearing challenged.”

Those in government, business, education, law enforcement, and the media are extraordinarily careful in their use of language, if not always so careful in their treatment of the people about whom they are speaking. Civility and thoughtfulness in speech have never been so complete or so codified.

All of which is well intentioned and mostly a wonderful thing. I’m all for being polite and caring and Golden Rule-ish. Soon there will be no hate and no war and we’ll all wear white robes and have huge heads and communicate by telepathy.

(I sincerely hope you are enjoying my essay so far and that nothing in it has offended you or made you uncomfortable. Of course, I don’t really give a gnat’s toenail, so shut up and keep reading.)

Sadly, like the lovely field of sunlit wildflowers—which in reality is filled with angry yellow jackets and bloodsucking ticks and noxious pollen—we live oh-so-politely in what must certainly be the rudest era in recorded history. Maybe even pre-history. Neanderthals were probably nicer to each other than we are.

Pick your poison: rap lyrics, reality shows, slasher movies, video games, online porn, cell phones, automated answering systems (which somehow manage to be exceptionally polite and glass-chewingly rude all at the same time), giant assault vehicles driving to the grocery store, thumping car stereos played at volumes easily heard on the moons of Jupiter, Web-powered copyright infringement, people who will not shut their inane traps in movie theaters, and, lord help us, now even people who won’t shut their inane traps during live theater.

We’re all talking to someone all the time, it seems, but it’s ever more rarely to the people we are actually with. Our cell phones blare idiotic pop-song ringtones that no one else wants to hear. We love to watch TV shows that play endless footage of addled goombahs suffering the inevitable and stunningly predictable results of hand-feeding a grizzly bear or attempting to light a stick of dynamite with their cigarette. We also love to watch shows where people lie to others for money and programs where snarky, slightly talented folks say vicious things to hopeful, and usually more talented, contestants.

Civility rules, friends.

Civility is dead, jerks.

Why? I have several theories.

The first is that America is in the same historical position as ancient Rome found itself in about 420 CE (this used to be called AD, but Anno Domini assumes that everyone accepts the whole Jesus/Bible thing, so we changed it to be, you know, civil), meaning that we’ve reached the peak of our civilization and now everything is going to Tartarus in a chariot. We’re too far from our food and energy sources and fewer and fewer of the Druids and Visigoths like us anymore. So we desperately cling to a patina of civility while we grab a snack and watching large, toothy predators devour people.

The second theory is that decades of television have destroyed the various lobes of people’s brains, and now we can only vaguely recognize the difference between being out in public and being at home with our full-figured behinds on the sofa. Analogous to the phenomenon of people who think that others can’t see them while they’re driving in their cars (the famous Nosepicker Postulate), modern Americans in public act 10 percent of the time as if they were being watched by their saintly grandmothers and 90 percent of the time as if they were being watched by no one at all.

The third theory is that sunlight contains tiny spores that lodge and breed in the cerebellum, making the infected believe that everything revolves around them and that they are the center of the universe.

My final, and somewhat less cutting-edge theory is that a large percentage of people are just clueless, distracted, and self-absorbed, unable to process concepts such as spatial awareness (i.e., when you are walking in the same direction with several hundred other people in, say, an airport terminal, DON’T JUST STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FLOW!).

But I digress.

I am not here to judge whether being civil and considerate is somehow better than being a mindless dillweed. You must make that choice for yourself. We inhabit the most civil of times and also the least—and I completely honor and respect your freedom to choose your side in the Great Civility War.

Just don’t get in my way. I’m on my cell in the Escalade, and I can’t be bothered.

From the Fall/Winter 2008 “Civility” issue