Manners

There’s a webpage, Comics Kingdom, where you can follow all of today’s King Features comic strips and (here’s the part that’s really worth paying for!) several vintage strips from the ‘50s and ‘60s and such, like Rip Kirby and Johnny Hazard and Buz Sawyer.  You can also post comments with each day’s episode, and we sometimes say snarky things.  I wonder how the writers and artists who created those strips would feel about that—I suppose they’d be happy that some people are still reading their work today and care enough to say anything about it.

One of the vintage strips I follow is the soap opera strip The Heart of Juliet Jones.  The latest story is about a young woman who meets a young man and they become grifters conning people out of their money.  In one episode the girl’s father showed up, and when the boy saw him for the first time he said “Who’s the old creep?” In my comment on that episode I quipped “Emily Post he isn’t.”

It reminded me of a real-life incident when Beau Brummel met a guy who was with the plus-sized Prince Regent, and he said to him, “Who’s your fat friend?” (Brummel must have been pretty slender himself, fitting into all those dandy clothes.) But I think he actually did know the Prince and they’d used to be best buddies but now  weren’t getting along, so he was deliberately being rude to him!  So it isn’t really a bona fide entry in the rudeness championship sweepstakes.  What can you do about deliberate rudeness?  In such cases, you can’t very well say “Don’t do that, it’s rude.” If they listened to you that would defeat their whole purpose. It’s like telling a thief, “Don’t steal that, it’s too valuable.”

Another example of deliberate rudeness was on that TV show American Idol.  In one episode Simon Cowell said to some hapless singer “What.  The.  Hell.  Was.  That?” Of course the purpose of such rudeness is to grab the attention of scatterbrained young TV viewers, which is contemptible.  (I’ve never watched that show and only know of that bit because they showed it in a promo, which shows they think this is the kind of thing that will get people to tune in.) Rudeness sometimes, as in that case, takes the form of aggressive rhetorical questions.  When your boss says “How could you be so stupid?” he isn’t really interested in why you were stupid; he’s just getting in your face!

My sister saw the recently-deceased Jean-Luc Godard at the Toronto film festival about 30 years ago introducing his Yugoslavian war-themed Forever Mozart.  She says he was very rude, in that Parisian way. (And the movie disappointed her too.) Funny how the French and the English both have an image as etiquette sticklers, yet they’re also notorious for pointed rudeness!

For my own part, I remember when Frank Zappa appeared on the CBC radio show Cross-Country Checkup attacking censorship in the music industry.  He kept saying things like (sarcastically) “Oh yeah, that’s real intelligent,” and to one school principal he said “You should be fired!” He also insisted that anyone who disagreed with him on this issue was mentally ill…

When someone’s table manners are lacking, it’s one thing to make specific criticisms.  What’s annoying is people who point it out with aggressive gibberish, as my brother occasionally did.  Some people would be well-advised to spend a bit less time judging other people’s manners, and a bit more minding their own.  The actor Maximilian Schell interviewed Marlene Dietrich for the fascinating documentary Marlene, and at one point she said, “You should go home to Mama Schell so she can teach you some manners,” when anyone can see that she was the one being rude!

As for minding my own manners, I generally make an effort to be polite.  When I’m waiting in line for service at a convenience store, I’ll pretend to take an interest in their goods just so it won’t look like I’m cooling my heels.  When a bus driver starts to leave but stops long enough to let me on, I thank him—after all he didn’t have to do that!  Back when I took ballroom dancing lessons at Arthur Murray studios, they had a lot of dance parties, at which I’d make an effort to dance with every woman there, and when I saw a new girl I’d try to dance with her first. (Cynthia, my dance instructor, said I’m a gentleman.) To tell the truth, I wasn’t doing it out of politeness:  I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I liked having a scheme where I set out to dance with every girl!

Some people are rude to everyone, and you have to feel sorry for them, really:  they tend to have few friends.  But what gets to me is the Eddie Haskell types who’ll be perfectly polite to people they see as their equals, and especially to their superiors, but rude to people they see as lower in status.

One example is servants.  Muhammed Ali, the boxer, once said “I don’t trust people who are nice to me but rude to the waiter.  That’s how they’d treat me if I were in that position!” Billy Wilder was a great Hollywood filmmaker, but according to Frank Sinatra’s valet he was rude to servants. (I’ve got the impression that great directors are often “pain in the neck” types…) Being rude to servants, it seems to me, is one of the worst things you can be in this life!  There are stories of New York millionaires who’ll chew out their servants in front of guests—you’d think that even if they don’t care about the servants’ feelings, they’d at least care about making the guests uncomfortable.  But maybe they’re really doing it to impress their guests!  It’s actually pretty easy to make an impression on people if you don’t care what kind of impression you make. (Like when schoolboy Marlon Brando wrote the word “shit” on the blackboard in really big letters with kerosene, then set it on fire…)

Another example is children.  I mentioned Eddie Haskell before:  on Leave It to Beaver he was Wally’s teenage friend who was unctuously polite to grownups but nasty to the Beaver.  And so you’ll sometimes find teenagers being rude to younger kids.  Their attitude is “I’m more mature than you so I don’t have to respect you!” Which is to say, they’re being semi-mature…

I come from southeastern New Brunswick, where the nearest city is Moncton, and I saw a documentary involving Moncton mayor Leonard Jones, who caused controversy with his opposition to official bilingualism, a hot-button issue in a city with many Francophones as well as Anglophones.  It showed this 1968 incident where radical French students from the University of Moncton confronted him at a city council meeting.  He was incredibly rude to them!  I could scarcely believe what I was hearing, and I was thinking “Come on, you’re supposed to be the mayor!” (Later on, New York mayors Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani were often rude to people, yet it was presented as a sort of style.  I hope that style doesn’t catch on…)

I think there was a lot of that in the 1960s.  Many students were demonstrating against things like the Vietnam War in the United States, but the older generation often refused to view them as fellow citizens exercising the free speech that seemingly makes America great. Their attitude was, “You haven’t earned our respect!” On the contrary, some of them preferred to think of them as spoiled children, who needed to have obedience beaten into them.  This naturally culminated in the Hard Hat Riot of 1970, when construction workers busted up an antiwar demonstration on Wall Street, like Berlin Storm Troopers breaking up communist rallies in 1930.  They were outnumbered about five to one, but they had makeshift clubs. Notice that these hard hats didn’t organize a counter-demonstration:  this wasn’t about offering an alternative position, it was about shutting them up!  The union man who organized this hooliganism was later given a post in the Nixon Administration.  Very corrupt.

I guess a lot of rudeness comes from people reacting instantly, without considering what they should say or do.  That’s common with children.  Some kids I knew in school were deliberately rude to me.  It was about raising their status at the expense of mine.  Like when they quote you to make fun of you, and of course they start not with “He said…” but “He goes…” I said the other week that I could forgive being hit, but not being judged.  Well, that was a form of judging!   Or I’d be bicycling down the street and this crowd of kids would see me and jeer me on the spot. (I doubt any of them would have done this alone; they felt the empowerment of numbers!)  For me, it was running a gauntlet.  For them, it was their automatic response.  When you’re automatic with someone, it shows that you don’t respect them enough not to be that way!  And I was expected to ignore it all, of course.  Did that mean that I could be rude to others and expect them to ignore me?  It meant that I, being the sensitive, angry kid, was the “weak link.”

I’ve seen the funny 1950s educational short Manners in School, in which a terrible child actor gets manners lessons from an animated chalk figure with the imaginative name Chalky.  Among other things, kids got taught to say “Yes” instead of “Yeah,” and “No” instead of “Uh-uh.” (The ‘50s was the golden age of micromanagement.) They said in it that if you’re rude other kids won’t want to play with you, but I’m not so sure about that.  Seems to me that it’s the badly-behaved kid who’s popular with his peers, because he’s doing what they’re afraid to do!