“Mother!! I told you. Not now!” 

He was a toothache of a man. His greasy unkempt hair, which looked like a shovelful of wet pine straw dumped unceremoniously on his head, framed a face whose signature expression was a resentful scowl. Grey eyes pierced from under his furrowed and bushy eyebrows, his weatherworn face had more lines than a map of L.A., though one would search in vain for “laugh lines.”

“Ever time we set down you bring this up and Ah’m tarred of it!” he thundered. The object of his scorn, presumably his mother, was a white-haired diminutive woman who looked to be in her 70s or 80s. She smiled sweetly, though she had a slightly bewildered look in her otherwise tender eyes. Her walking cane leaned carefully against the table.

“Here you are, sir,” the hostess said as she seated me in the next booth, facing Mr. Happy and his mom. It had been a very long and tiring work week and since my wife had dinner plans with her adopted sister, I thought it a great opportunity for a quiet meal alone and a chance to catch up on some reading.

“Mother!! I done told you and I’m not gonna tell you agin!” I don’t know what the elderly lady was saying, speaking quietly as she did — and perhaps trying to teach her offspring to do the same. But it wasn’t working. He spoke in blasts and alternated from critiquing the food to critiquing his mother,…pausing only to voice approval at the Everly Brothers song, “Bye Bye Love,” played on the house speaker system. “Now that there,…I like that song,” the half-wit growled.

I was growing more irritated by the moment, not least because I have no patience for supposedly grown adults who treat their elderly parents like indentured servants or perpetual meal tickets. I was wishing the lady would chime in with the Everly Brothers and sing “Bye Bye Dummy,” to this miserable oaf, but…., but where was I? I wanted solitude and some reading, right?

Reaching for the ear-buds I wear during the work day, I placed one in each ear and dialed up some classical piano music on my iPhone, which veritably poured into my mind. Oh, sweet bliss. Well, I haven’t looked at the G-File in awhile and this week’s missive from Jonah Goldberg is titled, “The People We Deserve.” Besides, the tone of the opening lines seemed to harmonize nicely with my own growing disapproval of the world around me.

Expanding on George Washington’s admonishment for a virtuous citizenry, Goldberg writes, “When the people become capable of profound evil, the law alone is a flimsy barricade — a cardboard dam holding back the river,” before adding that, “When the people go south, the law will go with them.”  “Yes, yes of course,” I thought to myself, “which is one reason why here in Memphis we’ve normalized marauding bands of idiot barbarians who terrorize neighborhoods, shoot innocent children, rob and beat the elderly, and even shoot and kill drivers on local stretches of interstate highway. And yes, Memphis has a storied history of official corruption.”

Ah, but Jonah wasn’t through:

… To be clear, I am not arguing or suggesting that the American people have lost all virtue, never mind that there’s a holocaust around the corner. What I am getting at is that George Washington’s argument works the other way around, too. When the “general Government” starts to degenerate into “a monarchy, an Oligarchy, an Aristocracy, or any despotic or oppressive form,” the virtues of the people degenerate as a result. As Joseph de Maistre said, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.

Resisting the urge to engage in a bit of chicken vs. egg conjecture (what came first, official evil or private?), I wonder what the solution may be, if indeed there is even one to be found? The problem is made manifest at every turn. From the grisly and horrific school shooting in Florida to the mindless half-wits who destroy their own communities, to officials on the take at the local, state, and federal level. How can we reintroduce simple civility into communities which…

“Ah don’t like these french fries here as much as Ah like the french fries at Steak and Shake,” the Human Toothache blasted across the table to his mother.  “Well, why don’t you order something you like and then choke on it,” I found myself muttering.  Oops. “Did he hear that?” I wondered. I glanced over and nothing in his empty-headed countenance indicated he had heard my earnest wish for his continued happiness in this life or the next.

But that wasn’t exactly a charitable or civil expression, was it? I’ve been reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and found myself momentarily channeling Rodion Raskolnikov’s theory that men are naturally divided mainly into two categories; the majority belonging to that, “material that serves only to reproduce its kind.” “It’s a base thought,” I chastised myself,….to which myself replied, “Yes, but look around you!” But it’s been a very long day, capping an arduous week and, …and, where was I again?

Oh yes. How to reintroduce nearly extinct concepts of civility and (dare I say it?) virtue into communities and the nation generally? The problem, at the official level, as Goldberg points out, is systemic:

Many of our national legislators want to be pundits, decrying usurped powers that are wielded by the other branches of government, rather than legislating to stop it. Local politicians would rather pound the table about what the federal government should do to fix urgent problems — problems that they were elected to deal with — than fix the problems themselves. The whole framework created by the Founders was based on the assumption that our governing institutions would be jealous guardians of their power. They are now made up of people who are jealous guardians of their slots on Morning Joe or Fox and Friends.

And the public? That is, when they can wrest themselves from the latest TV reality show, of course. Even as far back as 1970, Irving Kristol pointed out that,

The inner spiritual chaos of the times, so powerfully created by the dynamics of capitalism itself, is such as to make nihilism an easy temptation. A “free society” in Hayek’s sense gives birth in massive numbers to “free spirits”–emptied of moral substance but still drivenby primordial moral aspirations. Such people are capable of the most irrational actions. Indeed, it is my impression that, under the strain of modern life, whole classes of our population–and the educated classes most of all–are entering what can only be called, in the strictly clinical sense, a phase of infantile regression. With every passing year, public discourse becomes sillier and more petulant while human emotions become, apparently, more ungovernable. Some of our most intelligent university professors are now loudly saying things that, had they been uttered by one of their students twenty years ago, would have called forth gentle and urbane reproof.

In talking with Andrew Klavan several weeks ago, I questioned whether, through a combination of ignorance or apathy, our generation has dropped our end of what is often called the Great Conversation — an ongoing search for truth that spans across the centuries, from generation to generation encompassing religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and lessons to be gleaned from the human experience. To my surprise, Andrew replied:

I don’t even know if it’s ignorance or apathy. I think there was a movement to destroy it. I really do. I mean, the cultural Marxism that came to this country after the war.  Of socialists who had been chased out of Germany, the Frankfurt school — who actually said that we’ve got to go into the universities and destroy this idea that freedom is a good thing, that capitalism is a good thing, and destroy the idea of the individual. And they have been assiduously teaching our children that the Conversation itself is poison.   …So there’s actually been an effort to deprive, to cheat our children of their inheritance in order to install a new paradigm.

“I’m going to the restroom now,” the elderly lady told her disagreeable offspring. She rose carefully from her booth and, taking the cane in right hand, began making her way slowly across the restaurant using the other benches to keep her steady. The Two-Legged Migraine she had been dining with sat with his head buried in his smartphone.

Whatever the genesis of the malady, the results have been remarkable. We are told that certain lives matter more than others, presumably on the basis of race. Yet those that carry the signs and stop the traffic and disrupt others sit dumbstruck and silent as people of one race are slaughtered by members of the same race. We are reminded of the need to respect women, yet we are expected to cheer the millions of future women who are dismembered in the womb and then discarded like yesterday’s trash. The press instructs us to be outraged that a member of the President’s inner circle might have been abusive to women in his life, and yet we’re not supposed to recall that it was the same press who thought another President’s abuse, molestation and possible rape of other women really not worth getting worked up about. I think Andrew was right, actually, and that we would do well to resist the left’s “new paradigm.”

“I’m ready to go whenever you are,” the white-haired lady told her son. She had carefully made her way back from the restroom and was again seated, addressing The Scowl. “I’ll be back in a minute, he growled,” before retrieving his phone and heading out the front door. Ten minutes later, after I had finished my reading and paid my bill, I made my way out of the restaurant, and there stood the lady’s son, fussing at someone else on his phone. “Your mom is waiting,” I mentioned in passing.

The problems run deep, and they apparently infect society from top to bottom. Is there a solution? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps all we can do is maintain vigilance over those in office, and broaden our literary and cultural horizons when we can. Oh yes, and one more thing. We can apply cultural norms of decency to each other and those in our private circles in life. And yes, we can even treat our parents with a much-needed measure of dignity and respect. It really all does begin at home.