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Being Decent
Not too long ago, I returned to my parked car and found a sheet of paper on the windshield bearing an expletive-laden message. The anonymous poster had obviously gone to some effort to make these flyers on his home computer – complete with color cartoon figures and such. It let me know what a $#@&*%! I was. My sin was having parked my car a tiny bit over the white line. I confess. I’m guilty. The garage was full of empty spaces, mind you, and it was only a few inches, but still, it was wrong. But did it require that response? If he had to vent his rage, couldn’t he have left a note saying “It’s inconsiderate to park over the white line”? My offense seems to have been merely an excuse. This person, clearly overflowing with hostility to his fellow men, had preprinted these vulgar missives, and delivered them to everyone who offended him.
Is it my imagination or has the tone of the Internet seeped into daily life? People often suggest that Twitter’s cruelty and misanthropy are unique to the format. Announcing that he was deleting Twitter from his phone, Andrew Sullivan advised: “Social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life.”
The comments sections of websites are sewers, some have suggested, because they’re anonymous. I used to think that. Now I’m not so sure. While anonymity clearly unleashes some of the darker sides of human nature (which is one of the reasons mobs are so dangerous), and while real life is somewhat more civilized than “pseudo life,” the indecency is now quite open in our politics, our entertainment, and, as noted in the car story (and others I could tell), in daily life.
What happened when Samantha Bee used the “C” word with reference to Ivanka Trump? She ought to have been greeted with shocked silence. Instead, she got applause. When Robert De Niro unloaded the “F” bomb on Donald Trump, he got a standing ovation at the Tony Awards. These cultural figures are clearly not thinking things through. If they object to Donald Trump’s vulgarity and norm violating, they forfeit their standing by responding exactly in kind. If you find him offensive, maybe you shouldn’t emulate him?
Almost exactly sixty-four years ago, the subject of decency became a national show stopper. At the Army/McCarthy hearings, attorney Joseph Welch, representing the Army, punctured the pretensions of Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s aide, by demanding that he release the senator’s list of 130 subversives “before sundown.” Cohn couldn’t, as Welch well knew. The list wasn’t real. (There were communists in the State Department, but McCarthy threw wild charges in all directions and tainted the entire anti-Communist cause.) When Welch raised the matter of Roy Cohn’s use of taxpayer dollars to wine and dine his friend, and Cohn’s abuse of his government post to pester the Army to afford his friend special treatment, McCarthy responded (as he usually did) with an accusation of his own. Instead of answering the criticism, he did something die-hard Trump fans would love: He leveled a new accusation, this time against a lawyer in Welch’s firm, who had been a member of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild. Welch responded, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness . . . Have you no sense of decency sir?”
McCarthy didn’t. And in the 1950s, it proved his undoing. Nor did Roy Cohn, who went on to a lucrative, if dodgy career marked by corner cutting and allegations of professional misconduct (he was disbarred in 1986). His most significant role in history may well have been taking a young Donald Trump under his wing and modeling the “never back down, never apologize” style we’ve come to know so well.
This entire administration, taking its cue from the president, has engaged in indecency on an unprecedented scale. We’ve elected the boarding school bully. Just a day before the president reversed his position on tearing children from their parents’ arms, Corey Lewandowski, confronted with the story of a 10-year-old Down Syndrome child forcibly separated from her mother at the border, scoffed “Womp, womp.” That’s the Trump spirit.
Republicans keep mostly silent about Trump’s assaults on basic morality because they fear his popularity with their voters. It’s small and cowardly. But the Democrats have nothing to fear from modeling basic integrity, civility, and fidelity to truth. They should try it.
Published in Politics
You go, girl!
You could have equally accurately titled your post “Being Descent”.
Amen.
I apologize to the degree that I have contributed to this incivility.
Come on, Gary. Her column isn’t that bad.
Typical homophobia from Welch. You need to get with the program, Mona!
Anonymity drives everything. People know that their Church, Friends, and Family won’t find out , so they do whatever.
I have been guilty of this at times, and I regret it.
The National Lawyers Guild wasn’t simply a left-wing organization. It was a Communist Front organization.
Man, this column takes chutzpah to a new level.
Oh sure, Trump can be offensive. But the idea that the left is emulating him just makes me laugh out loud. To say that with a straight face is to offensively ignorant of history.
The left attacked and mocked Dubya relentlessly. They even promoted a film about assassinating him! The left is and has been a complete cesspool.
Part of me wants to agree that incivility has spread from the internet. But I remember that, starting in the mid-to-late 1990s, I discovered that I could not take my young children to football, basketball, or hockey games, because of regular profanity by other fans. So it’s not that new.
I never liked the obnoxious, self-righteous “have you no sense of decency” line by Welch. I think that too little was done to ferret out Communist and Communist-affiliated groups. Surely Ms. Charon could have come up with a better example of indecency than McCarthy’s accurate, if overzealous, campaign against enemy infiltration.
Maybe a better example would be the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in favor of a t-shirt with an expletive (I guess the COC won’t allow me to write it, but it was “[Expletive] the Draft”).
You go, Basil. LOL.
Now that’s civility.
The Swamp is aghast that President Trump would stoop so low as to enforce the law.
Favoring law-abiding Americans over foreign criminals is a capital crime amongst the RINO set.
But wait, there’s more! It’s not just the President, but his “entire administration.” Nikki Haley, every Ambassador, every Cabinet officer, General Kelly, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, Pompeo, Mattis . . . These are all “indecent” people.
But civility is the thing.
As, apparently, is hypocrisy.
Agreed. He ruined Anatomy of a Murder for me. He’s the kin of the Crocodile Democrats bemoaning the separation of law-breaking families.
Trump? Seriously? You give the man too much credit. The Republican response to incivility is to sit down and let the Left rave and have their way, ever bloody time. Now after your generation losing the culture war by writing civil little articles very few read and even less cared about. Trump shows up as the Paladin of the Right and does something different. As a creature of the Left he fights like a Leftist and wins like a Leftist. Sixteen other GOP canidates hit Trump and when he hit back as a Leftist would they all folded. When Hillary hit him like a Leftist would he punched back and won. Now the Left is comparing him to Hitler and that he is running concentration camps and he is hitting back as Leftist would which is to ridicule and caricature them like they do him. Time will tell if he wins again or teaches the Right to stop losing. Gods know he has his work cut out pulling against allies such as yourself and your love of losing.
Anyway the point is that Trump is a creature of the culture and is fighting back in the culture. He did not create this environment anymore than a fish creates water. He is just swimming in it. If another GOP would have won (and they would not have) then Samantha Bee and Robert De Niro would still be doing their bit, because they are fighting in the culture.
Trump is not a cause. He is a symptom. For those of us who sat through years of “Courageous Conversations” and other leftist garbage, not allowed to respond for fear of being ostrasized or, possibly, fired, and, now, having to listen to the idiotic, over the top rantings of the left about every possible issue, Trump, for all of his coarseness, rudeness, and vulgarity renders a certain sense of satisfaction. He isn’t Andrew Breitbart, but in his crude manner he does essentially give the left the same treatment Andrew did, something richly deserved.
I would grant that, to a point, Trump gives the left something to latch onto, but, in truth, they would have done the same to any Republican who beat Hillary Clinton. As much as I dislike Trump, I really love what he does to the media and the left, but then I repeat myself.
Mona,
As always you are technically correct. However, how did you miss Peter Fonda physically threatening Melania & Baron Trump? How did you miss a Justice Department employee loudly harassing Kirstjen Nielsen at a restaurant? How did you miss The Washington Post’s Adam Bernstein taking a cheap shot at Charles Krauthammer in the obituary?! How did you miss Robert DeNiro screaming “F*uck Trump” at the Tony Awards? How did you miss Kathy Griffin tweeting “F*ck Melania”? Well, gosh Corey Lewandowski has a much greater following you know. Why Corey’s internet fan club must have millions and millions of followers no doubt just hanging on his every tweet.
Gee Mona, don’t you think your sense of decency has a somewhat distorted focus? It seems to have a single target irrespective of all reality. Perhaps I’ve missed something.
Regards,
Jim
Enharmonac : Definition (anagram) of she who takes pleasure in writing the same note fatuously.
Mona’s right. I accidentally cut someone off in traffic yesterday and he flipped me the bird! So yeah, people are uncivil like never before…and it’s Trump’s fault.
He has ruined civility in our once great nation by his callous attitude from which rampant bird-flipping only one of the symptoms we must all suffer.
That any American would have to endure the naughty finger is something that I never thought possible. Until now. Darn you Trump! Gosh darn you to heck!
lol, this is priceless :)
One: As others have said, Trump’s the result of the Left’s ongoing culture-coarsening project, not the cause. You might expect the Left to recognize that decades of sneering at civil discourse as a bourgeoise value would end up with a crude-talking President, but in their minds they’re always RFK waxing eloquent, the high-minded better angels. But they gave aid and comfort to the radical rabble – who, after all, believed in the same things but expressed them with more honesty, because they were passionate, and angry, and hence had moral legitimacy. They never though the mud would spatter on their own cuffs and penny loafers, because all the useful ranters were never held up as emblematic of the Democratic Party.
Now they seem to believe that the depredations of the Trump era permit – nay, demand! – an uncivil reaction, as if they’ve been chattering on like Oxford Dons all these years, and all those BUCK FUSH bumperstickers were just misprints.
Two: Where do we go from here? Post-Trump, does everyone flock to the candidate who has his style and sticks it to the libs and pwns the media, or the less-kinetic candidate who can actually discuss conservative ideas without half-arsed nicknames?
After 8 years of Trump, won’t Presidential Candidate Pence be a dull bore? Or will people be ready for someone who seems like a gentleman again?
I’m hoping for option number ‘B’. While I don’t doubt that America could elect a coarser man than Trump – and doubtless will as the decades pile up – decorum will eventually come back in style. I’m hoping.
They will flock to the canidate that can win. Not the one that waxes eloquently then when a vulgar concept is uttered toward them heads for the fainting couch. What Mona and clan can not seem to understand is that the GOP had its best most intellectual presidential field in our lifetimes and were bested by an escapee from the Leftist camp. The Left is playing smash mouth politics and wins, it will continue to play smash mouth as long as it continues to win by running the Right from the field. It will only be when the Right plays smash mouth just as hard that civility might have a chance to return.
I loooove the way this column admits McCarthy was right: there were Communists in the State Department! He had a job to do and he did it. Oh but his “tone”! I thought Moana was gonna mention that cleaning woman whom he dared to interrogate (just because she had unfettered access!) but–a member of the Lawyers’ Guild?? He coulda just asked that guy to show his Communist Party card!
If the Prez has to be sharp and acidic to cut through the years and years of accumulated unction–so be it. He has done his country a tremendous service.
One more point: the writer assumes that words of imprecations and obscenity are timeless and immutable. They’re not. The F bomb is being defused. New words, that mean nothing, like “cuck”, spring up and have power for awhile. The swastika is shoved aside by a (comical) li’l green frog… the C-word is as Bee said, being “reclaimed”. “Pussy”, which had never been more than mildly naughty in a cute, ooh la la! sorta way, suddenly and mercifully briefly became “the P-word” based on one illegally taped conversation! It’s just a part of “all the many changing things/in dreary dancing past us hurled…” y’know, Moana: sticks ‘n’ stones……
If he happens to do this to you, don’t take it personal, he is just having a laugh.
Andrew Sullivan has it right. The venomous tone of the Internet, the silencing of free speech on campuses, the meltdowns of adult children who don’t get their way (like the person that left note on your car) started long before Trump. Somehow your posts start out with a great point and always descend into Trump bashing and fault finding. Again, Sullivan has it right.
Oh how I love this. Your son is devilishly brilliant!
I dunno, I heard, somewhere, that in olden times a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking! But now–Heaven knows!–anything goes…
What is “indecent” , in my opinion, is the kinda stunts the oh-so-civil administration of Buraq Hussein pulled, the abysmal depth of which testimony before Congress is now revealing every day–while pundits moan about “tone”- on the part of the victims!
As always the Bard was way ahead of us:
“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”