kefirmaven
August 29th, 2009, 05:10 PM
Special Report
We Are a Rude Awakening
By Marilia Duffles on 8.28.09 @ 6:08AM
I'm wrestling with my amateur version of a great philosophical paradox: if rudeness is so pervasively commonplace throughout society, does it cease to be rudeness?
It started when I went to our local bookstore this week to hear the nattily suited Howard Dean talk about his book, Howard Dean's Prescription for Health Care Reform, and ended up riveted instead by a rich display of rampant rudeness. Knees, backsides and hand-bags took swipes at me as people rushed towards the empty seats in my row with nary an "excuse me" being uttered.
A perfectly healthy middle-aged man refused to offer his seat to a woman well in her 80s. But she, too, cut a wholly unsympathetic figure by repeatedly refusing my offer of a seat because she preferred, I realized later, to stand and glower at him rather than to sit comfortably.
And there were others who obviously felt Dean was interrupting their talking. During question time, a woman politely mentioned that she was supportive of Obama's health care quest even though she had voted for Nader. Well! Like slings and arrows, loud boos and sibilant jeers shot through the airwaves with flaming disapproval. Dean immediately waved the parentally punitive index finger as he loudly exclaimed, to his great credit, I might add, "No, no, no, there will be none of this behavior"!
These are not spittoon using yahoos, these are not the sans culottes of the third estate.
No, the audience here is a consistently thick slice of Washington, D.C.'s Ward 4, whose fame spiked recently in a profile by the columnist David Brooks. Row after row of quills (quasi-intellectual liberals) in their shabby best, laser-beaming their eager intent to clap whenever the champion of the day verbally reinforces their ideology and to hiss whenever their orthodoxy is challenged.
Don't get me wrong, I am not wielding a partisan slap. My intellectual curiosity has an open-door policy to many a topic, issue and argument.
Shifting over to the rudeness taking place in town-hall meetings. I felt sorry for Congressman Barney Frank having to stand up for both issue and self as he humbly battled the babbling rabble-rouser who kept belligerently interrupting him. I can't recall his being treated this way when he faced the personal scandal in the early '90s. On the other side of the coin was Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee's appallingly rude choice to answer her cell phone in the middle of a constituent's polite question. No clearer statement of her disdain for those who elected her could possibly have been made if she were to use a megaphone. She should have been upbraided.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/08/28/we-are-a-rude-awakening
We Are a Rude Awakening
By Marilia Duffles on 8.28.09 @ 6:08AM
I'm wrestling with my amateur version of a great philosophical paradox: if rudeness is so pervasively commonplace throughout society, does it cease to be rudeness?
It started when I went to our local bookstore this week to hear the nattily suited Howard Dean talk about his book, Howard Dean's Prescription for Health Care Reform, and ended up riveted instead by a rich display of rampant rudeness. Knees, backsides and hand-bags took swipes at me as people rushed towards the empty seats in my row with nary an "excuse me" being uttered.
A perfectly healthy middle-aged man refused to offer his seat to a woman well in her 80s. But she, too, cut a wholly unsympathetic figure by repeatedly refusing my offer of a seat because she preferred, I realized later, to stand and glower at him rather than to sit comfortably.
And there were others who obviously felt Dean was interrupting their talking. During question time, a woman politely mentioned that she was supportive of Obama's health care quest even though she had voted for Nader. Well! Like slings and arrows, loud boos and sibilant jeers shot through the airwaves with flaming disapproval. Dean immediately waved the parentally punitive index finger as he loudly exclaimed, to his great credit, I might add, "No, no, no, there will be none of this behavior"!
These are not spittoon using yahoos, these are not the sans culottes of the third estate.
No, the audience here is a consistently thick slice of Washington, D.C.'s Ward 4, whose fame spiked recently in a profile by the columnist David Brooks. Row after row of quills (quasi-intellectual liberals) in their shabby best, laser-beaming their eager intent to clap whenever the champion of the day verbally reinforces their ideology and to hiss whenever their orthodoxy is challenged.
Don't get me wrong, I am not wielding a partisan slap. My intellectual curiosity has an open-door policy to many a topic, issue and argument.
Shifting over to the rudeness taking place in town-hall meetings. I felt sorry for Congressman Barney Frank having to stand up for both issue and self as he humbly battled the babbling rabble-rouser who kept belligerently interrupting him. I can't recall his being treated this way when he faced the personal scandal in the early '90s. On the other side of the coin was Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee's appallingly rude choice to answer her cell phone in the middle of a constituent's polite question. No clearer statement of her disdain for those who elected her could possibly have been made if she were to use a megaphone. She should have been upbraided.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/08/28/we-are-a-rude-awakening