ATLANTA — May I say a word on behalf of incivility?
After all, if it weren't for incivility, no end of kings would have been left to parade starkers down the Main Streets of their lands, none the wiser. If Peeping Tom hadn't peeped and told we'd never have known Godiva rode naked through the streets of Coventry to protest oppressive taxes on the peasantry.
A recent trifecta of crude events has unbound an apparently pent up burden of indignation.
First, and most signally, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., shocked by shouting "You lie!" at the president of the United States as he was addressing Congress. Then tennis star Serena Williams erupted in profane anger — really, really profane — at a line judge whose iffy foot-fault call may have cost her a tournament win. And rapper Kanye West snatched the microphone away from singer Taylor Swift, who had just won a Video Music Award, and ranted on behalf a Swift rival whose video he thought rather better of.
The result of these cumulative lapses in decorum has been yards and yards of copy and, lo, long hours of airtime empurpled with denunciation and filled with yearning for the return of a finer time when etiquette, mutual consideration and an abiding, well, just plain niceness flowered everywhere in the nation's social fields.
That was the era in which, for instance, Mark Twain was moved to address the Hartford gas company as follows:
"Sirs,
"Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed G-damned fashion of shutting your G-damned gas off without giving any notice to your G-damned parishioners ... "
Twain, being a serious writer, filled in the hyphens, as newspapers hesitate to do.
Until a couple of decades into the 20th century we were a frontier nation with all the rough and tumble and the makeshift manners that status implies. Even foreign visitors of no great pretension were routinely shocked when they ventured beyond the Potemkin villages of our eastern cities' high society.
The recent HBO series "Deadwood" was loaded with obscenities elaborated to near-Shakespearean richness. Who knew that four-letter words and the multisyllabic rowdies they roister with could aspire to iambic pentameter? But history testifies to the show's accuracy.
Our politics has produced great writing and oratory but, equally, acidic rhetoric that would scald an armored rhinoceros. Thomas Jefferson, when he ran for president, was called names only whispered in saloons.
Joe Wilson's trouble wasn't that he called the president a liar. What politician hasn't been? It's nearly an honorific. You could sub it for "mister." The problem was that Wilson did so in a venue and at an occasion where, really, that sort of thing just isn't done. (And he compounded the affront by preening in an afterglow of conservative adulation, making farce of his apology.)
Still, why this outbreak of such bad behavior? Is our public life coarsening still further? Are standards crumbling? Are we, you know, doomed? Commentators have pondered these philosophic puzzlers deeply without convincing answers.
Actually, there is technical term for clusters of such phenomena.
It's "coincidence." Relax.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn(at)earthlink.net.
