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Alas, if that was the plan, it went sideways a long time ago. In today?s America, the majority is nothing if not impressed by power and fame (its legitimacy is irrelevant), nothing if not obedient. As for mooning the lord, the ass to the glass these days is more likely to be the lord?s, and our own posture toward it, well, something short of heroic. Worse yet, should someone decide to take offense, and suggest that it is not the lord?s place to act thusly, he will be set upon by the puckering multitude who will punish him for his impertinence.
At a White House reception a couple of years ago, President George Bush asked Senator-elect Jim Webb how things were going for his son, a Marine serving in Iraq. ?I?d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,? Webb replied. ?I didn?t ask you that,? the president shot back. ?I asked you how your boy was doing.?
Webb, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, had not only risked his own life in the service of his country but now had a child in harm?s way, serving in an ill-conceived and criminally mismanaged war sold to the nation under false pretenses by the man standing in front of him. One might expect this second man to be nice. To show a modicum of respect. Should he fall short of this, one could at least take comfort in the certainty that the American people would hold him accountable for his rudeness and presumption.
Which is precisely what many of them did?they held Jim Webb accountable. ?I?m surprised and offended by Jim Webb,? declared Stephen Hess, a professor at George Washington University, in a New York Times article entitled ?A Breach of Manners Sets a Tough Town Atwitter.? Admitting that the president had perhaps been ?a little snippy,? Professor Hess went on to extol the democratic virtues of decorum and protocol, interrupting himself only long enough to recall a steel executive named Clarence Randall who, having once addressed Harry S Truman as ?Mr. Truman? instead of ?Mr. President,? remained haunted by it for decades.
Hess wasn?t the only one to be shocked by Webb?s behavior. Letitia Baldrige, the ?doyenne of Washington manners,? termed the whole thing ?a sad exchange.? Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, made the point that ?even discussions of war and life and death did not justify suspending the rules,? then declined to comment on l?affaire Webb-Bush, saying, ?It would be rude of me to declare an individual rude.?
But it was left to Kate Zernike, the author of the Times article, to place the cherry atop this shameful confection in the form of a seemingly offhand parenthetical: ?(On criticizing the president in his own house, Ms. Baldrige quotes the French: ?a ne se fait pas??it is not done.?)?
To which one might reply, in the parlance of my native town: Why the fuck not? R?p?tez apr?s moi: It ain?t the man?s house. We?re letting him borrow it for a time. And he should behave accordingly?that is, as one cognizant of the honor bestowed upon him?or risk being evicted by the people in favor of a more suitable tenant.
But let?s not kid ourselves. The outrage over the Webb-Bush exchange was not really about decorum. It was about daring to stand up to the boss. Rudeness? Stop. This is America. We?re rude to one another more or less continually. We make mincemeat of one another on television, fiberoptically flame one another to a crisp, blog ourselves bloody. No, rudeness, as deplorable as it is, is not the point here, particularly as Webb, judged by any reasonable standard, wasn?t rude at all.
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http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/06/0082039
