I say: not so fast. To my mind it is a great hypocrisy for citizens in so many walks of life t o be condemning the new verbal incivility of the political extremes while ignoring the rising note of accusation and hostility in so many of our own personal and institutional voices. The name calling and efforts to discredit the rival, as distinct from merely trying to win the contest by working harder or being better or even merely claiming to be better, are in evidence everywhere. The phenomenon may not be so shrill or strident as a call to arms from your local political hotheads, but it exists and has been on the rise for several years. It is a kind of continuous low, nasty, combative whine that has become the accepted background music of our daily lives.
Even product advertising, to take a case, has to my eye and ear become much more concerned than it used to be with raising suspicions about or otherwise trashing the other guy’s product, rather than proving the merits of one’s own. These are assault ads, conveying the simple message, over and over, that Brand X, the rival, is a cheesy piece of goods, won’t hold up, has t o be cranked by hand, immediately turns soggy in a bowl of milk, breaks open and spills out all the trash before you ever get to the alley and, despite the lies its sponsors have been trying to fob off on you, in road tests gets only 2 1/2 miles to the gallon. This is the model for not just our commercial product sales pitches but, rather more viciously, for our political campaigns as well. Many of those elected politicians who have been bewailing the disrespectful, untruthful way the intemperate Left and Right have been bad-mouthing the government, are themselves perpetrators of some of the most slanderous and irresponsible campaign commercials about their opponents that ever sullied the airwaves. We have gradually just gotten used to them. It’s not so much that I am wonderful, the candidate explains, as that the opponent is a lying, cowardly, two-faced cheat and con artist.
It is a curious turn on this trend that it has also reached the U.S, Congress, despite the survival in speech there of the residual, archaic civilities that never sounded very plausible in the first place and now sound positively bizarre. I am referring to all that oratorical embroidery about “how I yield five minutes of my time to the distinguished gentleman and my good friend from the state of (underbar),” and so forth. There is a prescribed formal idiom in Congress that didn’t sound quite so misplaced when it was accompanied by an earlier prescribed level of minimal courtesy. But now the most personal and abusive things are said on the floor of both houses, and I cannot say it does anything but make them sound utterly ridiculous to be accompanied by these vestiges of a vanished decorum: I would like to say to my good friend, the distinguished senator from – that he is a sellout and intellectual scum.
Now, each of these manifestations-the product ads, the campaign commercials, the congressional name-calling-is different from the others, some being more and some less abusive. But they add up to an attitude, and we in the media surely participate in it enthusiastically as well, whether as talk-radio scourges or more polite but no more respectful writers of decorous prose. And when you consider what is being said by many of those who call in to the talk-radio shows or write letters to our publications you hear the same thing: an instantaneous descent from any assumption that the adversary in an argument or–in our ease-the public figure we are reporting on, has ever once acted in good faith. We seem to be proceeding instead on an assumption of the opposite, that there is probably something totally squalid behind what the other guy is saying or doing-he doesn’t even believe it himself . . . he is up to something. A lot of this is owing to the vulgarization of psychoanalytic theory in our day, so that each of us becomes a practitioner, only too willing to diagnose the other person’s actions as the product of some unedifying impulse. “He is only saying or doing that because . . .” we begin, and proceed to utterly discredit what may even look to others like a relatively decent act. Since nobody escapes forever, we are in a way to turn ourselves into a nation of 250 million Rodney Dangerfields.
I don’t want us to sink into some namby-pumby, toothless public discourse. Good, frontal, rough political debate is what we should be about and skepticism is valuable. But all this sly discrediting of one another as a routine matter, this endless sneering and snickering and reducing of others to a caricature of unworthy motives is not the same thing as that. It is not robust; it is itself cowardly, a form of training from a fight, not facing one. That is because it does not have the guts to confront the opponent’s argument; instead it attempts to discredit and destroy the opponent, to east doubt on his moral standing to be in the argument at all.
Sometimes I think all this is a consequence of the Soviet Union’s having the bad grace to disappear the way it did. Minus an adversary we could collectively focus on, we have turned on each other. Sometimes I think it is a result of our political, social and ethnic fragmentation, the abandonment by so many of the idea of a common purpose and our voluntary self-recreation as a collection of mutually resentful groups. But I am not really sold on either of those speculations. The only thing I am sure of is that the whole fabric of civility and respect among ourselves has been ripped to tatters and that it’s not just armed crazies or political screwballs who are responsible. The tone of our public conversation and the quality of our relationships among ourselves are set by the mainstream, not the fringes. And we ourselves, not to mention our saintly political leaders in both parties, could do a lot to change it for the better if we wished.
