Civility matters, no matter what

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Looking back 10 years provides a great perspective on where we are today. If many now are clamoring for civility in our public discourse, and lamenting the coarsening of politics since the advent of the Age of Trump, they would do well to think back a mere decade. The signs were already in place, pointing us to this day, but does anyone really think we can put the impolitic political genie back in the bottle? —FM)

Does anyone even care any longer what is appropriate behavior in public?

Not mind you, what is legal, but what is appropriate.

The distinction seems to have vanished in American discourse, but it is a valuable one which should be revived if at all possible.

Probably all of us have some standard for what is appropriate and what is not, but there is very much a sliding scale, and as you know the scale has slid so far to one side that “obscene tirade” is now considered a family-friendly form of entertainment.

Of course, the argument goes, you don’t have to listen to an obscene tirade if you don’t want to. This is the equivalent of telling the Jews in the Auschwitz gas chambers, “You don’t have to breathe the Cyclon-B if you don’t want to.” Such a response to moral chaos is a dispiriting and clever rejoinder which just further insults righteousness.

Ultimately, we are reflections of our culture, and can no more be untainted by its contaminants than a fish living in a mercury-polluted lake can avoid heavy metal poisoning by virtue of prudent swimming.

There is no way to avoid living in the cultural milieu that you are living in except to cease living. It should be obvious that the more people are exposed to profanity, the more they will see it as acceptable language and use it freely. The more people see public figures treating each other with disrespect, the more it will appear to be acceptable to demean and destroy those you disagree with. Likewise, the more people are inured to intolerable behavior the more it becomes unexpectedly tolerable.

Examples abound.

Last week, it was Sen. Jim Webb nearly exploding with anger as he sputtered with disdain at his colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham, on “Meet the Press” over the Republican’s position on the war in Iraq.

This week it was the spat between Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Arlen Specter on the floor of the Senate when Specter had the temerity to call the Senate’s overnight pajama party to debate the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq “a ridiculous waste of time.” This led Reid to surmise that the voters in Specter’s home state of Pennsylvania “want a change of course” in Iraq, but when Specter tried to respond, Reid cut him off and called for a vote on an unrelated education bill.

When debate resumed later, Specter chided Reid for presuming to speak for the citizens of Pennsylvania, and for cutting off Specter’s response by using parliamentary procedures. Specter said Reid’s behavior was “rude, to say the minimum... And if the United States Senate doesn’t run on comity, on courtesy, on basic decency, the United States Senate cannot run at all.”

The same could probably be said about the United States as a whole. Just as the Senate represents a diverse mix of people with very different political philosophies, our nation is cobbled together as a patchwork of origins, races, and cultures. If we do not treat each other with respect because we are expected to, we very likely will treat each other with disdain because we are able to.

It appears more and more that there is no expectation of respect in America. Thousands of people in this country make their living off of being irreverent, if not downright uncivil. You could start with Rosie O’Donnell and Ann Coulter, add in MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, throw in a golden oldie like Don Imus, mix well with numerous politicians and celebrities, and you’ve got the start of a cantankerous stew that feeds the American soul with bile and bitterness. Doesn’t matter, say the liberals. We should all be able to say whatever we want.

Well, yes, we should be able to say whatever we want, but it does matter that people who are the most disrespectful, the most condescending, the most callow are the ones who are most celebrated in the 21st century glib-fest that America has become.

People have always been able to say whatever they wanted, but there were consequences. If you used vulgarity in public, you were known as a foul-mouthed boor. Today you are known as a comedian, or maybe just as Dad.

Surely we would all be better off if we could debate ideas without calling people names or questioning their character. I know I always appreciate it when someone who disagrees with me writes a thoughtful letter explaining their own viewpoint or trying to persuade me of the error of my ways. I also know that plenty of the letters I receive just call me an expletive-deleted idiot who doesn’t know bleep about squat. Those letters can be hurtful, or they can provide a laugh, depending on what kind of a mood I am in.

And those kinds of insults are not new.

It’s just a matter of how much we respect them. It is entirely appropriate for Rosie O’Donnell or anyone else to say what she thinks, but should she make millions of dollars for being rude?

Maybe yes. The ratings on “The View” skyrocketed when she joined the cast, especially after she got into her famous feud with Donald Trump. So in a free market, we are always going to have Rosie O’Donnell or someone like her making money by saying outrageous things. She is just Don Imus without the Y chromosome.

You remember Don Imus, right? He made a pretty healthy living for nearly four decades by saying whatever he thought no matter how stupid it was. In fact, the stupider it was, the funnier it was. Until it wasn’t.

Which brings us to the possibility of redemption for our society.

Imus found out that there is a difference between having the right to say whatever you want and the privilege of being paid for it. In our country, we do generally have the right to be as offensive as we want, but we have no right to an audience or a platform. We have to earn those.

Thus, whether Imus prevails in his lawsuit against CBS should be viewed as a matter of simple contractual law, not constitutional law.

The Constitution certainly did not guarantee him a multi-million dollar job on CBS to say whatever he wanted for as long as he liked. It just said that when CBS got tired of him, Imus could grab a soapbox and climb on top of it to complain, tell racist jokes, or say anything else he wanted. On his own time and his own dime.

Free speech is not a job guarantee. And it should not be the American public’s excuse for lowering its own standards of decency.

If we are going to ever have a serious discussion about why our culture seems to be in decline, we had better stop hiding behind the First Amendment. Just because I have a right to be vulgar doesn’t mean it is a good thing. Just because I have a right to sell pornography doesn’t mean it is a good thing. Just because I have a right to be a racist doesn’t mean it is a good thing.

Instead, we as individuals in a free society should not be so concerned about our rights as our responsibilities. It was this which Kennedy expressed so eloquently when he proposed that each of us should ask what we can do for our country, instead of what our country can do for us.

Lincoln addressed this matter, too, in his debates with Sen. Douglas at a time when slavery was legal and yet at the same time utterly immoral. He challenged Americans to look past their supposed constitutional rights and to embrace their God-given responsibilities.

We may not like to think of our own immoral behavior in speech and behavior as consequential, but yet in all moral matters there is a right and wrong which we confuse at our own risk. If we cannot distinguish between right and wrong, it does not mean that they don’t exist, or that doing wrong has no consequences, but rather that we are morally blind just as the slaveholders were morally blind.

Lincoln’s words are still powerful for those who have ears to hear:

“The Democratic policy in regard to that institution [of slavery] will not tolerate the merest breath, the slightest hint, of the least degree of wrong about it... [Judge Douglas] contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have, if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong...”

Lincoln spoke of “the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world.” He said, “They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle.”

So it remains today. Yes, the battlefield has changed, but we still do not have “a right to be wrong” even if a majority says we do. And even if we did have a constitutional right to be wrong, as the slave owners had a “right” to own human beings, we have an even more important responsibility to do right.

That responsibility does not reside in society or the Constitution, but in our own hearts.