Vulgarity and Civility in Politics
by Franklin H. Littell
Following the State of the Union Address of the President of the United States, the watching public had an appalling demonstration of incivility. It was also a demonstration of a lack of patriotism, of disrespect for the highest office in the land.
While a noisome claque of ill-mannered fraternity boys and simpering poor white trash sat on their hands, a few called "conservatives" demonstrated that they were genuine conservatives by civility of behavior and respect for the Senator (R., Pennsylvania), was among those who stood and applauded politely at the end of the Address.
A number of neighbors were shocked, indignant at the disrespect and vulgarity of social behavior displayed by so-called conservatives. The generalization was rampant: American politics is in severe decline.
I am not sure that the generalization will hold up, although negative political advertising and the buying and selling of Congressmen has certainly stepped up in pace (and cost) since 1980. After all, historical research has exposed to view the savage cartoons and scurrilous editorials of earlier periods of American history. Abraham Lincoln, now commonly regarded as the greatest of our Presidents, was attacked verbally day after day as "an ape," and portrayed as such in popular cartoons. The verbal and printed attacks of such vulgarians as Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh on President Clinton stand in an old, if dishonorable, succession.
Not that much has changed in brute fact, either for the worse or for the better. During the period before the Civil War, at the time of the other Buchanan, while the Congress was trying hard to suppress any discussion of the most important single issue facing the Union (chattel slavery), physical assaults were not uncommon. On one occasion a member of Congress attacked another with a club and bear him senseless to the floor.
Don`t jump too quickly to celebrate our present higher physical level above incivility and lower decibel levels of incivility, however. What has changed for the worse is substantial: everyone sees and knows everything that happens. The media, and the incredible cost of access, have not only corrupted the political campaigns and the office-holders: the media have made available to every school child the examples of vulgarity and misbehavior, not to mention lack of simple patriotism, of persons in Congress. Even state legislatures are no longer immune from the light of public exposure, and some of them are even less edifying than their national counterparts.
At the time of the equally vulgar and extremist attacks on Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, for instance, only a tiny percentage of the American people ever read them or heard them. Most people could neither read nor write, and fewer yet had access to newspapers. Among the elite who could read, most were experienced enough to shake down the hyper language and lurid reports to see what small kernels of truth might be left in the bottom of the pan.
Today this kind of misbehavior, disrespect, incivility, and lack of patriotism is on display not only to tens of millions of Americans, but to the whole world. When some months ago I was in a distant city in the Caucasus for a conference, a city of which I could almost say, "You can`t get there from here," I watched the same programs on CNN that family, friends, and colleagues were seeing in Great Falls, Waco, Evanston, and Philadelphia. And I saw things that made me ashamed that my country wasn`t able to present more worthy political leaders, persons better models for our youth, statesman whose conduct commended our principles of liberty and self-government.
We shall nor have such leaders, of course, until their election is taken our of the control of the super-rich and the large corporations and put back in the hands of the American people. The situation will not improve fundamentally until candidates are compelled to debate and win on the merits of principles and programs, rather than sliding into office on expensive floods of mendacious 10 second sound bytes. But perhaps even with the present crowd we shall see less shameful behavior when the naughty schoolboys wake up to the fact that what they are doing isn`t in the closer anymore: it`s our in the open in Moscow, Beijing, Jakarta, Seoul, and Jerusalem-as well as in Muleshoe, Tampa, and Kalamazoo.
