Peggy Noonan looks at a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that finds America thinks it’s headed in the wrong direction, and comes to the unusual conclusion that it’s not about the economy.
This could be because Peggy doesn’t understand what being worried about the economy means. She just flat doesn’t get what it means not to have a job, or to be worried about losing the one you have, or wondering how you’re going to keep your family alive without health insurance. No, she has GOP blinders on when you say “economy,” as evidenced by this summary of that concern:
Sure, Americans are worried about long-term debt and endless deficits. We’re worried about taxes and the burden we’re bequeathing to our children, and their children.
Really. Those are the only economic worries she could think of.
Fortunately, since she doesn’t understand the subject, she’s not writing about economic worries. She’s writing about concerns about our culture going down the toilet.
She uses a televised incident involving someone named Adam Lambert to get into her point. I don’t know who that is, but apparently he did something that she says broke the pact whereby most Americans say, “We don’t care what you do in New York,” so long as you don’t bring it into our living rooms via broadcast TV. She seems to put cable in another category. Whatever.
The part of her column that interested me was this theoretical poll she’d like to see. Here are the questions she would ask:
- Have we become a more vulgar country?
- Are we coarser than, say, 50 years ago?
- Do we talk more about sensitivity and treat others less sensitively?
- Do you think standards of public behavior are rising or falling?
- Is there something called the American Character, and do you think it has, the past half-century, improved or degenerated?
- If the latter, what are the implications of this?
- Do you sense, as you look around you, that each year we have less or more of the glue that holds a great nation together?
- Is there less courtesy in America now than when you were a child, or more?
- Bonus question: Is “Excuse me” a request or a command?
I thought I’d share those to see how y’all would answer them.
Here are my answers:
- Yes.
- Yes.
- Yes.
- Falling.
- Don’t know about the Character thing (at least, the way you imply), but certainly it has degenerated.
- The impoverishment of our souls.
- Yes. (Although I think this is more a function of political partisanship than what you’re on about here.)
- Less. Listen to the profanity in public places.
- Well, obviously, it should be a request. Don’t know whether it’s a demand yet.
Peggy Noonan is perhaps the most brain-dead member of the national pundit circuit. She thinks that being a rich, white, sheltered woman doesn’t stop her from talking about things she obviously knows nothing about. She’d be better off talking about sales at Talbot’s than discussing pop culture, or the economy, or anything. Why people keep giving her an outlet to speak is insane. She has yet to make a salient point in nearly 20 years.
I’m not going to answer the questions point-by-point but I will say that when it comes to issues of vulgarity, coarseness, sensitivity, public behavior, and courtesy in a now vrs. 50-years-ago comparison that we have improved rather than devolved. By that I mean I’m more concerned with the socially-acceptable ways of talking about and treating women, minorities, children and non-christians than superficial etiquette and manners. While I think the latter is important and I strive to be courteous and teach my children why it is important, I hate historical comparisons because the way we communicate and treat each other goes far beyond the realm of manners.
Wes, since when does being a rich white sheltered woman exclude someone from forwarding legitimate questions about a culture? In a multi-faceted society such as ours, I expect to be challenged by differing norms, and seldom interpret the experince as an invitation to class warfare.
The lady, blinders or not, has raised some interesting questions… I think it’s ridiculous to ignore the substance of her assertion, and I believe there is a connection, somewhere, between what she is on about and the current state of economic affairs in America today.
Since you took the bait, Brad, I’ll answer also, as I regard the queries to be interesting.
1 No. I do not think we have become a more vulgar country. I think that it has become less intimidating for the citizenry at large to demonstrate it’s vulgarity in public.
2 No. Coarseness has always been a part of every culture. The necessary permissiveness of our republic perhaps makes such coarsness more evident to persons with the means of Mrs. Noonan, as economic factors evolve.
3 Who’s We?
4 Standards of public behaviour are falling. That’s not always bad…
5 The American Character is something that develops as a result of a nation full of people who take for granted the right to live their lives free of interference. As such, it is a moving target. I think it has remained fairly stable so far.
6 N/A
7 seems to ask whether one thinks that there is less “glue” or more “glue” available in our society. I did not interpret it as a yes-or-no question. I am puzzled by Brad’s response.
Conditions are generally sufficient here in the U.S. for most people to recognize how good we have it. Smells like glue to me.
Less or more?
Less.
8 Courtesy? It seems right in line with what I was raised to expect and give. I heard lots of profanity in public places as a child, but I always understood it to be a low-class thing…
BONUS: “Excuse Me”
The balsa of polite interaction. Infinitely carvable to meet a variety of needs, according to one’s particular situation.
I doubt that it has changed much lately, and it’s not a good barometer for anyone who has had wide interaction with all aspects of society…
I’ve got news for Peggy, the vast majority of people in this country really don’t give a tinker’s damn about the national debt. Brad is 100% correct on this one, she is totally clueless on this issue. People are worried about feeding their families not on trillion dollar budget deficits.
Speaking of the term “tinker’s damn”, that phrase was probably considered vulgar 60 years ago. I would suggest to all my friends 50 years of age and older the F word is fast becoming a standard part of public language just as damn did in the 40s. This whole coarse public discourse issue has been around for many decades and will probably be around for many more. Let’s move on to more important issues, like feeding our families and providing them health care. Right now I don’t give a timker’s d*** what words are considered vulgar. In a few years we’ll dream up some new vulgar words to take their place.
Actually, bud, it’s “tinker’s dam,” without the “N.” So cursing is not involved.
Another one of those useless little things I know. If only I could make a living from knowing them…
People are just plain mean these days. Everyone looks out for themselves and their cohorts. The “public good” is compromised again and again.
It’s me, mine and my money , over and over and over again.
Yes, there is great insensitivity. For example, it was exceedingly insensitive of Ms. Noonan and her friends at the Wall Street Journal to encourage the onslaught of reckless greed that led to our current mess.
And exactly what is a “tinker’s dam” o knowlegeable one? As for Ms. Noonan’s concerns, I think that our society has become much less officially polite, in that we no longer have a single (wasp) set of cultural mores to abide by, or else. However, we have become much more aware of, and accepting of peoples of different ethnic backgrounds, religious belief, cultural practices, and sexual identities. In one sense, I think it would be nice to once again have one general code of polite social interaction, but when we last had that we also had racial, sexual, religious, and cultural inequalities that were far worse. Those inequalities were simply accepted by society. I can remember when “n******town” was a collection of appallingly inadequate housing. Much more appallingly, most of the privileged race didn’t care that people whom they knew had inadequate plumbing, heating, and no air conditioning. I can remember when one flung accusation of “queer” of “fag” could ruin a teenager’s life, whether it was true or not,and where girls didn’t do sports. I can remember when “Jew” was used as an insult. Some of this is still in existance today, of course; and those who would get so upset about “political correctness” may want a return to those days. I prefer to live in a time, when people at least try to see that people in their community have a decent home to go to, where people can worship as they please, without having the dominant faith thrust upon them, and where the name of a people is no longer considered an insult, per se.
Karen, you and Maude subscribe to the “Ascent of Man” mode of thought that holds that our mores today are better than in the past, and that we’re just constantly progressing toward being BETTER, more civilized, in a moral and social sense.
I don’t agree. I think society changes, but that it would be a mistake to say it necessarily IMPROVES in any moral or social sense. Things just change.
And the thing is, you have many, many changes happening at the same time. And I don’t buy that we have to be a trashier, less genteel, less morally traditional and socially polite society in order not to have, say, Jim Crow. One does not have to throw out all the rules of civilized behavior in order to be fair to people. In fact, I would think things would tend to run the other way around, but apparently they don’t.
I mean, why on Earth can’t we have the Civil Rights Act without “reality TV?”
When it comes to manners and decorum, I’m a reactionary. I would prefer that we act socially the way folks did in the Aubrey-Maturin books and Jane Austen. If you then point out to me that there was slavery in those days, and that a Catholic couldn’t be a serving officer on His Majesty’s ships, I will say, what does that have to do with manners? You can be decent to people and not enslave them or bar them on the basis of religion, and still act properly at a dinner party.
Can I get a harrumph here?
Amen, Karen (and Maude).
…and Brad, please, although I do not have cable TV, from reading The State, I do know that Adam Lambert, an American Idol alumnus, is openly gay and on some awards show did a dance routine that simulated the performance of oral sex on him by another male dancer, inter alia. He was then cut from a Good Morning America appearance the next day (?), but picked up by the CBS early morning show. Do I think this is a good thing? uh no. I am quite a stick-in-the-mud prude about all sorts of burley-Q stuff–not fond of the ubiquitous female T&A displays popular for as long as I can remember it–the Adam Lambert kerfuffle was largely a big deal because it involved gay male objectivizing.
In the South, “excuse me” is still largely a polite request, unlike the accusation of rudeness it seems to have become elsewhere, from what I hear.
and “A tinker’s damn
Meaning
Something that is insignificant or worthless.
Origin
There’s some debate over whether this phrase should be tinker’s dam – a small dam to hold solder, made by tinkers when mending pans, or tinker’s damn – a tinker’s curse, considered of little significance because tinkers were reputed to swear habitually.
If we go back to 1877, in the Practical Dictionary of Mechanics, Edward Knight puts forward this definition:
“Tinker’s-dam – a wall of dough raised around a place which a plumber desires to flood with a coat of solder. The material can be but once used; being consequently thrown away as worthless.”
That version of events has gone into popular folklore and many people believe it. After all, any definition written as early has 1877 has to be true doesn’t it?
Knight may well have been a fine mechanic but there has to be some doubt about his standing as an etymologist. There is no corroborative evidence for his speculation and he seems to have fallen foul of the curse of folk etymologists – plausibility. If an ingenious story seems to neatly fit the bill then it must be true. Well, in this case, it isn’t. The Victorian preference of ‘dam’ over ‘damn’ may also owe something to coyness over the use of a profanity in polite conversation.
That interpretation of the phrase was well enough accepted in Nevada in 1884 for the Reno Gazette to report its use in the defence of a Methodist preacher who was accused of the profanity of using the term ‘tinker’s dam’:
“It isn’t profane any more to say tinker’s dam. The minister stated that a tinker’s dam was a dam made by itinerant menders of tinware on a pewter plate to contain the solder”.
The same view was expressed in the Fitchburg Sentinel newspaper in 1874.
The problem with that interpretation is that all those accounts ignore an earlier phrase – ‘a tinker’s curse’ (or cuss), which exemplified the reputation tinkers had for habitual use of profanity. This example from John Mactaggart’s The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, 1824, predates Knight’s version in the popular language:
“A tinkler’s curse she did na care what she did think or say.”
In the Grant County Herald, Wisconsin, 1854, we have:
“There never was a book gotten up by authority and State pay, that was worth a tinker’s cuss”.
So, we can forget about plumbing. The earlier phrase simply migrated the short distance from curse to damn to give us the proper spelling of the phrase – tinker’s damn.
Copyright © Gary Martin, 1996 – 2009″
I can Google with the best of them…
The nasty truth is that the vigor of American culture may be inseparable from the coarseness which has so often been part of our national life. Though I often find it offensive, I understand that vigor and vulgarity go hand in hand (this is the U.S., not Switzerland). But Peggy Noonan is about as economically clueless as they come.
I did not say that everything is improving; as a matter of fact, I do believe that I said that I preferred a general code of polite interaction. All I said was that if we had to choose between the two, I preferred a citizenry that tried to treat all people well, rather than simply refuse to have anything to do with the ‘trash’, while congratulating itself on how polite it was. And you still haven’t explained “tinker’s dam.”
Karen-
I posted an explanation….
and I heartily agree with your analysis.
I don’t think things are worse today than they were when I was growing up. The only difference is that there are more outlets to show the behavior than in the old days. Had there been cable TV and the internet in the 50’s, we would have seen much more of the behavior that went on behind closed doors.
I distinctly remember hearing the F-word used on the playground in 5th grade sometime in 1971.
Is it better to be a black American in Columbia today than it was forty years ago? I would think very much so. I wasn’t here, but I would imagine the level of civility was not exactly genteel.
Is it better to be a woman today in America than it was 100 years ago. Again, I would assume so.
As a Libertarian, I really don’t care what they show on TV. It always comes down to a question of demand more than supply. People want what they want and no amount of government intervention can stop it.
Actually, the one area where I do see less civility is in the lines to get on airplanes. It only seems to be a recent phenomenon that people cut into lines to get onboard… but that appears to be more a function of the airlines charging for checked bags and the rush to get a spot in the overhead space. Other than that, I don’t see a big difference and I spent more than half of 2009 all across the country.
what’s a tinkler?
Thankyou, Kathryn, for the explanation.
“People are just plain mean these days. Everyone looks out for themselves and their cohorts. The “public good” is compromised again and again.
It’s me, mine and my money , over and over and over again.”
This is why I hate historical comparisons. Anyone who feels the way orphan annie does should be transported to Ukraine circa 1932. If you’re hung up on young people responding with m’am or sir or the use of “excuse me” as a request or demand as indicators of our society being headed to hell in a handbasket then I suspect you have very little understanding of human history.
Would a “tinker’s darn” be a person who sews up holes in socks?
Yes, thanks for the added depth on “tinker’s dam(n),” Kathryn. I was just going by memory there, having read the explanation I shared — somewhere, sometime. The reason I remembered it was that it was counterintuitive, and I have an affinity for things that are not what they seem.
Your explanation is closer to the way the phrase FEELS, and is therefore probably right. Of course, we never know for sure, do we? Something that has always impressed me is those examples of earliest known use of a word or phrase in dictionaries — long before Google or Wikipedia. Now that’s erudition.
Brad I think much of what you regard as manners is simply a matter of convention. Does good manners require kids to say yes mam or no sir every time they respond to a question from an adult? A simple yes or no seems fine to me but some folks suggest we’re less mannered if the mams and sirs are dropped.
Likewise if a waitress hangs around discussing her life story is that an indication of a more courteous waitress or is it an indication of an inefficient waitress?
How about neckties? I used to regard those as essential to proper decorum in the workplace. Now they just look ridiculous.
And yes I still cringe when I hear the F bomb in public. But my kids hardly give it a thought. The kids probably have it right. Afterall it’s just a word.
How about the N-word? When I was growing up that was pretty acceptable. I still here older people use it. Yet my kids would never dream of using that word. It’s all a matter of perspective.
It seems to me that manners have evolved rather than deteriorated. Others have made good points concerning the welfare of different sub-cultures in our society. Seems to me we’ve come a long way. So what if we have to listen to teenagers utter a word we find offensive. Seems like a small thing to me.
Am I worried about our culture? Yes. I am worried that education is not important to all of us as it should be. I am worried by our culture of debt, both personal and public. I am worried that we think we should have everything we want without working hard for it. I am worried that we have replaced news with entertainment.
Am I worried about perceived rudeness, vulgarity on TV and course language?
F*** no.
Rudeness, incivility, discourtesy are very much relevant. These actions say, “I’m not listening to you. You don’t have anything of value to say. In fact, you have no value. What I think is the only thought that matters. My way or the highway.” Then lace this attitude with a few crude barbs and a caricature of the targeted person, group, and/or philosphy and you have the current discourse on vital issues. No wonder nothing of substance gets accomplished. No wonder SC has over 12% unemployment. No wonder Wall Street fell. The current culture idolizes self and greed and winning without regard of the fallout and the effect on others. The liberty currently idolized is not the same as the Christian liberty which says I am free to do or say many things but I restrain myself for the sake of my brother. Would that we all had this Christian liberty – then we would be free indeed.
BTW, Brad, you are right with your meaning of “worried about the economy”. To the man on the street, it means ” worried about my job; worried about losing my job; worried I can’t find a job; worried I can’t take care of the present generation; worried I can’t provide; worried”. The other “worried about the economy” is a luxury done when one feels secure.