"Your mind is on vacation and your
mouth is working overtime." – Mose Allison.
What possesses one member of
Congress at a joint session, while listening to a prime time Presidential
address, to suddenly yell out: "You’re a liar!" – words that were quickly eaten by his own post-address
apology and Obama’s prompt next-morning acceptance of same.
When it happened, the TV camera was
fixed on the President at the lecturn, with Speaker Pelosi sitting behind, on
the viewer’s right, and VP Biden, also sitting behind, on the left. Pelosi looked like she had been punched
in the stomach if you play back a video recording of the speech, but wisely did
not call order or single out the single Congressman who let his mouth
obliterate his reason on national TV.
How did we get here?
Was it the recently concluded
Summer of our Discontent, where we were all treated to – perhaps ‘regaled with’
is the proper phrase – with Townhall meeting after tiresome Townhall meeting,
where people crudely yelled and gestured and threatened and uncivilly mocked
their elected representatives and, yes, even a disabled woman in a wheelchair,
to say nothing of the gun-toters?
Was it the increasingly bitter tone in both Washington and Sacramento
which has seemingly replaced any form of diplomacy? Was it the TV Talking Heads and radio types with their
incessant 24/7 drumbeating about death panels and Kenyan presidential births
and vast right-wing conspiracies? Was it this stinking, rotten economy that has
driven so many past the brink?
I wish I knew what it was that
robbed us of the civility that could and should characterize our public
discourse. I want it back!
Diplomacy is about people
presenting different views in a diplomatic, non-offensive fashion, without ad hominem personal attacks. Once upon a time, the legal system
offered lawyers who could be diplomats and stay above the fray, when their
clients were literally at each other’s throats. Indeed, the whole reason for a court system is to provide a
civilized alternative to hand-to-hand combat every time a landlord wants to
evict a tenant, or businesses cannot agree on what their contracts mean. Over the last couple of decades, the
"I-want-a-Barracuda" style of law practice has evolved, where the lawyers,
emulating those actors they see on TV and in movies, now feel they have to out-macho each other and act as incendiary
devices for their already agitated clients. And, somewhere in the last decades, civility went right out
the window.
Maybe it was Watergate, maybe it
was Iran-Contra, maybe it was the Clinton-Lewinsky madness which some saw as
payback, but, we are getting lost in incivility while our multitude of problems
just grown and grown, as unattended as the waist-high weeds on a vacant
lot. 100-year old water pipes
burst and practically inundated Studio City last weekend, but we are too busy
to address replacing our worn-out infrastructure and would rather just fight
and insult and call names, instead of dealing with it.
Enough already.
We need to get back to
disagreements without character assassination, debating without ninja attacks,
negotiating without the nuclear option, and just plain civility again. There are far too many pressing and
urgent matters to waste all the good that we are capable of on the kind of
uncivil discourse that has literally crawled out of the gutter and now seems to
pervade everything, everywhere I look.