The following passages are taken from an AP story on public rudeness. The author clearly has some overt bias here, and seems to leap to some strange generalities as a way of expressing "her" displeasure with others around her. There are no less than eight references in the piece about public cell phone use, obviously one of her pet peeves, and the remainder is the usual senior citizen WASP blather about child rearing gone astray: back in my day we made kids behave better. Suffice it that i am only choosing some quotes that stand out for their sheer cuckoo qualities.
A slippage in manners is obvious to many Americans. Nearly 70% questioned in an Associated Press-Ipsos poll said people are ruder than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
The use of the term "slippage" is interesting. It relies on an anecdotal generalization that in some mythical past people were less rude, based of course on anecdotal evidence from people old enough to have established some sort of perception regarding this. Likewise it presupposes that "manners" are a civic and social responsibility rather than the hallmark of the bastion of elitist and classist social hierarchical structures enforcing some civil code on the peons and minions who do their bidding. Can't you picture the hoy palloy in Manhattan suggesting over an afternoon tea that their own maids and servants have lost their sense of place and manners?
Peggy Newfield, founder and president of Personal Best, said the generation that came of age in the times-a-changin' 1960s and 1970s are now parents who do not stress the importance of manners, such as opening a door for a female.
What?? Opening a door for a female?? Isn't that the most quaint form of conservative social retro-reengineering? So who is this chica who is suggesting that we re-objectify women back into the weak synchophantic swooning submissive class of citizens for whom manners served as a constant public marker of their second class status. This little tidbit is from her website:The American School of Protocol™, a subsidiary of Personal Best Inc.®, offers a distinctive training opportunity for professionals who would like to teach etiquette to children. What?? Protocol is another wonderful word for upper class associations and hidden in this sentence is that very subtle marker "professionals" code here for people who earn more than a $150K a year. And you thought i was kidding about the hidden agenda of this piece. The other lovely aspect of this story and good old Peggy is that she is indeed a senior Southern Belle from Atlanta and confidant of Zell Miller. If that doesn't speak volumes regarding the overt patrician classism inherent in demanding people behave as she tells them? And of course you can send her a couple of hundred dollars to receive DVD's of her manners and dining classes.
So it was no surprise to Newfield that those children wouldn't understand how impolite it was to wear flip-flops to a White House meeting with the president - as some members of the Northwestern women's lacrosse team did in the summer.
What?? "Impolite" to and of whom i need to ask. Assuming that there is some sort of change in the status of the First Amendment for White House visits, and similarly assuming that the First Amendment no longer applies in social relations between the wealthy and the not wealthy, one would need to suppose that these championship winning athletes (who btw were part of a huge tour of women's NCAA championship teams many of whom also wore flip-flops and TEVA sandals) were truly ignorant of their servile submissive duties to the upper crust classes. But really what underlies this specific attack, by a southern WASP bitch is epigramtic of the culture war in which we are engaged. Knowingly singling out Northwestern for its liberalism and northern yankeeism, the symbolic attack is really focused on baby boomers and their offspring, raised in defiance of the patriarchy's authoritarian dominance that renders all in its path non-human resources to be used and discarded.
What?? She had to add that now didn't she, dyssing that democratic equalizer that spreads those enlightenment based liberalistic notions of equality, freedom, and civil and human rights. If it isn't the hippy commie parents then it is the liberal media that engages the masses into defiance of their betters. The "whopping 93%" represents, one would assume, a large population of people who are active viewers of MSM and thus have gotten the "liberal?" message that parents don't teach their children well? The idiocy of the simultaneous claims is stark. Here is a MSM, choosing to use that dim ol' bat Peggy to pronounce that parents and media are to blame for the apparent rudeness of the servile and impoverished classes. And this MSM is doing so because it is part of the problem?? or is it doing so because it is working to get it both ways: running programming that generates revenue from representing the disdain the people have for the breakdown of the patriarchy's stranglehold on our nation's well being--the collapse of economies, endless war, failed schools, destroyed infrastructure and social institutions, etc. while making sure that the people blame one another for their weakness of character and failure to see that their betters have the right to treat them this way.
