Manners vs Money

When peasants have neither.

I expose myself to a lot of soundbites, and what’s interesting is that I’m even cutting those closer. I’m sure most of my YouTube history rarely goes longer than 15 minutes that’s about the length of an NFL highlight film. But I do remember one in which a second-generation Vietnamese American considers going back to Southeast Asia because America is getting too rude. And I’ve met these kinds of Texans quite a bit in towns like Bellaire. Meanwhile my daughters are right now vacationing in Kathmandu. We like Asia.

It’s difficult for me to determine how harsh American culture is. I have the luxury of selective engagement. I’m so used to discounting and ignoring that which seems foul and stupid that I cannot accurately tell how much other Americans must deal with it. I generally get that a lot of people believe most institutions and elites are completely corrupted. But reading the subtexts of American pop culture through TV and movies is my best bet. So that’s where I’m going today.

The bottom line is this. I believe that Americans are going to have a reckoning and something is going to break in society similar to what happened during COVID. It’s going to test us because we are going to have to use manners where in many cases we just use money. That’s going to be a difficult reckoning for a lot of performative crap that substitutes for genuine culture and social engagement.

Woke Breaks
Woke is not broken. It’s bent, and millions understand that it is crooked. There is a level of lightweight engagement that you can still get away with because a lot of affluent people still believe that their level of rhetorical noblesse is a valuable social currency. But if you’re forced to deal with an environment where people are stealing toilet paper from the supermarket, all of those false mannerisms go out the window. When you can buy your way out of all kinds of situations, then you don’t have to take ‘others’ seriously. You put on the mask of a 20% tip and you get away with disregard and disrespect. At some point, you hit the reckoning wall. I hope I can describe it adequately by looking at different angles. Either way, it comes down to your bubble being popped - you realize that people heard you and saw you when you thought your actual thoughts and attitude were behind something thicker than a soap film.

Shame
For the first time last night I watched what I didn’t know was a Thanksgiving movie. Planes Trains and Automobiles with John Candy and Steve Martin. What’s particularly insightful about the movie is the extent to which the class differences and personality differences stretched tolerance under stressful conditions. It’s difficult for me to imagine two American men across a similar class and income gap give each other the amount of benefit of doubt that these two gave each other. Yet and still the deepest gap between them is not revealed until the end of the film.

Nevertheless, each of them has moments, especially Steve Martin’s character, where they know they have gone overboard and been too hostile to one another. Steve Martin’s expressions of shame, wordlessly communicate that he knows he has gone too far. I’m trying to think of a contemporary movie where that expression on Martin’s face is ever used without paragraphs of weasel words and rote phrases of qualified contrition.

An 18 year-old musician just said something that more reflects what our times are giving us: “Don’t come for me in the comments.” Big contrast.

Wild West
If you watch enough martial arts and mannish stuff, you get to recognize in your maturity the two schools of influence in the attention economy. There are the videos that isolate all conflict to a set of cool moves that you can do. These are kayfabe and far less than instructional. Similarly there are ambiguously worded trick questions that “You’re a genius if you get this right.” The more serious lessons are those that help you to understand that you have no idea what the other man knows, so you had better be polite. Or as my coach always told me, stay away from stupid places where stupid people feel comfortable doing stupid things.

The problem is that we are led to believe we don’t have to be a day late and a dollar short. If you just remember these quick and easy steps. This seems to me to be very American. I don’t know exactly why but it has to do with the idea that opportunity is always just around the corner, just waiting for your proper attitude and tools. Everything is some manner of exploitation and that’s the only game in town. So our virtues are repressed or submerged by our ambition. There’s always a way to be right if you have enough guns, money and lawyers.

There is something to the proper ethics as expressed in our best Western movies, myths and literature, but it’s not about the huge expense of resources, brains and government license. Character is lost in those assumptions. It’s true that to succeed in our biggest and toughest areas you have to “be first, be brilliant or cheat”, but that’s for the leaders of industry which we Peasants are not. Everything isn’t a global stage.

So a kind of Wild West scenario we are going to be forced to be polite because there is plenty of evidence of strapped Karens. I honestly believe that’s not where Texas is now and I don’t see it heading that way. It’s much more likely to happen here in California, where ordinary people are not as based as they ought to be despite their proximity to dangerous realities.

Three Triggers
There are, to my mind, several scenarios that trip us up aside from the obvious of doubling the unemployment in a hard recession. The first one just popped into my head ten minutes ago when I got off the phone with an old friend.

• Dead CVN: The first president who is blamed for getting an aircraft carrier sunk is going to shame America for at least a decade. It would be a different class of attack and I don’t know how, militarily, that possibility might occur. It seems both impossible and inevitable that America will fail to project power. Imagine if it’s not the USS Stark, but the Gerald Ford. Impossible?

• Local Sharia: Somewhere religious men sing and dance together. Most of us have no idea what that looks like outside of cadence calls in movies and highschool drill teams. Someday one American town is going to show us what it’s like to have 200 armed Muslim men stand up to local law enforcement. It will be bigger than Ferguson, MO. My theory here is simple. What we Californians have seen in Mexican gangs in cities like Stockton and Fresno, and what New Yorkers know about the Russian Mafia is a foreshadowing of the failure of American liberalism. It only takes 200 men to outweigh the willpower of any local law enforcement agency. Call them hooligans, call them whatever you want. There will be defiance. Impossible?

• Love Canal Again: Quite frankly I think we are due for an environmental goof, or a natural disaster that really gets the better of us. Maybe some combination of the two that scars us into a distrust of our nation’s capacity to keep anyone safe. Considering how little political will we have demonstrated, and nothing quite comes as close as Katrina or the LA Fires (and we’ll all be following up on that in 45 days) to tipping us over the edge. But I’ve been in Texas when toxic refinery fires have burned for days. People panicked. COVID we know. But there are lots of ways that we could become overwhelmed by our inability to live safely in the place we call home.

I want to generalize point two. If you feel like I’m being unduly harsh or paranoid, check out what Jorge Ventura discovered in California. Basically Mexican cartels and Chinese migrants exploiting rural areas to steal water to pay for illegal marijuana plantations. And yes slaves work on those plantations. There is nothing more horrifying for a civil libertarian like me than to know how evil men take over where people are weak and isolated.

I’m also not saying these are the only things that will force us to be more honest and respectful and demand more honesty and respectful behavior from the powers that democratically be. Whatever that trigger may, we will need to adjust from the expectation that all we need is money.

We cannot simply use wealth as a substitute for respect and accountability. I recognize the cynicism inherent in the idea that we can monetize everything and people will always pay attention and cash to that which is monetized. In that direction lies the easiest path to corruption. It is a path too many of us have taken.

When Peasants Have Neither
Fuck you money is indeed fuck you money. I want you to now consider a secular culture that has neither the time, the inclination, the money or the manners to uphold domestic tranquility. Imagine when the youth have completely lost the vocabulary and the concepts — when the discipline is all but forgotten and those that have it are dismissed and ridiculed. Imagine when the powers that be have abandoned them as a class and have hired money, guns and lawyers in their retreat to peaceful locales. Impossible?

This is the darkness I perceive. I guess I fear it as well. I am, as they say, laying up treasure on earth in the form of faith in my fellow peasants. I want my peaceful presence to bear witness as I continue to mature. I need to stay sharp. We all need to stay sharp. There are assassins up in them there hills.

In the comments, tell me a movie, fashion or song that made you think that we have lost some fraction of our civil dignity.