388
PARTISAN REVIEW
situation after situation, that those who are truly civilized do not take ad–
vantage of the wandering stranger. They extend the sort of hospitality
that assumes kinship and seems to foreshadow the democratic legal idea
that one is innocent until proven guilty.
Sometimes I feel that part of our trouble in the area of civility arrives
from both the horror stories of slavery that we have heard over the last
thirty years and from an idea that we have seen evolve into terrible be–
havior since the middle fifties: we prove ourselves most individual when
we make sure that we don't give a damn what anybody else thinks about
us. What the terrible stories of humiliation during slavery have done, it
seems to me, is to lead to a confusion between service and subservience.
This results in people of all races giving you bad service in order to prove
that they aren't inferior to you. I think the simplistic idea of not giving a
damn is also an example of how our American pursuit of individuality
and our nose-thumbing attitudes toward excessive and pretentious con–
vention have been distorted. Moreover, this cavalier rudeness submits to
the facelessness of the metropolis in which the kind of terrible behavior
that would be chastised in the small community is possible because it is so
easy to disappear within the vast urban landscape.
We cannot forget how much sheer ignorance we are witnessing as
well. These people feel that they exist on a lane separate from everyone
else and that in that lane they can speak whatever four-letter words they
know at whatever volumes they choose, no matter who else is around. In
a certain sense, they are saying that what they do makes no difference in
the larger picture, just as what they feel has no effect on the course of life
either. In this mixture of battered civility we should forget neither the
obnoxious trash aristocracy of rock and rap, nor the millionaire athletes
who have replaced sportsmanship with the thin-skinned pugnaciousness
of thugs playing in the street. Then there are the many who make lower–
class communities into gauntlets of perpetual threat, reminding us of what
Shakespeare meant in
Henry V
when he wrote:
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses, and ourselves, and children,
Have lost, or do not learn, for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country;
But grow like savages, as soldiers will,
That nothing do but meditate on blood,
To swearing, and stem looks, diffused attire,
And everything that seems unnatural.
