Any Which Way but Proper

It’s amazing what it’s OK to do in public these days. If you need to blow your nose while walking down a city street and find yourself without a tissue, it’s OK to press on your left nostril, lean to the right, and blow hard out of your right nostril. If you execute the appropriate maneuver correctly, the mist of mucous you emit will land on others and not on you. I’ve seen this nose-blowing technique performed with considerable aplomb several times on the streets of Santa Monica. Not only is it OK for your cell phone to ring as the casket is being lowered into the ground at a funeral, it’s OK to take the call. Yes, I was shocked when I witnessed this recently at the funeral of a friend’s mother in Orange County, but I have to assume it’s OK because nobody said a word. (Granted, everyone may have been temporarily stunned into silence).

Whereas business attire was once de rigueur for air travel, wife beater T-shirts are now OK, and once your plane is airborne, it seems it’s OK to unbutton snug trouser waistbands, remove your shoes and pad up and down the aisle in threadbare socks. It’s also OK to pack your travel gear in a Hefty bag and drag it on board with you. Leaf blowers are illegal in many communities, but it’s still OK to use them, at least it is in my neighborhood. And, yes, it’s apparently fine if you go away for the weekend and leave your three dogs in the backyard to bark non-stop for 48 hours, as my neighbors recently did. Based on the results of a test conducted two years ago by the San Francisco Chronicle, seated passengers on Bay Area Rapid Transit trains no longer feel obliged to relinquish their seats to standing passengers on crutches, and it’s also OK to ignore a lost pedestrian studying a map.

What all these instances of infantile narcissism share is a failure to grasp the fact that the world is a small place. There are lots of us crammed together here, and there are aspects of the world we have to share. When occupying public spaces--or even when within earshot of others--we would do well to remain respectful of issues involving body space, eye contact, sound and smell. No one has the right to pollute these shared spaces, whether by driving around in a car blasting music at a decibel capable of triggering seizures, throwing trash on the ground or screeching into a cell phone.

More annoying than the sound cell phone users make is the subtext of this activity. (Doctors and parents of small children--the only people with a legitimate claim to cell phone use--are excused from this part of my lecture.) Essentially, a person on a cell phone is saying to everyone around him; “I’m not here inhabiting this space with you, we are not together, I am someplace else.” This incredibly anti-social message is a complete negation of the notion of community, and is also a way of not being fully present in the world. The world’s an interesting place. Let’s show up for it and pay attention.

All aspects of telephone etiquette have, of course, eroded in recent years. Social satirist Harry Shearer’s weekly radio program, “Le Show,” once featured a character in a skit who was talking to someone on the phone when another call beeped through. “I better get that,” said the character. “It might be somebody else.” Really, isn’t that what call waiting is all about?

If you’re thinking of heading for cyberspace in an attempt to escape the madding crowd, don’t bother--things are bad there, too. When a friend sends you one of those blanket e-mails that’s also been sent to twenty other people, don’t you feel as if you’ve been demoted? I always scan the list of fellow recipients and think, “oh, so this is how I rate.” “It’s a way to stay in touch in a busy world,” protest those multi-tasking spammers, but a mimeographed memo is not my idea of communication. If you’re not convinced of the depths of cyberspace gaucheness, just check out Roger Clarke’s 1995 typology “Net-Ethiquette: Mini Case Studies of Dysfunctional Human Behavior on the Net,” which covers such things as “flaming,” “trawling” and “spidering” along with the ultimate in what he terms “Power Rudeness”--firing someone by e-mail. Nice, huh?

While evidence seems to abound that man is rapidly creeping back to the primordial ooze, in fact, the ever-shifting code of etiquette we cling to in an effort to perceive ourselves as civilized creatures is constantly in the process of breaking down. The offenses listed above represent nothing more than how it’s breaking down right now.

It’s tempting to romanticize the past, to think of it as a sort of endless “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the signature work painted by Georges Seurat during the years 1884-1886. In this romantic vision, life used to be a choreographed social minuet in which beautifully dressed, impeccably polite people enjoyed interacting. Although wealthy people lived more formally in Paris 150 years ago, they also engaged in behavior that would strike us as weird today. Most of the rules that have governed public conduct for centuries originated in the French royal court in the 16th and 17th centuries, and while some of them still make sense, others have become obsolete. Children were once taught the proper way to kneel before a teacher, and to remain silent until spoken to, but they were also taught how to use a pointed dinner knife as a toothpick.

When people first began reading in public shortly after the industrialization of literature in the early 19th century, it was considered downright thuggish, just as when people first started walking around plugged in to Sony Walkmans, they were often perceived as hostile and remote. Neither activity raises an eyebrow now. My mother nursed her children with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, and so did most of her friends. Driving drunk was once considered not that big a deal. When abstract painter Jackson Pollock wrapped his car around a tree in 1956 he went down in history as a romantic hero, and nobody made much of the fact that a woman named Edith Metzger, who’d just met Pollock and had the bad luck to be in that car with him, lost her life because Pollock was drunk. It’s unlikely such behavior would pass without sterner condemnation now.

What constitutes acceptable behavior is clearly a kind of a one-step-forward, one-step-back situation. We’ve gotten smarter about some things, but we’ve gotten wretchedly grubby about others. The guy at the next restaurant table is no longer allowed to light up a cigarette, but he may go outside and blow his nose on the sidewalk. Granted, that nose-blowing isn’t endangering anybody’s life, but it hardly seems a mark of social progress that people have come to feel at liberty to do it. Somebody needs to rework the rule book.