Incivility is the new secondhand smoke

By GottaLaff

Earlier I posted a rather disturbing MUST-SEE video that shows sweet, kind children morphing into nasty, uncivil bigots in a mere 15 minutes. It was a heart-wrenching, appalling eye-opener, and should me mandatory viewing.

Then I opened the L.A. Times this morning and found a "a crash course in American coarseness" via an op-ed by Tim Rutten:

Incivility is the new secondhand smoke. Everyone feels impelled to disdain it, but nobody is willing to do away with it entirely.

Besides, it's profitable. Look at South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson. Two weeks ago, he was just a loudmouth with the bad taste to shout an insult at the president of the United States from the House floor. Since then, he's become a right-wing darling, and $2 million in new campaign contributions have flowed his way. Incivility apparently cuts both ways, though; his Democratic challenger has taken in more than $1.5 million. [...]

People enjoy incivility -- maybe because it's easy to remember; maybe because it's entertaining. [...]

These days, everyone seems to remember a time in the relatively recent past when civility wasn't in such short supply and when rudeness and boorishness of the Wilson variety wouldn't be tolerated. So the natural question is: How did we get here?

Actually, our recent descent into boorishness didn't begin on the political platform but on the stage -- not with our politicians but with our stand-up comics. [...]

From the perspective of cultural history, you can draw a straight line from Rickles' Las Vegas lounge act through Stern and Limbaugh and on to Wilson's big mouth. [...]

[O]ur electoral politics have always been essentially uncivil, from the founding of the country to the present day. The problem is that we suffer from an insufficient regard for the facts.

Without facts there is no argument, and without argument there is no persuasion. Argument plus civility is dialogue, and that produces compromise, which is what permits people of good conscience to live peacefully with one another even though they hold different views.

The growing culture of assertion and the death of persuasion, rather than the loss of civility, are what we ought to fear about our politics. Because there's no insistence on a common set of facts, we're perilously close to the point at which we stop even talking past each other and the language of our politics dissolves into mutually unintelligible dialects.

As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to say, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Please read the whole thing.