Etiquette Hell Blog

When a person chooses to enter the public arena of either television media celebrityhood or political service, shouldn’t they be profoundly aware that the consequences of their actions, both good and bad, will impact their families?  One would think so but the recent spat of celebrities and politicians caught in compromising situations would indicate a complete inability to gauge how actions will harm their wives, children and other members of the family.

US Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and NY Governor Eliot Spitzer (D), caught in different sexual scandals, both paraded their wives at their sides during press conferences.   Spitzer’s comment was,

Today, I want to briefly address a private matter. I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family, and that violates my or any sense of right and wrong.

But I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.

“Disappointment” is hardly the word to describe the painful humiliation, embarrassment, anger and loss of trust every wife of every disgraced public servant experiences.   Silda Spitzer’s eyes and set jaw speak volumes.  She knows, just as we know, that if her husband truly valued his family, he would not have engaged in ten years of dallying with high priced prostitutes against his alleged “standards”.   Sometimes one simply has to catch their breath in awe at the audacity of arrogance that presumes to be able to engage in scandalous behavior with no expectation of facing the consequences.

From a March 10, 2008 episode of FOXNews Special Report With Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer had this to say about Eliot Spitzer:

KRAUTHAMMER:  But I think the worst offense here, the one that is truly unforgivable, is having the wife stand by.

HUME: They all do that, though.

KRAUTHAMMER: But it is cruel. You have already humiliated her, and to make her stand there as a prop, I think, is a hanging offense.

 I agree with Charles Krauthammer on this.  It is cruel and they all do it.  Every one of them conducts their confessional press conferences with the wife by their sides as if this spousal prop will somehow mitigate the severity of the situation.  I believe it is possible to heal a marriage damaged by distrust but marital loyalty should not have to be tested by whether the wife stands publicly by her man in his hour of well deserved public humiliation. In Spitzer’s case, he spent ten years not standing by his wife and his vows of fidelity to her so Silda Spitzer should be excused to not have to stand by Eliot as he soaks in the media spotlight he has earned as the consequences of his actions.   This cruel practice of publicly sacrificing wives on their husband’s political and familial funeral pyres needs to end. 

Yet as bad as it is for wives to be used as props and made to bear and share the humiliation their husbands earn, consider the effect on children and family relations.  At least wives of politicians made the choice to be married to a public figure whereas children have no say in the matter, being bound to them by blood.   It’s bad enough to be a teenager in a stage of life when peer group pressure is at its peak and teens their most cruel to each other but to be a teenager with a father whose behavior garners media attention must place these children in a special kind of hell.   It used to be the father inherited and kept his family’s good name intact and the parents prayed their son(s) did not tarnish it during youthful foolishness and sowing wild oats.   Now children can be born with a last name so indelibly etched in history and the news media that this negative association will follow them for decades, maybe even generations. 

Children being dragged through the media mud of their parents’ making is not limited to the offspring of randy politicians.  Consider celebrities who expose their families to media attention.  I’ve been a fan of the TV show, “Little People, Big World” and have weekly watched the lives of the Roloff family.  And while I enjoy the show, I’ve often wondered aloud (to the annoyance of my family who has heard it untold numbers of times) my amazement that parents would expose underaged children to that kind of media attention that is certain to not always be flattering or positive.  I don’t consider myself a celebrity at all BUT there have been points in my career where I had to choose to expose myself more and to be honest, that can be unnerving.  In fact, I’ve deliberately made choices which limited my exposure.  Based on my experiences, I cannot imagine children under a certain age really understanding the consequences of having their homelife not only televised worldwide but talked about in blogs and forums.   I’ve read some of the TLC fan forums and people can be extremely harsh in their criticisms of the Roloff children.   These recorded TV images and the Internet are never going away.  

The Dakota Fanning rape scene in the yet to be released movie “Hounddog” is yet another example of supposedly adult parents making decisions for their minor aged child(ren) that results in enormous negative media attention.  Child actress Dakaota Fanning, then aged 12, filmed a scene in the movie where she is raped by an older teenaged boy.  When news of this was released, the reaction was intensely negative considering that the film was shot in North Carolina which has strict laws against filming even simulated sex acts involving minors.  Dakota Fanning addressed this media criticism of her parents,

Some who bashed the film’s concept “were attacking my family and me, and that’s where it got too far,” says Fanning, 12, jabbing her finger into a table at a restaurant. “Pretty much everybody who talked about it attacked my mother, which I did not appreciate. That was extremely uncalled for and hurtful.”    USAToday

And predictable, Dakota. Any rational, intelligent adult would know that allowing a pre-teen girl to film a very controversial scene where her character gets raped is going to result in a boatload of bad publicity targeted at the stupidity of parents who gave their permission for it.  The above referenced article further elaborates that,  ”…all involved in the movie agree it is a disturbing sequence.”    The script reveals it is a scene that is as offensive as people stated.  

The age of consent laws are predicated upon the belief that children under a legally specified age lack the cognitive reasoning to understand fully the consequences of their choices and actions.  Parental responsibility involves making decisions in the best interests of their children for their longterm good but when that responsibility is negligently applied or not evident at all, we get situations where children are used as props to improve their parents’s public image such as 12 year old Dakota publicly defending her parents while they silently sit by. 

The question that needs to be brought to bear on these situations is, “Who is being served by this?”  When parents ambitiously seek media exposure that has the effect of exposing their minor aged children to public scrutiny, who is being served by this?  The children? I don’t think so.

The price paid for ambition inflicted on unwitting or ignorant family members is not limited to skanky politicans or parents intent on cashing in on media attention either.   Rising to political power at the expense of friends and family is just another variety of ambition.  Consider the speech Barack Obama gave in the aftermath of the media scrutiny into his association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.   Senator Obama is an articulate, thoughtful man but one phrase caught my ear and really rubbed me the wrong way:

“I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”  Source

All that may be a true account of Senator Obama’s white grandmother’s attitudes and beliefs yet it is only later, in other news reports, that one discovers that this “confession” was made decades ago and may not reflect Madelyn Dunham’s current beliefs and opinions at all. 

But was she really racist? If a fear of passing a black man on the street qualifies as racist, then consider the words of Reverend Jesse Jackson.   Reverend Jesse Jackson made similar comments in 1993 at a meeting of his organization, Operation Push, devoted to street crime. According to a November 29, 1993, article in the Chicago Sun-Times, he said,

“We must face the No. 1 critical issue of our day. It is youth crime in general and black-on-black crime in particular.  There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved….After all we have been through, just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”

The second example Obama refers to is his grandmother’s use of “racial and ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe”.    The reality is that everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, color or creed is bedevilled with their own stereotypes about people different than them that they struggle ( and sometimes not) to overcome and Obama is no exception to this.

I spent some time this weekend going over the book “Dreams of My Father.” On page 229, these are Barack Obama’s words, “…there were no cigar chomping crackers like Bull Connor out there.”      “Cracker”  is a  pejorative term for a white person in the US and refers either to the whiteness of a cracker or the sound a slave whip makes, i.e.  white people are stereotyped as whip cracking slaveowners .    I personally don’t get my hackles up at being equated to a Saltine cracker but stereotype me or my ancestors, none who owned slaves and some who fought in wars in the mid-west to keep slavery out of those territories, as no different than a whip weilding slavemaster,  yeah, I’m going to cringe at the stereotype. 

There is also a world of difference between a pastor who has been in the public eye for over 20 years and a grandmother who has studiously avoided for 25 years, and continues to avoid, even in the aftermath of the most recent media, any media exposure by refusing to grant interviews.  In that regard, Grandmom Dunham was more faithful to her grandson in not airing any family laundry than he was to her.  One does not expose family to negative media attention merely to make a point in a speech meant to assuage potential damage to a political career.   Particularly when you know they have a long history of refusing to interact with the media and whatever is said will never be challenged.   I can’t help viewing it as using grandmom as an expedient and silent stepping stone on an ambitious climb to political power. 

I had the opportunity last fall to observe, firsthand, a composed and properly focussed bride in the midst of what could have been a bridezilla opportunity.  

 The occasion was the 2007 Cape Fear Kite Festival at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.  The beachfront hotel was full of kite enthusiasts from the East Coast and the beach front property was a happy conglomeration of stunt kite competitions, displays of huge and colorful show kites, children running everywhere with little kites in tow and loud speakers announcing upcoming events.  The hotel is designed that access to the beach is through a pool area and funnels through a boardwalk that is not very wide.  Once on the sand,  there was a kite vendor’s tents to the left and a tent for children to decorate paper kites on the right.  You had to pass both of these to gain greater access to the beach.

Yet, surprisingly, just past the kids’ tent farther to the right was a wedding arch and a few chairs set up.  Clearly there was a wedding afoot!  My first thought was that a few of the kite festival participants were going to have a kite themed wedding but I was wrong.  I came across the bride and a few of her attendants in the lobby waiting to process to her ceremony which meant walking through the pool area, through that boardwalk funnel which at that time of day was crowded with people coming and going and finally past the vendor and kid tents to this tiny wedding arch set up on the beach.  This was not going to be a romantic, quiet, or even remotely private  beach wedding ceremony. 

After congratulating her, I asked her, “I guess you didn’t anticipate a huge kite festival happening during your wedding ceremony, did you?”  She replied, “No, I didn’t but everyone with the kite festival has been so nice.  Besides, the important thing is that I am getting married.”

 WOW!  I wondered right then and there if she was an EHellion but moments before her processional was not the time to ask her.  I wished her further joy and went before her to alert everyone on the boardwalk to have a heads up because a young bride was about to process to her wedding on this very path. 

The photos of the wedding appear on the 2007 Cape Fear Kite Festival’s web site at http://www.capefearkitefestival.com/gallery.asp#   Gallery 1.    I wish I could link to some of the photos but the way the site is set up, I cannot access individuals photos. 

So, if that bride was an EHellion and reads this, yes, that was me in the denim dress and yellow sun hat talking to you just before your wedding.   Kudos to you for having the best possible attitude about your wedding. 

I’ve been meaning to write on the issue of cyberbullying ever since the blogosphere rebelled against the blatant cyberbullying being inflicted upon bloggers and declared a “no cyberbully” day” last year.  However, it’s obvious from the dearth of posts to this blog that I am not the kind of blogger married to my keyboard day in and day out.   Real life has this way of intruding upon my time to blog and I happily choose to yield to the lovely realities beyond the internet.    I’m a “fire in the belly” kind of writer who needs a cause to get “fired up” about enough to get my writing engines started.    A recent situation has caught my attention and inspired me to once again look into addresssing the issue of cyberbullying. 

The first indication of a problem was that the number of guests visiting the Etiquette Hell forum jumped dramatically followed by a 2000% increase in membership requests over a three day period.  A quick google search yielded a newspaper column written in the Lansing State Journal that contained a link to a specific Etiquette Hell forum thread about one member and her husband’s visit to Monticello and their encounter with a tour group consisting of ill-mannered middle schooled aged children they had been told by both chaperones and tourguides were from Lansing, MI. 

Columnist John Schneider titled his column,  “Lansing students falsely accused of bad behavior on Web site”.      Mr. Schneider starts his column with,

 Allow me to suggest a project for a Lansing middle school class - or, better yet, several of them.

Log onto the Web site Etiquette Hell Forum (http://www.etiquettehell.com/smf/index.php?topic=26264.0) and pummel it with polite, but pointed, posts explaining why it’s in exceedingly poor taste to spread information that is both false and defamatory.

Also, demand an apology.

Wow, did I read that right?  He’s advocating middle school aged children log onto my forum and “pummel it” with demands for apologies.   Mr. Schneider’s “proof” that Lansing MI students couldn’t have possibly been the culprits is a phone call he made to Stephen Serkaian, public relations spokesperson for the Lansing MI public School district who apparently stated that no Lansing middle schools have taken any out of state trips this year. 

First, Mr. Stephen Serkaian has no jurisdiction nor knowledge regarding the activities of non-public schools such as private schools, charter schools,  homeschool groups or private clubs and groups.  Mr. Schneider made a faulty leap of conclusion that if Mr. Stephen Serkaian says no public school kids were involved,  it could not possibly be ANY Lansing students. 

Mr. Schneider offers no other evidence that Lansing students were incapable of behaving this way.   One would think from Mr. Schneider’s column that it is inconceivable that 12-14 years olds from Lansing would be ill-behaved and that begs the question, do all Lansing students have sterling reputations deserving of Mr. Schneider’s defense?  Mr. Schneider’s own column yields an interesting story from October 19, 2005  regarding some Lansing middle school and high school aged hockey players taught to aggressively bully and fight their opponents and the silence (i.e. condoning of it) by players and parents more interested in protecting potential careers in hockey than any concern for character development.  More recently in 2007,  four Lansing Middle School students physically assaulted their teachers yet were not expelled as state law required according to the teachers filing suit against the school district.   Interestingly, I delved into the Lansing State Journal’s archives using all kinds of combinations of search keywords yet found not one article or column by Mr. Schneider on the assault incident.  Yet he devotes three days’ worth of columns obsessing about one woman’s forum posts as if dissing Lansing middle schoolers was far more newsworthy than four students slapping and throwing chairs at their teachers. 

It is therefore conceivable that if the Lansing School District contains some students who assault their teachers and some students who are instructed by their hockey coaches and condoned by their parents to beat and bloody their teammates in preparation for pummeling their opposition in violation of league and USA Hockey rules, then it is certainly within the realm of possibility that some Lansing MI school kids could be ill-mannered brats while on a school field trip.  

Mr. Schneider failed in his pursuit of information to really ferret out exactly what school group was touring Thomas Jefferson’s home that weekend.  The only solid information given was the forum member’s eyewitness account of what four boys were wearing (sport jackets with the name of a school on them) and the testimony she received from the bus driver, a chaperone and Monticello tour guides that the group was from Lansing, Michigan.  So, I called Monticello’s tour group coordinator who rifled through her records and proceeded to tell me the group consisted of four tour buses from a middle school located in Troy, MI.  Yes, it was a case of mistaken identity but not done maliciously.

As the evidence kept building over the following days, Mr. Schenider reran the entire column a second time, on February 21st, only this time he changed the column title to,  “Web site is mistaken about misbehaving Lansing kids.”   His changing the title was not surprising since journalists are supposed to have a higher standard of ethical reporting and declarative but erroneous statements of intentional and malicious false reporting is, in itself, defamatory.  And let’s get this straight, Mr. Schneider, the entire Etiquette Hell web site nor the 4,000+ forum members were not “mistaken” about anything.  One person was misinformed based on the information she was given.  

In a delicious twist of irony, Mr. Schneider’s own mistaken reporting of facts as they were given to him were included in the same days’ columns.  At the very bottom of the February 21st column, he writes about a local Lansing issue regarding an out-of-business  restaurant owner not honoring gift cards,

Well, this week the chef e-mailed me a note naming only the English Inn in Eaton Rapids as a willing recipient of Villegas gift cards.

The problem is, Mr. Schneider failed to verify chef Eric Villegas’ claim that the English Inn would honor his defunct restaurant’s gift cards with English Inn owner Bill Nelson.  Oops!  Mr. Schneider believed what he was told, reported it in his column and when all hell broke lose, he proceeded to explain in minute detail how he came to believe Eric Villagas.   Mr. Schneider devotes an entire February 26th column titled, “English Inn owner says he didn’t OK Villegas’ gift card plan”and describes English Inn owner Bill Nelson as “distraught” .  Schneider further elaborates on Nelson’s dilemma,

So, imagine Nelson’s position. A Villegas gift cardholder shows up at his restaurant expecting a free meal and one of Nelson’s employees has to explain that, contrary to what Villegas implied in the newspaper, The English Inn was not prepared to accept the gift cards unconditionally.

How is the customer likely to feel toward The English Inn?

Exactly. Suddenly, Nelson could find himself in a lose-lose situation.

Wait!  Was was that?  Eric Villegas “implied in the newspaper”?  It isn’t Eric Villegas’s column, it’s Mr. Schneider’s.  Mr. Villegas merely implied in email, Schneider took it another step and reported it in the newspaper.   Great blameshifting!   Schneider failed to doublecheck with Bill Nelson because he had no reason, at that time, to disbelieve Eric Villegas’ word.  Just like DCGirl had no reason to disbelieve chaperones and tour guides who misinformed her that the misbehaving little darlings were from Lansing, MI. 

Fresh from his own mistaken reporting debacle that has the potential to materially harm Bill Nelson’s restaurant reputation and business, Mr. Schneider devotes yet another day’s column defending the honor of poor yet wrongly maligned Lansing students by targeting the EtiquetteHell.com storyteller specifically (”DCGirl’s words on wrongly ID’d students rings of DCspeak”).   

You would think a regular participant in a Web site forum on etiquette would know how to apologize.

But so far I’m not hearing any conciliatory words from “DCGirl,” the Web poster who recently decried the behavior of “four bus loads of middle-schoolers from Lansing, MI.”

She’s offered no shortage of excuses for wrongfully defaming Lansing students, but 21 pages into the so-called discussion “thread” that followed her original posting, I had not yet seen those magic words: “I’m sorry.”

Everyone I showed this column to, including my lawyer, said the same thing, “This is wrong on so many levels.”   Let’s start with the simple and progress to the serious.  

 Please, Mr. Schneider, it is really bad manners to repeatedly demand an apology, especially when you owe others apologies for your own identical errors yet seem to conveniently forget to do so.   Instead of an apology from Schneider to Bill Nelson such as, “Mr. Nelson, I am so sorry for not verifying Eric Villegas’ claims with you before I published the news that people can redeem their gift cards at your restaurant,” the readers get treated to journalistic blameshifting as if Mr. Villegas held a gun to Mr. Schneider’s head forcing him to publish the contents of his email unverified.   

I see that readers of Schneider’s  column have addressed his tendency to publish without the benefit of checking his “facts” and even taken it up with his editor only to be told:

I recall, though, being outraged once by Schneider, and the editor at the time said that Schneider was not a reporter and that his column should not be viewed as news, he was not being held to journalistic standards, and so my complaint was null and void.

However, that doesn’t jive with the Lansing State Journal’s  “Principles of Ethic Conduct for Newsrooms” which states,

We will hold factual information in opinion columns and editorials to the same standards of accuracy as news stories.                    

Other principles related to truthful reporting of the facts include,

• We will dedicate ourselves to reporting the news accurately, thoroughly and in context.
• We will be persistent in the pursuit of the whole story.

I’m certain English Inn owner Bill Nelson would have appreciated Mr. Schneider pursuing the whole story so that the news of the gift card redemption could have been reported accurately and thoroughly.

Second, Mr. Schneider is the first journalist of many in my 13 years of operating this site to not afford me the professional courtesy of inquiring with me first about conflicting, interesting or newsworthy statements and stories made by forum posters and story contributors.  

Third, don’t backpedal and claim to have called on “Lansing School defenders” to “pummel” my site with demands of apologies.  Mr. Schneider specifically called on “…a Lansing middle school class - or, better yet, several of them“. Fortunately, Mr. Schneider’s influence and powers of persuasion must be waning because only two people had the nerve to do his bidding while the vast majority behaved quite nicely and even became good members of the forum.   

Fourth, from a legal standpoint, entire classes of people cannot be defamed.  A plaintiff who is a member of the allegedly defamed group would have to prove that the words would be understood to refer to that plaintiff in particular.  Since there are no individuals identified in the “misbehaving tour group kids” thread, there is no defamation.  Mr. Schneider’s repeated whining that Lansing students as a whole have been defamed comes off as ignorant.   However, Mr. Schneider, by specifically targeting the author of the story and making her the subject of your columns, you may be liable for defamation, particularly when you accuse her of falsity and character defects.

 Fifth and finally, it’s unlikely he’ll get the grovelling, bootlicking apology he so desperately seems to need from DCGirl so what is next?  Exposing her real name? Following her all over the internet and writing repeated columns until Lansing’s honor is satisfied?   That last column certainly looks like an attempt to whip up a cyber witchhunt and that makes Mr. Schneider a bully in my eyes.   As a published columnist in a major newspaper, he has a journalistic duty, both ethically and legally, to maintain higher standards of reporting than say, the average anonymous and non-public person posting to a relatively small forum.  Imo, he abused his journalism privileges to bully a quiet, valued member of my site’s forum trying to first silence her about what she saw, heard and reported and then attempting to discredit her completely.  And that qualifies Mr. Schneider for his own, special corner of Etiquette Hell.

Ehellions know I have no kind thoughts for theme weddings that look more like theatrical productions than the serious sealing of vows a wedding ceremony is supposed to represent.   The overuse of theatrical type make-up and theatrical props to pull off this Goth wedding ceremony puts it way over the edge as one of the worst examples of “wedding theme gone bad” I’ve ever seen.   JH

Bride and gloom: Meet the happy couple behind this goth wedding
By DEBRA KILLALEA - 8th March 2008, Daily Mail

The bride was smiling and the groom looked a picture of happiness.But while this black wedding was a joyous occasion the two newylweds involved have certainly taken the phrase for better or worse to a whole new level.

Childhood sweethearts Julie Williams, 45, and Dylon Holroyd, 49, decided to tie the knot goth style, although judging by the amount of people dressed in black one could be forgiven for thinking they were attending a funeral and not a happy celebration.

Julie Williams and Dylon Holroyd tied the knot goth style

Julie arrives for the ceremony in a black lined coffin

Arcade worker Julie, who arrived to the nupitals in a coffin and hearse, said their wedding seemed “like the most natural thing to do.”

Julie, nicknamed Morticia by friends, walked her husband down the aisle with none other than a dog lead and said they decided to tie the knot after first meeting 27 years ago.

“We went our separate ways when we were young, married other people and had children,” she told the Mirror.

“But then we bumped into each other last year and realised we were meant to be together.

“So the first thing I did was put a dog collar around his neck and say ‘It’s taken me this long to get you, I’m not letting you escape now’.”

More than 100 guests attended the register office wedding in Wakefiled, Yorkshire, and Julie’s wedding coffin now takes pride of place as her lounge room coffee table.

Julie literally led her husband down the aisle

The happy couple say a goth wedding was ‘the natural thing to do’

From National Review, September 24, 2007:

Prisoners in our jails are not allowed to wear belts for fear they will use them as weapons, or as instruments of suicide. In a deplorable case of “owning the insult,” young black toughs have taken to wearing low-slung pants in honor of their jailed - unjustly, of course!- brethren. As fashions will, this fashion has been taken to extremes, so that is now common to see pants worn with the waistband below glute level, exposing several inches of (usually) colorful underwear. Now a backlash is developing, with town ordinances being passed to prohibit this unsightly fashion. Louisiana has led the way. In Delcambre, that exposed underwear will get you a $500 fine and up to six months in the slammer.

Oh my, how styles have changed. When I was in high school, only the most uncouth would have dreamed of wearing droopy pants. Particularly ones that make the wearer appear to carrying a loaded, ten pound diaper in their pants. Of course, no one would have been caught dead wearing Bermuda shorts, Crocs or Vera Bradley purses either.

But do droopy pants really represent an etiquette dilemma? When the pants hang down far enough to see a butt crack, yes, it does. I have no desire to know what color thong someone chooses to wear that day or frankly, how hairy their backsides are. The former tempts me to reach out and execute a flawless wedgie whereas the latter conjures up mental images of how best to apply Nair to that region. I don’t need either mental distraction by those willing to ramble through their day exposing areas of the body commonsense says should be hidden.

Further, super low slung pants could be a hazard. My daughter reports that in her college Physical Education class on bowling, the young men with low slung pants are unable to execute a proper bowling stance to deliver the ball down the alley. It seems that when you pull the waistband of the pants down to thigh level, you have effectively lassoed your legs into a 28-inch waist (or thereabouts) circumference.  And this fashion statement is certainly not limited to a particular race any longer. 

Obviously an inability to properly bowl does not represent a lifesaving hazard. But the ability to run from a building, to exit a plane, to climb down a ladder, etc. could be effected by the limitations of low slung pants that retard the ability to fully function in a possible emergency situation.  It could be argued that in an emergency, a quick hike up of the pants would solve that problem.  I’m not sure I want to be behind the guy hopping along pulling his pants up as we try to exit a burning building. 

A reoccurring theme on the www.Etiquettehell.comforum is the concept that etiquette exists to “make others comfortable”. As with any code of law, it gets taken to an extreme interpretation of comfort equating to being a doormat upon which we allow the boors of the world to get their way while wiping their feet all over our politeness.  But does etiquette really expect its practioners to extend “comfort” to everyone in every situation? To answer that question, let’s start by reading what Miss Manner has to say on the subject:

At a great London banquet, dear Queen Victoria lifted her finger bowl and drank the water. She had to. Her guest of honor, the Shah of Persia, had done it first. At a Washington embassy dinner party, the king of Morocco plunged his fingers into his teacup and wiped them on his napkin. He had to. His guest of honor, President Kennedy, had done it first. Then there was the time that Mrs. Grover Cleveland attempted to engage a tongue-tied guest in conversation by seizing on the nearest thing at hand, an antique cup of thinnest china. “We’re very pleased to have these; they’re quite rare and we’re using them for the first time today,” she is supposed to have said. “Really?” asked the distraught guest, picking up his cup and nervously crushing it in his hand. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” said the hostess. “They’re terribly fragile. See?” She smashed hers. Mr. Grover Cleveland, on another social occasion, carefully added sugar and cream to his coffee, stirred it and poured some into his saucer. Observing this, all his guests felt obliged to do the same. There they all were, pouring their coffee into their saucers, when the President leaned down and put his saucerful on the floor for his dog.

Miss Manners relates these alarming incidents to illustrate a great danger. It is not the peril of serving watery tea, engaging in diplomacy with foreigners, permitting dogs in dining rooms or other such grand-scale hijinks. It is the terrible burden one assumes when attempting the practice of Making Others Feel Comfortable. Miss Manners is sensitive to this because she often hears the great and subtle art of etiquette described as being “just a matter of making other people feel comfortable.” As if etiquette weren’t magnificently capable of being used to make others feel uncomfortable. All right. Miss Manners will give you an example, although you are spoiling her Queen Victoria mood: If you are rude to your ex-husband’s new wife at your daughter’s wedding, you will make her feel smug. Comfortable. If you are charming and polite, you will make her feel uncomfortable. Which do you want to do?

Oh,  there is no question what I’d want to do.  I would want to make ex-husband’s new wife as uncomfortable as possible.  One of the sublime pleasures of etiquette is the ability it gives a person to maintain decorum while simultaneously inflicting excruciating discomfort on deserving boors.  Miss Manners talks about her “meager arsenal”…

Miss Manners’ meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose. They generally work. When they fail, she has the ability to dismiss inferior behavior from her mind as coming from inferior people. You will perhaps point out that she will never know the joy of delivering a well-deserved sock in the chops. True—but she will never inspire one, either.

She’s being modest…her arsenal of verbal retorts is a little more extensive as her many syndicated columns attest.    As an example,  “So kind of you to take an interest” , a Miss Manners recommended phrase in response to rude questions from strangers. Say it ”coldly” then turn away, presenting your back as a sort of non-verbal barrier and rebuff.  That is certain to elicit at least mildly uncomfortable bafflement from people who have enough conscience to realize they might have done something wrong but aren’t really sure what it was. 

I’m not sure I comprehend Miss Manners’ last comment about not ever inspiring a well deserved chop in the jaw.  Does that mean her own chop or someone else’s?  I’m of the belief that women can be the recipients of vulgarity by boorish men solely due to having mammary glands and an X chromosome.  Through no fault of their own, i.e. not deliberately “inspiring” a man to react vulgarly, they are on the receiving end of vile innuendos, proposals, inappropriate touching and other forms of sexual harrassment.  It’s situations like that require more in the arsenal than a withering look.

I’ve used the example of the pervy wedding DJ who “inspires” the crowd and garter catcher to hitch that garter as far up the bouquet catcher’s leg as possible.  They are playing that skanky wedding reception game whereby every inch the garter gets placed above the knee of the bouquet catcher is another ten years of marital bliss (can someone explain to me how gropping up a woman’s leg is a predictor of someone else’s marital longevity?) and he has a willing accomplice in the garter catcher who is all too eager to  plumb the depths of feminine privacy for the good of his friends’ marriage.  If he ignores the not-so-subtle cues of knees locked together and hands holding a dress firmly in place barring any further advance past the knee cap, a swift kick to his man bits is in order followed immediately by rising from your seat in faux concern for his health while apologizing profusely about your “ticklish knee” having a mind of its own.

I’ve personally elbowed a man in the lower abdomen who made the mistake of coming up behind me with his pelvis too intimately acquainted with my buttocks.   My elbow made contact and I immediately turned around in faux shock as if having been startled into reacting reflexively.  “Oh!  I am sorry! I had no idea that was you behind me!  I’m so ticklish that just kinda happens sometimes.  Can I help you?”   I was quite comfortable watching him double over in discomfort.   He never did that to me again.

Obviously this short blog entry is not going to address every single situation and how to react to it.  Miss Manners has a point that reactive rudeness to someone else’s rudeness by escalating it can yield unsavory results.   Etiquette empowers people to restrain themselves by building upon the idea that it debases a person to lower oneself to the same level as a rude boor.   Ignoring rudeness may look like a wimpy cop-out but when you really understand etiquette, there is power in having so much self-esteem that you simply cannot abide the thought of even associating with ”inferior people”, as Miss Manners calls them.   

But sometimes there comes a point when you believe icy looks, cool retorts, and scathing glares aren’t working and there is no one higher up the chain of command to appeal to.  I’ve been fortunate over the years in those rare situations to be able to afford paying my lawyer to figuratively slap the legal bejeebers out of annoying people who crossed a serious legal line.   In those instances, I’ve quietly relished the discomfort of sputtering, nearly frantic backpedaling when my lawyer delivers the legal version of the “chop to the jaw” to those most deserving of it.   Oh, yes, making others uncomfortable by use of etiquette approved means can be quite satisfying. 

From National Review, September 24, 2007:

In unusually cheering news from the strange little world of ethnic apologizing, the Tolai tribesmen of Papua New Guinea have expressed formal regret for having killed, cooked and eaten four missionaries back in 1878. The missionaries were Fijian Methodists under the direction of the indefatigable Rev. George Brown of the Wesleyan Missionary Society.  Led by the governor-general of Papua New Guinea (himself a Tolai), thousands of villagers gathered to offer their apologies to Britain’s Fijian High Commissioner (i.e. ambassador), and to listen to eulogies of Reverend Brown. 

Peter Hartlaub wrote a great article for the San Franscico Chronicle titled, “Apologists Leave Much To Be Desired“, in which he and Miss Manners despair of the plethora of feeble celebrity apologies this past year. 

“The problem is that there have been so many public apologies, that they’ve worn out the form,” Martin said. “I had noticed a while ago that people were doing that non-apology ‘I’m sorry if you took it wrong’ sort of thing. But now they’ve worn out ‘I take full responsibility,’ too, because it no longer means that.”

Martin further explained that the apology has three ingredients: “remorse and shame, plus the vow to make things up and reform.”  She explained that apologizers have become experts at completing the first two ingredients, but have no follow-through.

I’ve never understood how anyone thinks they can get away with a non-apology apology.  Even if you’ve never heard it called a “non-apology apology”, hearing one leaves a sour taste in your mouth even if you can’t quite put a specific finger on why.   Peter Hartlaub sums it up well, “And almost every one has left me angrier at the offending party than before he or she said ‘I’m sorry’.”   

Expressing remorse and vowing to change but not actually following through with the committment to change falls into a category I call “Brave New World Speeches”.  The apologist makes passionate declarations that a Brave New World of personal change will happen but nothing comes of it.  With each fresh transgression comes the same old Brave New World speech and then nothing.    Apologies without reform are vaccuous.