Me, me, me

Is it old age, or is our culture really becoming more selfish? I’m writing this sitting on an Amrak train and already after ten minutes can count at least five potential cases of justifiable homicide: the loud-mouthed junior exec in his 20s making endless business calls on his cellphone; the 60-ish lady behind me with a head cold who snuffles loudly exactly once every 14 seconds as if she were wired to a metronome; the giggly college student across the aisle who thinks her life is like, totally hilarious; the iPod dufus who can't hear his own off-key humming but thinks the rest of us all should; and last but not least the ticket-taker 25 years my junior who has arrogated to himself the right to address me as ‘Timothy,’ a privilege not enjoyed by my late mother. I could understand it if we were on a football team bus from a remedial high school, but these are alleged adults--a category, by the way, that should be earned, like fatherhood, rather than awarded by biological default.

Like so many of the seamy and perverse aspects of American life, I trace this phenomenon to the crude self-congratulation unleashed by Saint Ronald and his minions as a way of life and thought in the 1980s. It’s ‘Morning in America,’ they proclaimed, and we should start feeling good about our country, our families, ourselves and our precious bodily fluids. Nuance became suspect; criticism of our way of life a sign of wimp, loser pessimism. We were to think only about America and Americans’ comfort and safety and never stop to consider the world from others’ point of view. This blithe jingoist Me-ism spilled over into our personal lives as well, and now no one even blinks when personal affairs like one’s business, one’s music or one’s annoying tics are splattered all over public environments.

This debasement of the public space has its exact political parallel in the triumphant neoliberal disdain for the public sector, i.e. local and national government, or any notion of collective assets or collective welfare. Even in the realm of security, which trumps everything, the preeminence of the public’s safety implies not respect for vulnerable individuals but a vast steamroller of policing designed to crush all threats, real or imagined. We’re taught either to expect nothing of the public sphere or to be terrified of it.

Our fragile polity is in urgent need of an examination and a renovation of its social manners because they manifest and reflect but also actively build our core collective values. I dream of a day in which people pay as much attention to them as to their personal electronic arsensals.