Tuesday, September 15, 2009

People are suddenly rude! Also, get off my lawn.

Umm... OK. The L.A. Times trying to explain recent outbursts of rudeness (Joe Wilson, Kanye West, Serena Williams, etc.):
Some say it reflects a general collapse of manners, rooted in the anti-authoritarian strains of the late 1960s. Some offer a psychological explanation: that such outbursts reveal the person beneath the mask of a public persona. Some see an element of racial animus at work.
To which I say, Kanye has done this before, how many times did we see John McEnroe go crazy on tennis umpires/judges. And, as for politicians from South Carolina, the New Yorker reminds us:
In May, 1856, Charles Sumner, a Democratic abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, gave a speech in the Senate, denouncing the “crime against Kansas.” The Kansas territory had been created and opened to settlement in 1854, but the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the territory had been left up to the inhabitants of the state. “The South,” Donald writes “determined to create a new slave state in Kansas, had banded together ‘murderous robbers from Missouri,’ ‘hirelings, picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization,’ ” (in Sumner’s words). Sumner’s impassioned rhetoric against this pro-slavery faction enraged Preston Brooks, a Democratic representative from South Carolina. On May 22nd, he stormed into the Senate and beat Sumner with a gold-handled cane, striking half a dozen blows to Sumner’s head, blinding him with blood.

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