Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is an old-fashioned grrrll. She is keenly aware of THE IMPORTANCE OF MANNERS. She writes:

When I was a young teenager in rural Minnesota, the only magazine in our home was Reader’s Digest. It had several humor sections, including Humor in Uniform and Laughter Is The Best Medicine. It had a section meant to build your vocabulary. And very short and interesting little stories. I loved it and awaited it eagerly each month. One little anecdote stuck in my mind. I will have to recreate it imperfectly from memory, but you will get the gist.

A gentleman dressed in a business suit, tie, and fedora was in an elevator in a large office building in New York. Two women got on the elevator on the next floor. The man promptly took off his hat and held it in front of him. Soon the women started talking. One said, “If my @#$% boss gives me any more work, I think I may quit,” and the other replied, “Yeah, my boss is a jerk too who can go to @#$$.” The gentleman didn’t say a word. He just quietly put his hat back on.

So by kind of reverse engineering the joke, I learned that women who curse do not merit the privileges of being treated like a lady. My beloved late Mama was a South Dakota farm girl and toughie but she was a lady to her core. She never swore and it was not allowed in our house. Heck, as kids we weren’t even allowed to say “Shut up!” to each other! Sadly, after high school I departed somewhat from this program. I’m still working on it.

In the words of the late great Merle Haggard, “Mama Tried” her best to teach me “lady things,” but I was a failure at hair, nails, and makeup. I cannot walk in high heels to this day. There were no Goths yet, but had there been some, I might have briefly embraced the nihilism. However, the makeup would have just looked like way too much work.

Mama also armed me with some practical advice on how to behave on a date. “Stay in the car until the boy comes around to open your car door…but if he’s already in the restaurant ordering, best to get out and join him. Look at the prices before you order. Do not order the most expensive thing on the menu. You don’t need dessert — we have dessert at home.”

We did not learn the impeccable manners of the South, such as “Yessir” and “No, Ma’am.” But when Mama said “Bless her heart,” she meant it unironically. We did not learn how to slip in a shiv disguised as a compliment: “Honey child, I love that scarf! It makes your neck look less muscular!” And we definitely were taught respect for our elders, all elders.

But, in general, the South beats the North all hollow in manners. This came home to me in a shocking way in an anecdote I have told before. When I was in Macon, Georgia in the mid-80s to perform, I went for an early morning walk. From a small hill I could see down into the town and I saw that two “redneck” young men were about to meet up at the corner with a very elderly black man. Oh dear! Would there be racist violence? Could I intervene?

Well, as it happened, the young white men removed their caps, greeted Mr. Johnson politely and asked after his wife and family. That’s what happened. They all chatted briefly and went on their separate ways. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

My parents did not drink, but they had many social gatherings that looked like fun anyway. Mother told me that it was not polite at a social gathering to discuss sex, religion, or politics, lest you offend someone or hurt his feelings. People in our neighborhood were mostly moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats and there was not much difference between them. Virtually everyone was a Christian, Catholic, or some sort of Protestant.

Nobody liked extremists. One of my friends from school had a father who was in the John Birch Society. When Mr. S. announced that President Eisenhower was a card-carrying Communist, my father set him straight. My father, somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun generally, was a World War II-era vet whose brother was killed in the Pacific and slandering Eisenhower was not something he was going to tolerate.

Society rolled along in a mostly peaceable way. What later was mocked and vilified as “mass conformity” was really mostly just good manners. Many decades later, when Joe/Max and I started taking steps toward leaving the Left, we often found ourselves at social gatherings where we were the only people who believed that killing babies was evil, being soft on crime was going to lead to disaster, and George W. Bush was NOT Hitler.

Once at a Minnesota dinner party where the conversation was taking an ugly turn, our host TRIED to intervene by saying, “Uh…Joe and Susan are Republicans.”…very long awkward silence, followed by an attempt to clarify: ”but they’re NICE Republicans.”

Fast forward a couple decades again, to our current little neighborhood social circle. Six of us are Trump supporters and one dear, kind, smart, generous, helpful person cannot stand Trump. Okay. That is his right. We simply do not discuss politics at social gatherings. We didn’t even have to spell it out. Because the world is full of movies, music, comedy, grandchildren and travel and we do not HAVE to isolate and harangue a person over dinner.

But, oh my, how our mighty nation has fallen in regard to basic manners, as in so many other basics of living in a pluralistic society. I have mentioned many times how I worked with 80 men on nightshift and comedy green rooms where my “swearing governor” had its gears stripped. And STILL, I was shocked to hear the wretched “comedian” Chelsea Handler call Ivanka Trump the very bad “c” word. In public! It was low and disgusting, even from someone whose autobiography is called “My Horizontal Life.”

For my entire lifetime that word was absolutely “no-go” territory. We had achieved new lows. Yes, it’s probably “sexist” on some level that it FEELS even worse coming from a woman, but it does. It’s so childish — whenever a woman wants to demonstrate what a strong independent girl boss she is, she starts dropping “F” bombs and worse. Oooh…how tough!

Ah, there was also the bloody disembodied head of President Trump. There was a half-hearted apology by Kathy Griffin, then a retraction of the non-apology and finally, but of course, the assertion that – truth to tell – SHE was the victim!

We have the current bizarre spectacle of a nasty war of words between E.T.’s ugly older brother, James Carville, and Stephen A. Smith, a black sports personage who believes he is ready to fill the leadership vacuum in the Democrat Party by running for President in 2028. For all their devotion to DEI, for all their rants about OUR putative “racism,” here is a white Southern former mover and shaker of the two successful Clinton campaigns, WARNING a black man to stay in his lane because he doesn’t know [stuff] about politics. The mind boggles. For his part, Mr. Smith said “out of respect for Carville’s age” (ouch) he would not go the obscenity route that Carville did – but he “could” if it was game on.

The bottom line is that in order to attain even fragile “unity,” let alone a spirit of eagerness to return to the values that built America, people are going to have to be much nicer to one another. Either through cooperation or a religious revival or FAFO. I do not believe in the “pox on both your houses” theory of how this level of degradation came to be. It is at least 90/10 the fault of the leftists, including the wretched legacy media, social media, and unhinged celebrities.

There was a really cool bar in Fort Worth in which I saw the perfect sign for such a transformation: “Be nice or go home.”