On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> It's just the kind of contentless idiocy that Alan Wolfe celebrated
> in his stupid book on the American middle class. Meanwhile, while
> we're all being nice and positive, our military is slicing people in
> half by the hundreds. Lovely.
>
> Doug
This reminds me of the cloying politeness of many of the students I've had who grew up in the South. They call teachers "sir" and "ma'am" (definite culture shock for me; I prefer to be called Miles by my students). It fascinates me that this Southern culture of politeness is concomitant with a persistent Southern culture of lynchings and racial terror (frankly, I'd trade all the sirs and ma'ams ever spoken in the South for one less black person swinging from the poplar trees).
--A tentative hypothesis: politeness and respect are integral to the survival of brutal, coercive social systems.
Miles