Letters to the Editor
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Imaginative Repositioning
"In our egalitarian, largely classless and ritualless society, we only need to learn the most general rules of social conduct. Peasants do not have to tug their forelocks when the lord rides past, because we don't have peasants and lords anymore."
Um, I'll echo a few others in saying, "Wha?" Are you living in the same America we are, where the richest .1% have taken/are taking most of the accumulated increase in wealth the last decade or so, while working people earn less and less? The one that's now primarily a "service" economy? Who's getting serviced, and who's doing the servicing? This is sort of a non sequitir as to the rest of the article, but let's not pretend our society is either "largely" or any other kind of classless.
"Haaretz is a superb newspaper, and there are always intelligent and thoughtful postings somewhere in the discussion threads after its stories. But the threads tend to be so nasty that I've mostly given up reading them. Even if you're just a bystander, you feel battered and spattered."
Unfortunate analogy to end that anecdote with, given the fact that Israel is engaged in an ongoing conflict that includes the "spattering" of, well, blood on many actual bystanders from both sides. But I suppose that they really all ought to just clean up their language - what could anyone in Israel or Palestine possibly have to be angry about?
The larger point to all of this is a case of who is allowed (by you, I suppose, in this case) to say what and be considered "serious." Limiting discourse to some notion of decency is, inevitably, a manner of control. The question here is, what's the goal of this control? And honestly, I can't tell - what, really, the point of this article; to point out that people say bad words, and that that's bad, and that it'd be "better" in some way if they didn't? Is that it?