That social consensus has long since eroded. The leadership of New York Women in Communications, the group sponsoring the luncheon, professed to be delighted with O’Donnell’s performance. The managing director of the group actually sent an email to O’Donnell’s handlers, calling her “fabulous.” The editor-in-chief of Jane magazine told the New York Post’s Page Six that it was “fun to watch other people be offended.”
How times have changed. Traditionally, people who stooped to crass behavior were understood to be implicitly conceding the limits of their own intellect, refinement and self-restraint. Even insults – at least those leveled in public – were expected to contain at least a modicum of gentility. Compare O’Donnell’s “Eat me!” with Winston Churchill’s assessment of Clement Attlee as “a modest man, with much to be modest about” and the contrast is clear.
What’s more, resorting to public vulgarity at once marked the one doing so as not a lady or a gentleman. No doubt the terms “lady” and “gentlemen” have been devalued over time, now evoking images of simpering socialites pretentiously crooking their pinkie fingers as they sip tea. But the essence of being a well-bred, civilized person – male or female – was to behave in a way that never caused needless discomfort to other people. Good manners were understood to be primarily an expression of kindness and concern for others’ feelings. This was particularly true for women, who were generally seen as civilization’s gatekeepers.
Certainly, it’s never easy to live up to high standards – and in recent decades, too many of the cultural elites have abandoned any pretense of trying to do so. A cultural emphasis on “free-spiritedness” and self-expression over self-discipline and self-restraint has gradually resulted in the inauguration of a “free to be you and me” ethic that means Rosie O’Donnell is deemed to have no obligation to watch her tongue, even if her behavior embarrasses everyone else in the room. It means that disgust with one person’s self-indulgence and selfishness in ruining an otherwise enjoyable event for a roomful of people is considered nothing more than prudery. And it means that standards of public behavior are slowly devolving into a simple, subjective matter of personal preference.
Many of the public moralists and talking heads have been telling all of us that we need to find gentler, more civilized ways of communicating with one another when it comes to politics. Well, perhaps setting some standards when it comes to public discourse generally would be a worthy first step. Rather than turning away with a red face and a cringe, what if influential Americans – like the women at the media awards luncheon – actually cared enough to take a stand? If each of the attendees who were embarrassed by O’Donnell’s tirade took a real, concrete step to elevate the tone and content of America’s cultural discourse, eventually Rosie’s brand of heedless vulgarity might become as unfashionable as openly championing “ladylike” behavior is today.