The national discourse was already in free fall, what with the airwaves dominated by a Jerry Springer sensibility and political debate reduced to the loudest and the lowest.
But then came the Starr report.
Somehow, a government report managed to offend a country that seemed beyond offending.
"This is telling us who we are as a society as a whole," said Pier Massimo Forni, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University. "This has put a mirror in front of us. We look in the mirror, we see our images in the mirror. Do we like what we see?"
Forni, a professor of Italian literature, created the Hopkins Civility Project to examine, and perhaps remedy, what he considers a decline in public life in recent years. Like others who are part of the burgeoning civility movement, he sees connections between disparate phenomena: the "road ragers" who would as soon offer an obscene gesture as give right-of-way, the crass humor and language that pervade entertainment, the kind of culture in which a president is just another celebrity to be mined for shallow talk and idle gossip.
"Americans started to perceive that there was a coarsening of America that was going on, and that that was having a substantial effect on the quality of their everyday lives," he said. "Certainly what happened in the White House has only heightened the concern. It gives the concern a particular urgency.
"We live in an age of total disclosure, or at least the expectation of total disclosure," Forni said. "What can be considered part of the public discourse has widened to the point that there seems to be no topic that is off-limits."
Indeed, whether it's on television or in the grand jury room, the old bounds of what was considered decent no longer seem respected.
'Boxers or briefs?'
Clinton is the president who has been asked on MTV, "Boxers or briefs?" -- and it has been downhill ever since. But surely no one predicted then that it would come to this: the disturbingly graphic details released first in the Starr report and, tomorrow, the videotape of Clinton's grand jury testimony and transcripts of Monica Lewinsky's.
Even without those further revelations, many feel they've already seen and heard enough. The scandal has become one more thing from which to avert their eyes or to protect their children.
"I don't think I'll tune in to see the video. It was bad enough reading the report," said Kelly Hoyle, a Baltimore savings and loan manager who, like many office workers, spent Sept. 11 crowded around a computer as the Starr report unfolded on the Internet. "When we got to certain parts, there would be silence, or embarrassed laughs."
Perhaps it was inevitable that the White House would be pulled along with the rest of the country as it spiraled away from its moorings, a society no longer able to reach a consensus on what is appropriate where.
"There once was a reverence toward 1600 Pennsylvania," said a rueful Letitia Baldridge, who was Jacqueline Kennedy's social secretary in the White House. "Now, there she was hiking up her jacket to show her thong underwear -- and him going for it. Ugh!"
Too much information, as the current toss-off line goes.
"People are outraged," Georgetown University linguist Deborah Tannen said, "but what they're outraged at is that this private behavior has become the fodder for this public display."
There seem to be no boundaries anymore between private and public, between informal and formal. Language expected in a locker room or outbursts appropriate to a day-care center are occurring in the most formal places.
"Part of what I do every day is what a first-grade teacher does -- parenting infants," sighed Baltimore Circuit Judge Albert J. Matricciani Jr. "It's astounding to me the type of behavior people think is appropriate in court."
Matricciani and other judges have seen the order in their courts steadily diminish over the years: There was the woman on the witness stand who began breast-feeding her baby as she testified. The lawyer who cleared his throat during a proceeding by ducking his head out the courtroom and spitting on the floor.
As president of the Baltimore Bar Association, Matricciani oversaw the drafting of guidelines on civility, something dozens of other bars across the country have seen fit to enact.
Similarly, Baltimore City Council President Lawrence A. Bell III found himself playing schoolmarm to his raucous fellow lawmakers last year. After a series of fractious meetings and near fisticuffs, he wrote a code of conduct that would work equally well in a kindergarten classroom: Stay in your seats. Remain quiet when the president is speaking. No name-calling. Give others a chance to speak.
Television, however, has become the medium in which every rude act is topped by an even cruder one. The proud underachiever Bart Simpson begets the head-banging Beavis and Butt-head, who in turn beget the nihilistic citizens of South Park.
Forced to be rude
In a world of so much information, so many choices of channels and media, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to be more in-your-face than the last guy.
"You have to be ruder, more shocking and less civil," said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor and founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Television. "Competition has become so fierce because of all the cable channels now, that TV has to scream louder than it used to. The fragmentation of the audience has probably accelerated this type of uncivil behavior on television because that's what gets people to stop as they're channel surfing."
It wasn't really so long ago -- say, the days of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" -- when the strongest epithet you heard was something along the lines of "gosh darn it." The sense of decorum was so great that Dick and Laura, a married couple with children, were depicted as sleeping in separate beds.
Today, bed-hopping by the single and married alike fill the plot lines of shows such as "Melrose Place." Rude language is common, even from child characters.
What happened in between was nothing less than a tidal change, in both society and the television industry. Today, television depicts life more realistically, warts and all.
In the past, each network had a "standards and practices" department that would vet all scripts, and there was an unofficial consensus on what should and shouldn't be allowed on the air, said TV historian Douglas Gormley of the University of Maryland. The Federal Communications Commission also monitored the content and language of shows, given that the license to broadcast was considered a privilege limited to three stations per market, he said.
But by the mid-'80s, the networks began losing ground to the burgeoning cable TV industry and the proliferation of videocassette recorders. Viewers were able to see racier programming on the same TV sets that carried the programming of networks bound by the old restrictions. The networks began complaining that the license to broadcast was no longer such an exclusive privilege and, given the spirit of deregulation that swept through the '80s, were able to loosen up, Gormley said.
Still, concern remained about what children were seeing when they turned on the tube. Ironically, one of President Clinton's campaign issues in 1996 was a television ratings system that would identify shows containing sex, violence or adult language. It was enacted last year.
"The worst rating would be for any program covering the Clinton scandal," Gormley said, "but news reports are not required to carry a rating."
The proliferation of TV channels, coupled with what's available on the Internet, has helped drive the White House scandal at breakneck speed. The instantaneous delivery of the reports, followed immediately by punditry, sets this presidential scandal apart from all others.
'The good old days'
In fact, many believe it is this real-time quality that gives the erroneous impression that public life is infinitely worse today than it ever was. People in the past didn't misbehave any less, this argument goes; they just weren't watched by so many.
"A lot of people say 'I wish for the good old days,' " said the Rev. Joel Freeman, a nondenominational minister who retired this summer after 19 years as chaplain of the Bullets-turned-Wizards NBA team. "I think there's always been the, quote unquote, trash talking [in sports]. Perhaps at a time like this, the thin veneer of professionalism and culture gets ripped away and you see the true nature that's been there all the time."
As the media become ever more unfettered, airing trials such as O.J. Simpson's as they happen and presenting unedited documents such as the Starr report, people are getting a better picture of previously mysterious proceedings, said Thompson, the Syracuse professor. "We hear how things really happen," he said. "This is the ideal in a democracy. The impact of this last couple of weeks, we're going to be living with it for centuries."
Pub Date: 9/20/98