All of a sudden the “civility” bus got full. As I say almost every day, the mass man is moved by words and not principles or any moral code external to himself. To the mass man, principles, like clubs or bats, are temporary weapons picked up for the moment to accomplish the immediate goal and then dropped and forgotten altogether. If you listened to barkers, or to a dozen-dozen street thugs with masks and bats, incivility was all the rage, until it wasn’t. Someone in the robotic barking chorus changed the script and now civility is the cudgel. You better accept it, too, or you’ll get the principles beaten out of you. Incivility is just as brutal as civility when it is used to bash you over the head and get you to move. It’s hard to tell what the latest rage is anymore, until you realize it is rage itself. Mass man rage is the new moral arbiter. Or wind sock. Or some other appropriate metaphor. Rage gets to define civility in our bizarre world. I’M OUTRAGED AT THE INCIVILITY OF THE OTHER SIDE! We must come together in unity against everything with which I disagree! I was for incivility, and now I’m against it! How in the world did we even get here? Both civility and incivility require a definition and a fixed point or a standard outside of the mass man. Civility/Incivility have in common their root in civilization, something the mass man is disassembling as fast as his little hands can manage. Which means they have to have a reference point outside of political expediency. Think of millions of mindless minions with pickaxes and sledgehammers working at the foundation and all chanting “Incivility!” or “Civility!” depending on whatever the talking points are for the day. And, as the edifice of civilization crumbles, the mass man wonders aloud why he can’t be in charge of the smoking slag heap he’s made. You won’t be in charge, mass man. No you won’t. A strongman will be. He is all you get for your work.
