Somewhere, there must be books that describe how one should properly and appropriately set table, with the correct and approved position of plates, glasses, knives, forks, and spoons.
I have never read any of those books, nor felt that I should. When I go to a restaurant, I assume that the owner has figured all that out, and I’m not going to spend time wondering, in any event. At home, at table, I am interested only with the conversation, and not the place setting. The arrangement of glasses and plates adds nothing to me, or to anyone else with me.
A man is more than things, and more than their fussy arrangement.
But you know, and I know, that these things matter to some people. There’s a sense of meaning, and worse, a sense of hierarchy, for some in the knowledge of these rules.
One of the great advantages of American and Wisconsin life – now disappearing – is how causal we are. We are not a fussy people. One often assumes that residents of small towns follow this simpler life.
In many ways we do; in others we have become overly concerned about what’s polite, appropriate, and proper. We are reputed as simple and straightforward, but we have become mannered, complicated, obscure, and fussy.
There’s a good deal that’s self-serving in this change, a way to impose a barrier or objection to someone at a meeting, or to disqualify objections to policy.
There’s no natural reason in any of this; it’s an artificial objection from those looking for a easy, if empty, way out.
Consider the urban chicken movement, one that your city, if far from rural America, may have adopted. Urban residents are permitted to own a chicken or two, for fresh eggs, and perhaps as part of an effort at greener living.
I am not sure how convenient it would be, or how green. No matter: in many rural towns, it would be both illegal and objectionable.
Whitewater has an ordinance against livestock on land of less than two acres, and although the ordinance does not mention chickens, it is written broadly, to implicate species not expressly mentioned.
(This presumably allows the city to rule against someone who might splice together a pig and a cow, calling it a pow, and putting it in his backyard. Many of our ordinances are written broadly, in a way that permits the city to rule restrictively and expansively. Some, although not this one particularly, are likely unenforceable at law as overbroad, vague, or contradictory to state law.)
But let’s be clear: urban chickens would be unwelcome here for social reasons – because they remind some of rural origins they would otherwise like to forget, now imagining themselves more sophisticated than mere farm life.
That brings me to the AMC television program Mad Men, and one of its characters. One of the leading characters in the third season is an English executive who leaves London to oversee an ad agency in 1963 Manhattan.
He finds New York a refreshing and liberating change after the stuffy and restrictive manners of early 60s London. He tells his wife, happily, that even after months working in Manhattan, no one has bothered to ask where he went to school. The English executive learns that the go-getter Americans just don’t care as much as his native countrymen would.
The American way, I am sure, was and is better; it just shouldn’t matter so much.
We have adopted empty manners, and servilely expected deference to them, in contradiction to the more direct and casual small town way of life.