Shocked?
I’ve heard people espouse all sorts of rules of conduct, of propriety. One will hear that people should not chew gum, talk about religion or politics at table, etc. It’s always a lecture about what’s appropriate, proper, civilized.
Often, it’s about what’s not appropriate, from a scold’s point-of-view — there’s often someone to out-Victorian the Victorians. Prissy, starched, lifeless, and as such, contemptible as a distortion of the natural and unaffected. Many times, the people who insist on these rules are a pretentious lot.
Worse, It’s not enough for some people to lived cramped lives; they cannot bear that you’ll not do the same. That’s the problem with Mrs. Kravitz, from Bewitched.
Sometimes, the busybody’s sense of proper and improper is laughable, and should be embarrassing to him or her.
Sometimes that sense reveals an odd preoccupation. Consider the notorious (and they are notorious) views of Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, on ice cream cones. Kass was more than a physician and bio ethicist; he had views on appropriate human behaviour, right down to the objectionable tendency of some to enjoy licking ice cream cones.
Here are Kass’s original remarks, from 1994, in which he complains about people licking ice cream cones:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone –a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.
I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America’s rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions — their reasons long before forgotten — that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners….But eating on the street — even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat — displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one’s food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.”
(Hat tip — www.classicalvalues.com)
If it’s disagreeable to Kass that people enjoy ice creams cones, because it reminds him of a cat’s tendency to lick things, I am not sure what Kass would think of a photograph of an actual feline, licking an ice cream cone. Less offensive, because it’s just an animal, or more so, because the cat-like behavior comes from the very animal, delivered as satire? I’d say less offensive, but then, perhaps he’d not appreciate the satire.
Ice cream cones, though? They’re much a part of America, aren’t they? They’re just not part of Leon Kass’s America, I’d guess.
Well, that’s Whitewater, isn’t it? The idea that some things are just wrong, improper, inappropriate. No one should do them, because to a few, they seem wrong, disgusting, revolting. Even if they’re commonplace elsewhere in America, they should be unacceptable, in Whitewater, Wisconsin, because some small-town grandee is sure that no one should be doing that.
Not in public!