"The Tale of Steven Slater - A Parable for Our Times?"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“The Tale of Steven Slater – A Parable for Our Times?”

August 16, 2010

It is not so much the antics of Steven Slater that speak about America today; it is the publicity provided him by the press and the empathy and even the pride people generally have taken with his bizarre behavior. Writing in Sunday’s New York Times, Benedict Carey classified him with those who have become “instantly sympathetic outlaws.” “If his story holds up,” Mr. Carey writes, “Mr. Slater was trying to strike a blow for civility.” Really? Cursing a passenger over the public intercom is “striking a blow for civility?” A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, out on Friday, suggested Mr. Slater’s act reflected broad public anger. Todd Gillian, a professor of journalism at Columbia, was quoted in Sunday’s New York Times about Slater: “He’s a seemingly ordinary person who acted out this collective longing…” “Ordinary person…collective longing?” Have we, as a society, been reduced to emulating those who rudely toss out obscenities, violate laws and walk away (or slide away) from responsibility? Mr. Slater is a nut and, more important, he is dangerous. Normal people do not fly off the handle as this guy did. As for being dangerous, keep in mind, as an attendant he had access to the flight deck.

As Peggy Noonan noted in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, “We are a service economy.” That means people must interact with one another. The irony is that as we have become more service oriented, we have become less polite, less civil. Too often, we applaud “emotional expressiveness”, as Rich Lowry put it in Saturday’s New York Post.

This is not to excuse the behavior of the passengers. Disregard and disrespect have become commonplace among too many who are being served. Manners do oil the machinery of verbal intercourse; long neglected, they have a place in our society.

Thomas Sowell, columnist and fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, has a new book out, Dismantling America. Mr. Sowell was born in North Carolina, raised in Harlem; he was a high school dropout who joined the Marine Corps and ultimately graduated from Harvard, Magna Cum Laude. The book is a stern denunciation of our culture. We spend more time whining about the declining value of our pension plans than we do worrying about Iran getting nuclear weapons; we are more absorbed with “gays in the military” than we are about the fate of Afghan tribal leaders who have been compromised by documents stolen from the Pentagon; we seem more concerned about CEO pay than terrorists in Yemen, dedicated to killing us. Political correctness trumps reality. Mr. Sowell is concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially while we are reducing our stockpiles. He sees us abandoning friends in Eastern Europe, in terms of cancelling a ballistic missile defense system; Mr. Sowell worries that Israel is no longer receiving the allegiance they deserve.

In terms of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, Mr. Sowell suggests that “just one bomb…might get us to surrender.” “Indecision and wishful thinking” are not the answer. It is a question of morality and the fear is we are losing our moral sense, as exemplified by the fascination with, instead of the condemnation of, Steven Slater.

In contrast, Country Driving, a reporter’s reflection on current day China by Peter Hessler tells a very different story. The Chinese are still in the early stages of economic growth. It is the tale of an awakening, after almost a century of hibernation. The strict reins of Communism imprisoned and impoverished over a billion people for most of the Twentieth Century. As reins loosen, the bounties of capitalism begin to appear. In the United States, the economy showed great growth for the two decades following World War II. Following ten years of Depression and five years of War, consumers who had been denied spent lavishly, powering the economy, so that an enormous federal deficit went to a surplus in less than a decade. Imagine how long consumer demand will continue to drive China’s economy following almost a century of denial?

It is the contrast between China and the United States, in terms of what society deems imperative that imperils our country. In one society, the obnoxious is elevated and trivialities become more important than serious threats; in the other, the people are focused on simply raising their living standards. Which one is Rome in 476AD?