As an “Official Old Man” (being four hundred and ten years old), I am occasionally allowed to express curmudgeonly observations in my writing.
Not because I believe things were better in an earlier America. Indeed, in some ways, they were. In many other ways, no. This is not about pining for an America that exists only in childhood memory.
This is a piece about simple, common decency. By definition, common decency knows no era, no epoch, no age. It is timeless, passed on by parents to children since the Enlightenment when the concept of “good manners” moved from the high born to the “middling classes.”
George Washington wrote out “The 110 Rules of Civility” when he was about 14 years old.
Many of them appear to us to be silly or superfluous. Rule #49 is quaint. “Use no Reproachfull Language against any one neither Curse nor Revile.”
But this Rule #43 is right for any age: “Do not express Joy before one sick or in pain for that contrary Passion will aggravate his Misery.”
Simple. Common. Decency.
The outpouring of mockery and hate-filled language following the confirmation of Joe Biden’s serious illness is something we’ve seen before when famous people die. I recall the death of Charlton Heston bringing out a savage response from gun control advocates and radical leftists who were apparently too stupid to remember Heston as one of the original Hollywood supporters of Martin Luther King.
However, I have never seen or heard such vitriol emanating from every corner of liberalism.
“Joe biden [sic] is an awful monster,” wrote Hasan Piker, a 33-year-old “anti-capitalist” who once said America “deserved 9/11.” “Prostate cancer doesnt [sic] change that.”
Meanwhile, Angelica Ross, an actress who has appeared on American Horror Story, said she would like to see the former president recover to full health—so that he could be tried at The Hague for war crimes. “Would rather he rot in prison for the remainder of his days,” she wrote online. “Karma comes for us all.”
The progressive darling Taylor Lorenz, formerly of The New York Times and The Washington Post, seized the opportunity to express her distaste for Biden’s healthcare policies, and wrote: “I hope he rots in hell and rests in piss.”
This is a very recent phenomenon. The death of Richard Nixon in 1994 brought out some left-wing hate, but Democratic politicians praised his statesmanship and the bureaucratic revolution he initiated. There certainly wasn’t the kind of hysteria generated against Joe Biden by radical leftists we’ve seen in recent days.
“My politics have evolved over time to a leftist/Marxist perspective, so I view all of these people as instruments of the American empire,” and had come to believe that Biden had “a lot of blood on his hands,” said a 28-year-old administrative assistant in Illinois who uses the “they-them” pronouns (I won’t).
“I feel contempt for Biden,” it said, adding: “He ought to seek out treatment in a cancer ward in Gaza.”
I should note that I found most of these people in r/FauxMoi, a celebrity gossip forum with nearly six million members on Reddit. Many of them had replied to a picture of former First Lady Jill Biden with her husband with comments like “damn imagine all the cancer patients in Gaza who got bombed while being treated.” (A BBC article from 2024 estimates there are 10,000 Gazans living with cancer.) When even chatter about celebrities is hijacked by talk of death and violence, it seems these radical ideas have gone mainstream. We are living in a moment in which young Americans are getting tattoos of Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed healthcare executive Brian Thompson—and showing up at his court appearances holding signs that read “Free Luigi.” The far left, though often claiming to oppose violence, has all but embraced it.
This is almost as bad as the “Reign of Terror” in France, where the revolutionary government lopped off the heads of hundreds of nobles and army officers suspected of disloyalty. As the public cheered each use of the guillotine, society became coarser, and common decency was shown to no one.
American politics is not just fragmented and riven by partisanship; it has become inhumane. The boundaries and guardrails that helped make the government work have disappeared, and the “Rules of Civility” are being ignored.
An uncivil society is a cruel society. Hopefully, I won’t be alive when it all falls apart.
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