08-31-07

The Culture of Thugs
Okay, so it's Friday, and usually I have reviews on Friday (or Saturday...or Sunday).  Well, I'm just gonna drop in a rant, here.  I'll probably do a review of Rob Powell's Steam Pirates by Tuesday at the latest.  I'd be doing it today, but I've been letting this rant stew for a while.  Also, I went to a bar last night and didn't give myself time to plumb his archives.

The bar in question is the Shamrock Pub.  I used to be a semi-regular there, and I wanted to go one last time before I had to shop for a new bar outside of Houston.  Houston has succumbed to the Health Nazis.  Health Nazis, if you're unfamiliar with the term, are doctors and citizens with issues who use rhetorical thuggery to force their views of a reasonable lifestyle on others.  In this case, they managed to get an across-the-board smoking ban placed on...well pretty much anything in Houston with a door.  Their main focus, of course, was bars and restaurants with separate bars.

I'm not going to argue the matter of smoking or second-hand smoke.  It's been done, and, anyway, that's not the focus of this essay.  What we're dealing with today is the alarming rise of the culture of thugs.  No, I don't mean Gangsta Rappers.  When I say "thugs" I mean rhetorical thugs.  Those people whe never enter into debate with an open mind, who only "discuss" things in order to verbally browbeat others into acceding to their demands, totally and completely.  No compromise allowed.  This attitude will destroy a society.

There are levels and degrees to everything, even problem solving, and refusing to acknowledge compromise solutions reflects a societies inability to get along with itself.  So, ignoring the obvious and contentious argument of the effects of second-hand smoke, lets examine the smoking ban realistically, and only within the context of possible solutions.  That's assuming a problem exists in the first place.  The primary stage of problem-solving is always determining if a problem actually exists, exactly what the problem is, an to what degree is the problem, in fact, a problem.  The proponents of smoking bans regard them largely as "public health" issues.  But are they, really?  Let's look at the "public health".

To be reasonable, we'll have to dispense with the flawed notion that the "public health" means that there are no threats to anyone's well-being, anywhere.  For that to be true, we'd live in a world without kitchen knives, cars, utilities, rivers, lakes, pencils, anything that might be partially swallowed...you get the idea.  Reasonably speaking, the public health can be said to be endangered if a threat to individual health and safety exists and:

• citizens are not made clearly aware of the threat, or

• the larger mass of citizens can not reasonably avoid the threat without severe effects on their quality of life.

To be fair, a threat, at the very least a short term threat to those with existing breathing difficulties, including allergies, exists in most bars, especially small neighborhood bars.  On the other hand, it's a simple matter to avoid that threat:  Don't go into the bar.  I know several people who don't frequent bars of any kind, and I know more than a few who have never even entered a bar, and I can't say that any of these people have reduced quality of life.  The general ban on smoking in places where the business of life must be conducted (office buildings, retail outlets) was reasonable because there was no reasonable way for non-smokers to avoid exposure to smoke in those environments.  You have to work, you have to buy food and clothes.  The domestic-flight smoking ban is also reasonable, because we are a rapid-transport society, and forcing non-smokers to endure cigarette smoke in an enclosed space to fulfill the requirements of their life is unreasonable.  But no one has to go to a bar; as I've shown, one will not suffer a significant reduction (if any) to quality of life by not bar-hopping.  So that lets out the second condition.  That leaves only public awareness. 

Previously, it was assumed that everyone knew an establishment tolerated smoking unless it had a sign stating:  "This is a non-smoking establishment."  Bars were especially subject to this assumption.  Everyone smokes in bars.  Not only do I know non-smokers who smoke in bars, I know a couple rabid anti-smokers who smoke when they go to a bar.  However, being reasonable, not everyone should be expected to just assume that smoking is permitted wherever they go unless notified otherwise, especially after the beating smokers' privileges have taken since the beginning of the 1990's.  So maybe it would be better to reverse the old standard and require any establishment that permits smoking to post that plainly on the front door.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that public notification is not enough to protect the public health.  Let's say that we're stepping on the rights of the non-smoking alcoholic by exposing them to second-hand smoke.  Well, how do we reduce the threat to acceptable levels?  Well, one thing could be ventilation requirements.  Every second-hand smoke study I've seen monkeys around with various numbers regarding the volume of the space, the volume of smoke output, and the ventilation rate.  A lot of them are based on an average American household with one or two smokers and a standard ventilation system.  I saw one that played the numbers up and down, especially the numbers on air movement, and it showed a steep ramp in both directions in its regard to exposure (I'm speaking of scientific experimentation here, not epidemiological population studies).  I've been in bars that weren't as well-ventilated as my garage.  It would not be unreasonable to demand that a smoking-permitted establishment maintain certain standards of volume-ventilation per patron.  There would be an added effect of this ventilation requirement:  improved ventilation helps fire-fighters do their job more safely (minimal ventilation creates oxygen-starved hotspots that can result in backdrafts and firestorms when new sources of oxygen are introduce, say, by hacking down a door or breaking a window).

The point of my going over all these possible compromises to the "public health" issue of smoking in bars was not to open a discussion on smoking, second-hand smoke, or any related topic.  I simply wanted to highlight and underscore the thuggery involved in the debate.  How do I know it was thuggery?  Reasonable alternatives to the absolute ban existed, but were not tried.  Any time a reasonable alternative exists, but is ignored in favor of an absolute, you can be sure that some form of thuggery was involved.  In this case, it was the rhetorical thuggery that has found a home in so many American hearts.

It is thuggery when Sean Hannity demands that, in order to support the troops you must blindly assume that everything the President says or does is correct.  It's thuggery when Al Gore demands that everyone with a vested interest in a human-habitable world must support poorly-researched and oppressive government regulations.  Pick a single hot-button issue in modern American politics, and I can show you thugs on both sides of the question who make it their business—their mission, really—to prevent any real compromise.

But thuggery is not simply a domain of political debate.  Not long ago, the community at the TWCL forums that I frequent was accused by members of the Something Awful forums of being a component of "The Culture of Nice".  That, too, is a form of thuggery.  I don't mean the SA posters' opinion of TWCL; I mean the Culture of Nice they accused us of advancing.  The Culture of Nice is a particularly annoying form of thuggery to me.  It prevents any reasonable advancement of cultural or qualitative values.  I wish I could say it was unique to artistic communities, but it's not.  Indeed, anywhere you find amateur and lower-level professionals submitting creative works of any kind, you'll find the Culture of Nice.  To the Culture of Nice, we are all special little snowflakes, and any expectation of standards is unreasonable due to any number of mitigating factors. 

For instance, I don't like the novel Eragon.  As a literary work, it fails in multiple substantial ways, not the least of which is the immaturity of its outlook.  When I bring these up in open discussion, I am often castigated and reminded that the Author was only sixteen when he wrote it.  When I state that that would be fine if he had limited his literary ambitions at the time to a high school lit mag, but that publication of a nationally-distributed novel held him to the general standard, that generally ends the conversation.  Subscribers to the Culture of Nice don't like to argue for more than a few sentences. 

As a rule, confrontation isn't "nice", even if it's objective discussion of an artform or an issue.  Anything that even bears the suggestion of confrontation is anathema to the Culture of Nice, even simple honesty.  The Artistic Director of a local community theater with which I was once deeply involved decided, a few years ago, not to allow me to direct any more shows (she didn't tell me this, she simply didn't offer me any shows, and refused to acknowledge my queries on the subject).  I simply assumed I'd been exiled from the community, and kept my distance.  When my friendship with another theater member demanded that I attend or do some minor setwork projects, I made every attempt to fly under the wire and avoid the AD.  The awful weight of reality forced me to discuss the issues with her, but that was a waste of time (which was why I had simply avoided her, before). 

I didn't mind not being allowed to direct; what I had a problem with was her refusal to respond to my queries, not even a "Thank you, we have all the directors we need" e-mail or phone call.  At first she pretended not to know what I was talking about, then she mistook my meaning and gave me a needlessly complicated (and demonstrably false) explanation of the process of director selection (this is a feature of the Culture of Nice, a belief that if you throw enough words at a person, he or she will relent), when I restated my position, she responded with "...I will try to mind my P's&Q's in the future."  The Culture of Nice gets shirty when you back it into a corner.

At any point during the preceding three years, she could have said, "I don't think you're a good director" or "I just don't like you," either of which I would have accepted.  But she couldn't.  In the Culture of Nice, good words are the same as cake, and bad words are the same as murder.  Words, to the Culture of nice, are more real than the actions they represent.  "I'm sorry" is a free pass, allowing you to repeat the mistake any number of times as long as it's followed by "I'm Sorry" ("I'm Sorry" is also an acceptable preamble to insult, in the Culture of Nice).  "Thank you" is the ultimate expression of gratitude, even when spoken in contempt and coupled with actions of ingratitude.  Understand that nice people don't subscribe to the Culture of Nice.  I know two truly nice people, and neither of them is bogged down by the sort of passive-aggressive double-speak that typifies the CoN.

And, of course, the Culture of Nice has its opposite number, a more obvious form of thuggery that we can call the Culture of Mean.  Here we find the Ann Coulters, the Al Frankens, the Howard Sterns, anyone who regularly uses the phrases "can't take a joke" or "teh Intarwebs R sirius bizness", or any variation of the theme.  If the Central theme of the Culture of Nice is that words have meaning whether that over-rides any contradiction implicit in associated actions, then the central theme of the Culture of Mean is that words have no meaning at all.  It's obvious thuggery, and it's thuggery for no purpose beyond one's own entertainment.  Subscribers to the Culture of Mean believe that any insult is okay, because they're only words.

In both Cultures, the thuggery is a result of the central theme, not the cause of it.  In a world where you can act any way you want as long as you fill your mouth with ebullient praise for others and are prepared to take offense any time someone mentions anything less than positive about your actions, there is no room for compromise.  In a world where Mother Theresa's long suffering for the sake of her charges (in the face of—it turns out—fading faith) can be dismissed with a sexually-oriented insult followed by, "Dude, it's just a joke", there is no room for reasonable discussion.

It has to stop.  The Sixties mantra, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem," is a lie.  Sometimes the solution is the problem.  Sometimes there is no problem.  Sometimes there is a problem but the solution will just make it worse.  Compromise, and language that invites compromise, will usually result in an acceptable outcome.  Thuggery will always, by its very nature, result in abuse.