267: Propriety

Ira Glass

An apple, nobody gives their teacher an apple anymore. In her first year of teaching first grade, here are the sorts of things that Mindy got from her kids.

Ira Glass

So last Christmas, the day before vacation, she has all the kids sitting on the carpet. And some of them have presents for her that they're all excited for her to open. And she has treats for them. And all the kids want to be picked. And they're raising their hands.

Ira Glass

That's what I love about this so much, is that it wasn't just one kid's judgment that this is the perfect present, that it's the entire class of six-year-olds. Like we might disagree on other things, but there is one thing that we can agree on.

Ira Glass

After school that day, as you might expect, Mindy nearly runs down the hall with her new slippers, eager to share the magic with a fellow first grade teacher.

Ira Glass

I say this as if it makes any difference at all. It's still a thong.

Ira Glass

No, I think all of America, well, not all of America, but I think many people are with you on this, including me.

Ira Glass

OK, maybe this is the kind of etiquette question that we should all already know the answer to, but I have to say, I found it kind of a stumper. You're a first grade teacher, and the parents of your students buy you a thong, or slippers that say Playerette on them, not the right kind of gift for a teacher, you think. So is it impolite to actually say something to them about it? Or do you just accept graciously? Both teachers, in this case, accepted graciously.

Ira Glass

Perhaps there was a time when social rules were clear, when people knew what to say and do in certain situations. But the world changes fast. There are constantly new situations out there that leave us all improvising, inventing our own rules of propriety. And that's the subject of today's program. We have three stories of people forced to figure out how to maintain some decency and dignity in the face of some very unsettling situations. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass.

Act One of our program today, Governments Say the Darnedest Things. In that act, government officials who want nothing more than a little civility, thank you very much, even when the facts contradict a lot of what they're saying. Act Two, Dems Gone Wild, in which a Republican tries to run for local office in a very Democratic district in New Jersey, evoking some rather disturbing behavior from his friends and neighbors. Act Three, Swiss Near Miss, a woman follows the rules of propriety. A man does not. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The Government Says the Darnedest Things. There is a part of our government that is charged with enforcing politeness as a matter of law. And that's the Federal Communication Commission, which, among other things, has the thankless job of deciding which words and images can be put on radio and television. As you probably heard, there has been a new crackdown on indecency at the FCC in recent months. And the case that represents the biggest break with the past has to do with the singer Bono getting an award at the Golden Globes and saying "F-ing brilliant" on national television.

In the past, the FCC has said that these fleeting, gratuitous uses of the F-word are harmless. But in a landmark decision, it declared, back in March, that they were changing the rules. And what's not been talked about much is the reasons that they give for this change. These reasons get to the very heart of what polite society means, here on the radio, or in television. The FCC said, basically, the F-word must be stopped in nearly all instances, because first and foremost, it harms children. So we wanted to check with an expert to find out if, in fact, there is any scientific evidence that bad words hurt kids.

Ira Glass

His other name, the one his mom gave him, is Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology and author of academic books with titles like Cursing in America and Why We Curse. A warning to listeners that in his interview, we mention directly and indirectly a number of curse words. He turns out to be very familiar with the basis of this FCC ruling.

Ira Glass

Reading Timothy Jay's studies is the kind of experience that simultaneously makes you feel hopeful and hopeless about the very idea of social science. The daycare and summer camp data are broken down into pages of charts, listing dozens of curse words, and breakdowns of who says what at what age, and what kind of situation they're saying it in. The single most popular curse word, by a huge margin, no other word is even close, among children age 5 to 12, is the F-word, starting around age 5, followed by the S-word, when they are about 7. Suck, damn, and Jesus get a lot of play in the summer camp data. Hell, bitch, bum, and ass do pretty well in the daycare data.

Ira Glass

When one of our producers, Lisa Pollak, went out and talked to kids around Chicago, aged 9 to 12, in their schools, they pretty much confirmed everything that Timothy Jay had seen. Bad words are everywhere.

Ira Glass

Now to be clear, these are very simple studies. They don't follow the kids who use more curse words for years, and then try to find out if their lives turned out differently than the kids who use fewer curse words. All the research can show so far is that most kids use these words, even if they think that it's wrong to use them, even if sometimes they aren't totally sure what certain words mean. And the research also shows that kids use the words in exactly the same way that adults do, in moments of frustration, or for emphasis, or in moments of surprise, or in jokes, or in anger. No difference.

Ira Glass

This has great relevance to the law. In the past, the Supreme Court has said that the FCC is right to keep words off radio and television, if hearing the words could, quote, "enlarge the child's vocabulary in an instant." And that's one of the justifications cited by the FCC in the Bono decision. Quote, "We believe that even isolated broadcasts of the F-word in situations such as that here could do so as well, in a manner that many, if not most, parents would find highly detrimental and objectionable."

Ira Glass

If Timothy Jay is right, what it means is that most of our current law and Supreme Court decisions about indecency are based on some very unscientific notions of what bad words and images do to kids. And we wanted to discuss all this with one of the FCC commissioners, or FCC Chairman Michael Powell. The commissioners that we contacted declined our invitations to appear.

But Chairman Powell's legal adviser, John Cody, said, sure. And we started with the studies. If there's no evidence that even repeated exposure to bad words hurts kids, I asked him, why ban these words?

Ira Glass

The recon, that is the petition for reconsideration. As you point out here that the FCC's own staff initially ruled that when Bono said "F-ing brilliant," it did not have any sexual connotation, and for that reason, it was not indecent. And it was the commissioners, the guys at the top, who went back and reopened the case, at the urging of a lobbying group, declared that "F-ing brilliant" means sex. We did ask the 9 to 12 year olds we interviewed around Chicago what Bono might mean by the phrase "F-ing brilliant." None of them saw it the way the commissioners did.

Ira Glass

Recent decisions by the FCC are about more than just the F-word. In the Bono decision, the FCC explicitly puts broadcasters on notice that it is changing the legal definition of profanity. In the past, the Commission gave some weight to the idea of context. The F-word and other potentially offensive material could sometimes be allowed on the air, if it was in a context that had some redeeming value, if it was in a news report, for instance. But with these recent decisions, the FCC has moved the line on where context counts. Now they're saying the rule is, if a word is deeply offensive to some members of the public, or the Commission thinks that hearing the word might enlarge a child's vocabulary, that could be enough to overrule context.

So the line has moved, though exactly where it has moved to is not totally clear yet. For instance, the Bono decision declared that now even euphemisms for the F-word, which presumably include the phrase "the F-word," are probably illegal most of the time. In our interview, John Cody of the FCC made a point of saying that context does still count lots of times. He pointed to page five of the Bono decision, where the commissioners specifically say that if there is quote, "political, scientific, or independent value," the stuff you're broadcasting might be OK.

Ira Glass

It seems the most likely outcome if listeners complained about this story is that the FCC would not rule at all. The current commissioners are much more exercised about sex than about bathroom humor. And the fact is, we did play the Sedaris story as part of a policy discussion, which makes the whole thing much more of an open-and-shut case for the FCC. It would fall into a more questionable area, and set more groundbreaking precedent, if we just played it on its own, no policy angle at all. There's no telling how that would come out. So.

There is a bigger question in all this. And it's a question that, weirdly, Timothy Jay's cursing research is no help at all with. The question is this. Let's say that you agree with Timothy Jay's findings that show that cursing does not hurt kids. Well, then what do you do?

I think most of us still would not feel very good cursing around children. Even Timothy Jay tries not to curse around kids, or his students, or strangers, for that matter, even though he's sure that it harms no one. In the same way, I think most of us wouldn't want wall-to-wall unregulated profanity all over radio and television, day and night.

The kids we talked to were unanimous, by the way, on this point. They did not want more cursing on radio and television. It gave them an odd feeling, the swearing. Listen to how a group of seven of them reacts when one of the kids, in front of an adult and a microphone, simply refers to a swear word that her mom said. She doesn't even swear.

Ira Glass

Seven kids look at each other, hands over mouths, eyes wide open, in disbelief, embarrassment, giddiness.

[LAUGHTER]

Ira Glass

When these 9 to 12 year olds talked about how they thought that swearing was bad, it was not in a way where it seemed like they were parroting things adults told them.

Ira Glass

A more sensible FCC policy might start right here. Instead of getting all hysterical about the harm that bad words are supposedly doing to innocent young psyches, we could all just agree as a country that some channels on radio and television should be as curse-free as possible. Not because it's healthier for anyone, not because we want to avoid teaching these words to minors who apparently already know them already, but because it just feels like good manners, because it's polite.

[MUSIC - "STUCK IN A MOMENT YOU CAN'T GET OUT OF" BY U2]

Coming up, if Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could be polite to each other, send each other handwritten notes, joke around, why can't Democrats and Republicans in New Jersey do it? Or men and women, well, lots of places?

[MUSIC - "STUCK IN A MOMENT YOU CAN'T GET OUT OF" BY U2]

That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week in our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, propriety, stories of people trying to keep a sense of decency and decorum in new and difficult situations. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two: Dems Gone Wild.

Ken Kurson had been around politics, but he had never actually run for office. He works with Rudolph Giuliani, co-authored Giuliani's book, Leadership, with him. And last year, Ken Kurson entered the political mosh pit himself. He ran for state assembly as a Republican in New Jersey's 34th district.

Democrats dominate Jersey politics in a way that seems almost quaint to most of us who live in other states. Democrats control both houses of the state assembly, and the governor's mansion. And there hasn't been a Republican senator from New Jersey in over 30 years. Ken Kurson's district is overwhelmingly Democratic. It includes the town of East Orange, where Al Gore beat George Bush by a 40 to 1 margin.

Ken Kurson

I knew this race would be just about impossible. Not only have I been personally unpopular my entire life, but the registration advantage alone was insurmountable. When Rudy Giuliani wrote a check for the campaign, he asked me, who should I make this out to, sacrificial lamb? So I wasn't getting into the race with any delusions about winning. But I did welcome the opportunity to shine a light on what I thought were some overlooked issues in New Jersey: property taxes, illegal campaign contributions, and public officials who hold multiple public jobs.

Going in, I realized that if I managed to make it a race, my opponents would do whatever they could to make things difficult. I expected disagreement, apathy, maybe even anger. But what I hadn't realized was how darn uncivil my town could get. The vitriol and nastiness that would come from my own neighbors caught me off guard. In my own hometown, Montclair, plenty of residents are so sure of the correctness of their opinions, so convinced that their little voices in the wilderness are the only thing protecting this great democracy from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Aschroft-Wolfowitz-Scalia cabal, so righteous in their indignation over the fact that a town son would dare call himself a Republican, that the gloves are way off.

In late August, I campaigned at the train station a block from my house. Now if you ever want to feel like a douchebag, I recommend concluding eight years of anonymously riding the train by suddenly interrupting your neighbors to talk New Jersey politics. By that point, I'd done this kind of retail campaigning hundreds of times in all five towns of the district, from the scariest all-night chicken joint in East Orange to the toniest country club in Glen Ridge. I'm not someone who finds it easy to introduce myself to strangers. Yeah, I know, a liability for a political candidate. Luckily, everybody was polite and even interested in talking over some issue or other.

Plenty of people asked tough questions or challenged my positions. Most voters in my district are Democrats, after all. But I never, not even once, encountered anything uncivil. Even those who clearly had no intention of voting for me were courteous. And I was genuinely grateful when someone would say, no thank you, and save me the time and money of handing them a piece of literature or a Kurson for Assembly pen.

But that day in August at the train station, one woman saw me standing there and started yelling at me. I mean top of her lungs, pop out crazy eyes. "Republicans are evil! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Stunned, I managed to stammer, "Why are you speaking to me like this?" She pointed to the embarrassing little name tag that all candidates wear and said, "You wearing that badge gives me the right to yell at you. You're killing innocent Iraqis!" Um, I guess you won't be needing a pen.

I wish I could report that this was an isolated incident. But it wasn't. The next time was at the Bluestone Cafe, a home away from home where I'd have breakfast several times a week. In the middle of September, the Sunday New York Times ran a long profile of my candidacy, headlined "One Montclair Republican Looks Strong." The piece was a total Valentine. The photo even managed to obscure my bald spot.

It was a home run for the campaign and the day after it ran, my team met at the Bluestone to savor it. A bunch of the regulars congratulated me on the coverage. And then a woman sauntered up to our table and said, "Are you the one who's running for office?" "Why, yes, ma'am, I'm Ken Kurson. And I'd like to earn your support on November--" "I would never vote for you. And I can't believe there are Republicans in my town." She pronounced the word "Republican" the way one describes symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

All of these attacks on me were one thing. But when people started to question my wife, it became downright bizarre. One time, the woman who heads the Democratic Party in Montclair called our home and yelled-- yelled-- at my wife. "Your husband is a liar. He's trying to trick everyone by not saying he's a Republican. Are you so ashamed of it that you can't even admit it on your mailings? We're disgusted with your lies." Click.

This tirade was prompted by one of my mailers that reprinted the Times article in full on one side, an article headlined "Montclair Republican," and on the other side featured a picture of my family with Rudy Giuliani. I'm not sure how I could have proclaimed my affiliation more overtly. But to be honest, I can't tell you how punk rock it felt to set off these little tizzies of outrage: the guy who took my little handbill at the train station and theatrically shredded it in a silent, heroic gesture of defiance, the woman who told my campaign aide that she cannot accept that a Jewish candidate would ever belong to the same party as a Nazi like George Bush.

Montclair prides itself on its reputation as a bastion of liberalism and tolerance. Montclair voluntarily funds its own busing program. And Chris Rock joked that a newspaper called Montclair the nation's best place for mixed race couples. The worst place was everywhere else. So what kills me about this particular form of nastiness I encountered in Montclair, and only in Montclair, and only from white liberals, is that it came from people who would be mortified to hear themselves described as intolerant or hostile to those unlike themselves.

In my campaigning in blue collar Clifton and minority East Orange, I experienced many polite no-thank-yous and plenty of passionate disagreements, which tended not to be about Iraq or President Bush, but over the actual stuff New Jersey assemblymen deal with, like tax rates and the state's notorious Department of Youth and Family Services. But not once, not a single time, did anyone stray close to the line dividing discourse from abuse. My campaign even made inroads into Montclair's minority community, especially after I was endorsed by the leader of the town's enormous Christ Church and was the only candidate to address its largely black congregation.

But when it came to white liberals, how about the aging hippie who lectured one of my campaign's black volunteers on the obligation minorities have to support progressive candidates? When I asked an artist friend, someone I'd been very close to for 10 years, to design a t-shirt for me and my crew to wear in Montclair's 10k race, she refused. She explained that a cartoon elephant was a powerful symbol she could not abide. We're not friends anymore.

I didn't win. I did far better than I was supposed to. And almost 2,000 voters crossed party lines to cast a ballot for me. But in the end, the district's two seats both went to the Democrats, as everyone knew they would. The incumbent, a man so dedicated to public service, he also holds three other jobs on the public payroll, and a woman whose chief attribute seems to be that she only has one other public job.

Look, there are really nutty people on all sides of American ideology. And I'm not suggesting that Democrats have cornered the market on incivility. That's obviously not the case. Anywhere one party has numerical dominance tends to breed bullies. So the Democrats are bullies in New Jersey, and the Republicans are bullies in Texas and Utah. What's galling is when the Democrats doing the bullying pride themselves on their tolerance, or when Republican bullies cloak themselves in their religious faith, a faith founded on notions of forgiveness and turning the other cheek. Montclair is a beautiful town, but it's not for me. After the election, my family moved out.

Ira Glass

Ken Kurson is Director of Communications at Giuliani Partners and co-author of Rudy Giuliani's book, Leadership.

[MUSIC - "ROCK HARD TIMES" BY EELS]

Ira Glass

Act Three, Swiss Near Miss. Samantha Hunt has this story that, among other things, is a story of manners, of one person acting with complete politeness and good manners, and another person not doing that. Actress Claire Beckmann read her story for us.

Claire Beckmann

My mother lowers her voice to a whisper, even though we are speaking across a telephone line from her empty house to my empty apartment, barring the slimmest chance that anyone might hear our conversation. Still, she quiets herself, as if to say, the story you're about to hear is too dangerous for broadcast on the regular frequencies.

My mother has never been good with secrets. She used to think keeping them was akin to lying, so the secrets she did keep were special, only for her and my father, kept as a hedge against their children, as a private world for just the two of them, as a reminder of their lives before six kids invaded. This story was one of those secrets.

She decided to tell me out of the blue recently, and she behaved as though it was no big deal. "Haven't I told you this before?" she asked. She had not. But things have changed since my father died three years ago. Now it seems the doors to mystery have blown wide open in my mother's life, as if proximity to the greatest secret of all, namely where my father went, diluted the power of the secrets she once kept. Now she'll tell anybody anything.

In 1964, my mother was a 26-year-old divorced woman living in the town of Pleasantville, New York. In the months leading up to my mother's divorce, her first husband had plowed through dates with a humiliating tally of local women. My mother's first remedy, smashing her car into his when she found him engaged in a passionate Lover's Lane moment with a woman from the Episcopal church, failed to produce helpful results. So she left, joining the world of single women again. Single, but in 1964, not unstained.

The divorce was painful. Her ex became abusive and so she needed a distraction. My mother convinced her friend, [? Kappy, ?] a lady with a large and fierce laugh, that they had to travel, they had to escape. Europe would be a good start. Switzerland seemed safe. Both women were itching to flee. However, Kappy's father, a Catholic, stood in the way. He would not allow [? Kappy ?] to be in the company of a divorced woman until he had first interviewed my mother. This unbearable interview included repeated uses of the verb "to know," employed in the biblical sense. Despite the odds, my mother passed his test.

That's how they found themselves in the spring of '64 in Geneva, where waves of relief and sudden joy swept over them at each sighting of non-American packs of chewing gum, each pair of funny Swiss shoes, every syllable from a foreign tongue, all the small things that proved the world was not at all small in 1964.

"We ate fondue every night. We'd never even heard of fondue before," she says. It was at the end of one such dinner when a waiter interrupted their hilarity. "Excuse me, mademoiselles. The gentlemen seated by the window there," and he pointed to two young Swiss men, "have insisted on paying for your meal." "We tried to protest," my mother says through the telephone, "but the men had already paid. And the waiter refused to return the money to them. So we shrugged and invited the men to join us."

There's a twist in my mother's voice that is audible through the phone line. "They were extremely polite, manners that American women could only dream of finding back home then. Maybe a Midwesterner could have been this polite, but there were no men like these men on the east coast," she says. "These men held the doors, pulled out chairs, listened intently, paid for everything, and stood each time [? Kappy ?] or I even considered visiting the ladies' room. These were very different times," my mother clarifies.

"After coffee at the restaurant, the four of us decided to go out dancing. They took us to a magnificent night club. And by this time we had coupled up, [? Kappy ?] and I having decided that she preferred one man and I preferred the other. I got the handsome one. His name was Hans. He knew how to tango beautifully," my mother recalls across the long-distance line. "The men were engineers working for an American company in Switzerland," she says. "Their relationship was that of business colleagues only, not friends. Still, we were all enjoying the night, and so continued drinking and dancing until 2:00 in the morning, when it was decided that what we needed was some fresh air. We thought a walk near Lake Geneva could provide that."

The four set off on an early morning stroll. [? Kappy ?] and her date had a seat on the bench beside the lake, while my mother and Hans kept walking down to the end of the pier that jutted out across the surface of the water. "This was back before you just rushed into a hotel room and slept together," my mother clarifies yet again.

Out on the pier, Hans stood directly behind my mother. The thousand lights of the city reflected off the lake. Romance was nigh, my mother felt. And again, a moment of relief passed through her, thinking of her ex, and then thinking of the exotic Swiss engineer who was just then no doubt preparing to kiss her. She exhaled, and at that moment, Hans placed his hands around my mother's throat.

He squeezed. He tightened once. He crushed the cavity of her trachea. Hans wrung her neck thoroughly and effortlessly, as though he were a soldier trained in the exact art of compressing an enemy's jugular.

No air could pass in or out of my mother's body. She could not move. She could not yell. She could not breathe. She stood staring out across the lake, her arms dangling by her sides, her feet nearly lifted off the ground by the vise about her throat.

She thought, "This is unbelievable. A Swiss stranger is about to kill me." And then she thought of her life up to that point, as if to see how it could have led her here. She wondered, "Are these the wages of my divorce? Do I deserve this?" By the shore of Lake Geneva, my mother noted the moments that passed. Hans said nothing, only continued to squeeze, as if in answer to her question. Yes, this is exactly what you deserve.

"The strangest part," my mother whispers, "is I remember the superb mental clarity I achieved as I was choked. In that clarity, I thought, I am going to die now. And the lights on Lake Geneva are beautiful. How sad, I was thinking, that beauty ends here. You really study these things when you think you're going," she says.

Time, that all night had been a torrent, slowed to a drip. After a minute or two of strangulation, she was losing consciousness. She was staring down into the water, when finally, silent Hans spoke. He asked my mother, "What would you do if I didn't let go?" His breath was on her neck. And she thought, "He's breathing." He held the choke a moment longer. He let go.

That part of the story is awful, being choked by a stranger in Switzerland. But both my mother and I believe that what came next is far more sinister. Rather than screaming bloody murder when she caught her breath, my mother, perhaps out of fear, or even scarier, perhaps out of fear of impropriety, simply turned and walked back to the bench, where [? Kappy ?] and her date sat talking. My mother said nothing. The four of them regrouped, walked back to their hotels, and politely said goodnight.

40 years later, my mother still has Hans's business card. She keeps the card in a bureau drawer filed beside a buffalo nickel her grandfather gave her, a clutch of two-dollar bills she saved, and a tiny red bean filled with miniature carved ivory animals. When I asked her why she kept his card, a reminder of how she almost died, she sounded surprised. "To get revenge?" I asked. "Oh no, not at all," she said. "I keep it because it's part of my life."

Ira Glass

That story from Samantha Hunt. Her novel, The Seas, comes out in the fall, and is published by McAdam-Cage. The story was read for us by Claire Beckmann.

Ira Glass

The program was produced today by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and [? Will Reichel. ?] Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, as I said in my conversation with John Cody.

[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS]

David Sedaris, who we heard in our story about the FCC, has a new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. At our web site, www.thisamericanlife.org, you can listen to our programs for free, or buy CDs of them. You can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, bestselling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia, who is tired of these things that we say about him at the end of every program. Like he said to me just yesterday,

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

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