In fact, the so-called ladies and gentlemen are also known as phonies and hypocrites.
Alright, that’s both sides of the story told. Here are media examples of what people do and/or don’t do in polite society:
1. If I hear one more snide comment about the utter lack of looting in Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami, I’m going to scream.
First, what happened in Japan? Entire towns were washed away. In the hardest hit areas, there was little left to loot and few left to loot it.
Second, the scope of the disaster is so great — the death toll still unknown but leaping upward every day, with nuclear reactors flirting with meltdown and huge numbers of homeless, it isn’t as if the media is going to stop and figure out whether any electronics stores have been ransacked. The proper response to anyone crowing about a lack of looting in Japan should be, “How do you know?”
Third, the entire idea of there being no looting plays into our preconceptions about Japan, a nation where — I’m sorry to be the one to tell you — there is indeed crime, indeed poverty, where the people are not all orderly worker bees collecting honey for the hive. Japanese are human beings — stop the presses! — for good and ill.
Fourth, tsk-tsking over the supposed lack of looting in Japan is a not-so-sly way for Americans to voice the kind of ugly racial prejudice that some of us just itch to articulate, to wag a finger at black residents of New Orleans (after five years, geez, let it rest) for stripping grocery stores after Hurricane Katrina. (Last week, the Justice Department came out with a scathing report indicting the New Orleans police for a range of brutal behaviors. But we can’t worry about that report, no, because we’re too upset over the searing memory of liquor stores being ransacked five years ago. Why is that?)
【Polite society?】相关文章:
最新
2020-09-15
2020-08-28
2020-08-21
2020-08-19
2020-08-14
2020-08-12