Mind Your Manners

Decorum
Thorstein Veblen wrote: "...decorum is a product and an exponent of leisure class [Power Elite] life and thrives in full measure only under a regime of status" [p. 48, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Mentor Book, 1953--original published in 1899]. He continues, "[Decorum--manners] are an expression of the relation of status--a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other" [p. 48]. "There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum. ...a breach of faith may be condoned, but a breach of decorum cannot. 'Manners make the man'" [p. 49].

When I was young I was considered crude. Especially my sister-in-law ( a woman's page editor on my hometown newspaper) thought I was so crude I needed help with my manners.

It was called deportment in kiddie school (grade school), and my grades were superb but my deportment marks were always "U"s (Unsatisfactory in my day)(they quit using A-B-C-D-E-Fs for grades in my "modern" grade school--written up in the newspapers when it was new as being one of the best-equipped schools in the USA. It opened originally as a boys military school called Peacock Military Academy--and, yes, there really was a man, I think he called himself Major, named Peacock, from San Antonio, the original home of Peacock Military Academy. The PMA had gone belly up after WWII started and the City of Dallas took over the school in the early 40s--they had just added on a new edition when the Little Wolf Boy started there, complete with a new auditorium where I saw my first movie ever--and my uncle was in the movie business, too, but I was never allowed to go to his movie houses--I was not allowed to go to "the movies"--but my mother let me go this one time because I was so rude about it, I guess. It was 10 years before I went to another movie--I saw them on teevee but that was different. That first movie I ever saw was San Francisco with Burl Ives and other big late-40s stars--a pretty rough movie for bright-eyed and bushy tailed kid with big eyes for masculine toughness and the softness of sweet girls--especially a girl named Janice who was the Baptist preacher's daughter and the church and her home were right across the street from the school--as a result of this early attachment to certain kinds of girls holding my sexual attentions longer than others I became enamored and desirous for "church" girls--especially the churchs's preachers's daughters--and that included several preachers's daughters until in the early '60s when I met and married my second wife, a Baptist preacher's daughter--the one I met in California--so of course I called her my Segundo wife--I don't expect anyone but Californians to catch that drift--but anyway, so, yes, my 2nd wife was a Baptist preacher's daughter and while her father was marrying us, you don't wanna know what I was thinking--it's for another day, but I'll tell you the truth, I couldn't stand her father and he made me doubly distrusting of any kind of preacher, though I was distrustful of preachers before I knew his crusty little backwards ass. That's why I liked preachers's daughters. When I was making love to them it was like I was doing Mother Mary--and a lot of preachers's daughters are named Mary, too. My 1st wife was just a Baptist and her family was big in the Southern Baptist Church though her father wasn't a preacher--I mean, she went to Baylor, the most Baptist university in the world--then when she annulled me and married my best friend later, they married in the biggest Baptist church in the world--he was an atheist and he thought it was hilarious marrying in a Baptist church--one hip clown thing he did was make me an usher--and I was so drunk--he had provided all the male participants in the wedding party with their own bottle of Ezra Beam and he even had a cool pitcher of branch water on a table and we took tons of slugs out of our bottles while we were dressing for the occasion--and I was in sartorial splendor that day--sporting a dark grey cutaway coat with tails and light-grey-striped tux pants and on my pedal extremities, Ballys "After Six" tux loafers. My job as usher was to light the candles up around the altar at the beginning of the service, which I did amazingly steadily, and then to extinguish them once the vows were read and the couple was ready to flee the scene and go consummate the marriage by performing the double-backed beast (I laughed to myself about that event)--but when I went to extinguish those candles, I was extra-lopsided, very wobbly, but I managed to douse most of those burning spears with first douse but then the last candle refused to go out no matter how I kept covering it with the brass bell at the end of this long rod I was using to put that candle out. A snuffer, I think it's called. I'd suffocate that flame, take the bell off it, and POP--up it would flame again. I retried snuffing the damn thing about three times. Finally I took off my cutaway coat and lept up in the air and tried to bushwhack the damn flame out by swatting at it with that snuffer bell like I swatted flies with a flyswatter. On my last swat, the son of a bitchin' top of the candle broke off and went flying toward the pulpit where the preacher was still standing. I hollered "FIRE!" My best friend and my 1st wife, they were about halfway up the aisle heading out of the church, turned around and saw what I'd done and they started laughing like hyennas and he hollered, "Hey, Wolfie, did your breath set the church on fire--Holy Smoke!"--other people were running like hell, a couple of women screaming as they took my cry of FIRE in a crowded place literally--they were running for their lives--it was only a tiny fire--like a weak-ass old-man Holy Spirit falling to earth with but a few licks of fire left to bring the Pentecostal down on us. [As an aside: one of my favorite minor league baseball teams as a kid was the Sweetwater Swatters of the Longhorn League--though their name had nothing to do with swatting flies but rather with swatting baseballs, I always thought of swatting flies when I thought of the term "swatters," though I knew "swat" was a baseball term for just that, the act of swatting at and then swatting through head-on to swat the baseballs, swinging with determined might at that tiny white pill-like ball that looks as tiny as a white fly as it flies towards you one-hundred-miles-per-hour as you stand with your swatting stick set to swat that god-damn white fly to kingdom come.... Babe Ruth was the last King of Swat--I haven't heard the term used much since Babe Ruth is no longer the ultimate baseball player--I did hear the late great Red Barber say one time while announcing a Yankees game in the 50s, "Boy howdy, he really swatted that ball. It's long-gone out'a heah!" Red Barber, by the way, was a native Alabaman, an open racist when he first started broadcasting MLB games back East--later when he was the Dodgers's announcer, he had had to apologize for his making fun of Jackie Robinson when Robinson first came into the pros with the Dodgers--and Red, like Southern-racist player Hugh Casey and Louisville-born Peewee Reese, had talked loud and Southern about not liking it that Knee-grow players were gonna be playin' alongside pure White boyz. Red later wrote in a book of essays how regretful he was for those comments he had made in those days and that since then he'd come to see Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays as the greatest baseball players he'd ever seen. Before the color-barrier, that was what the white baseball Power Elite called its rule for not allowing black players to play USA major league baseball, was busted wide open by Robinson in the National League and later Larry Doby in the American League (the most racist league for a long time), blacks were barred from playing in US pro baseball leagues in the late 1880s when everybody wanted to use black ball players except Cap Anson, player manager of the Chicago White Stockings, who first said he refused to play in any the game blacks were allowed to play in.

Here's the story:

The date was August 10, 1883. At the time, it was a common practice for Major League teams to schedule exhibition games against semipro teams as a way of earning more money. An exhibition had been scheduled between the Toledo team and Anson’s White Stockings. It would prove to be a fateful encounter.

Toledo’s roster included the young, black scholar-athlete Moses Fleetwood Walker, the team’s regular catcher. By all accounts, Walker was a gentlemanly [Mr. Ed: he had manners], educated player. On this day, Walker was injured (a common occurrence among catchers in the days before catcher’s mitts [or masks] were invented) and was told to take the day off by his manager Charlie Morton.

Unaware of the injury but full of his own prejudices, Anson announced to Morton that his team would not play with Walker on the field. This attitude infuriated Morton, who responded by putting Walker into his lineup at centerfield. The game was delayed for over an hour as the two managers argued. Finally, Morton declared that if Anson forfeited the game, he would also forfeit the gate receipts. It seems Anson’s racism ran only as deep as his wallet, as this argument convinced him to play the game. The game was played with Walker and further incidence was avoided.

As a side note, the Toledo Mudhens joined the American Association in 1884, and on May 1 of that year, Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Welday became the first African-Americans to play in the major leagues. The White Stockings did return to play Toledo in 1884, but this time Anson had an agreement in writing before signing the contract for the game that Walker or any other black would not play in the exhibition match.

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"'Leisure' doesn't refer to indolence or quiescence--what it connotes is nonproductive consumption of time" [p. 46, Theory of Leisure Class].

Baseball players, believe it or not, are members of the Power Elite, a lower eschelon, yes, but still in a position to have more power than the average "bear"--I mean, come on, the new New York Yankees baseball team with their two big free-agent purchases has a payroll of almost a billion dollars--C. C. Sabathia cost them 150 million and Mark Texiera got them for 180 million--those two players alone on the Yankees are wealthier than tons of Power Eliters, though they have their status from their high-rise and success as champions (trophy winners) in the sports field, which is Power Elite the same as the Entertainment business and actors and actresses and directors and producers are the same kind of champions and award winners--they, too, are concerned about getting HITS. [At first, Berry Gordy called Motown "Hitsville."] There is much DECORUM on USA baseball fields. The players are courteous to fans these days. They are supposed to show great comportment on the field, except now the true Power Elite of baseball, the owners, enjoy bench-clearing incidents--usually when a pitcher hits a batter--mostly in the head--an automatic warning, etc. These brawls look dangerous, but seldom has anybody been seriously hurt in a baseball bench-clearing brawl. They're just for effect. The rules say, though, that they can't punch each other out any more or throw spitballs at each other's heads or come sliding into second base with their razor-sharp spikes in the air and aimed at the face of the player covering second--or third, or home, too--spikes high aimed at the catcher's midsection--dangerous job hindcatching--nor can any baseball players or managers or coaches any longer get up in an umpire's face and "chew the fat" with him--like in the old days, the good old white days. And speaking of DECORUM, look at the manners Jackie Robinson had to maintain--Jackie couldn't, for instance, climb up in the face of a white umpire--and the umpires were solid white up until the 70s maybe, maybe later, when they starting using black umpires--even off the top of my head today, I don't think I know of seeing any black umpires the last two baseball seasons I've lived through. And Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella put the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers on the baseball map--made them bums the team they still are as the Los Angeles Trolley Dodgers--and L.A. once had street cars, too, the same as Brooklyn. In 1937, The PCC-type trolley car, the first "streamlined" trolley car, was introduced on the L.A. Street Railway system. PCC stood for "President's Conference Committee"--meaning it was picked for building by the design-committee of the Electric Railroad Association and it was designed to be way ahead of its time--the body was designed by the amazing American designer Raymond Loewy--he later designed the famous Pennsylvania RR's encowled streamliner steam engine and then the famous Pennsy Tuscan red electric locos called GG-1s; he also designed the famous or infamous torpedo-nose Studebaker automobile after WWII. Soon after the PCCs were introduced in L.A., General Motors set out first in the late 30s and all through WWII on up into the 60s (they destroyed the New Orleans streetcar system in 1964) to put an end to trolleys in the USA in order to introduce their buses (they had GM trolley buses in Los Angeles after GM tore up all the streetcar lines, too--trolley buses had a trolley pole on their tops just like streetcars--this way, trolley buses could use the old trolley electric overhead wires while the trolley buses acted like regular buses, their trolley poles long enough to allow them to pull over to regular curbside bus stops unlike the old trolleys which had to keep to the tracks in middle of the street--they made little noise, too, as they motivated on down the line) into city street transportation systems--GM destroyed the LA trolley system to the point that now you can't even see much evidence in L.A. that such an extensive street car and interurban railway system ever existed there--you have to know where to look to find what traces of evidence are left. There is a great video called Los Angeles: The Early Days out in the world somewhere that was brilliantly produced by an L.A. video editor and producer, David Rapka, that shows where all the old trolley routes and areas of L.A. in which they used to run were, where hills used to be, like Mount Lowe--the streetcars used to climb Mount Lowe in a circular motion all the way to its top; Mount Lowe also had a funicular-type tram that climbed it, too--the City of Los Angeles later in the 30s and 40s flattened hills like Mount Lowe when it built it's entanglement of highway systems that now worm like concrete spaghetti all over the L.A. metropolitan area. The L.A. street railway system was full of all kinds of trolleys but the pride of the fleet were its many PCC trolleys, on its Hollywood line and on its red car lines. Ironically, the first PCCs ever built to order (1936) were for the Brooklyn Street Railway System, though the very first PCC car, #100, was sold to the Pittsburgh Street Railway system.

Here's an air-conditioned PCC car, restored, still running in Philadelphia.
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The great Raymond Loewy [see photos of his designs below]
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My concerned sister-in-law one X-mas gave me a book called Mind Your Manners. It was supposedly written in terms I could dig, dig? I looked at the book and thought, what the hell is this? Manners--fuck manners. Manners was a butler on a teevee commercial to me. I knew about Emily Post, but she was a New York City socialite and even as a kid, I knew social graces were meant for phonies, the keiko-muckity-mucks, the Hoi Poloi, as the Three Stooges call them in a Three Stooges short that was called something like "Among the Hoi Poloi." It's the old "My Fair Lady" story, you know, the Bernard Shaw play where Professor Higgens decides to make a lady of great dignity and power out of a London flower selling gal, a Cockney gal with a terrible accent! British bullshit. And at an early age I shot the bird at anything British and still do. I was mortified to read lately that that piece of shit Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones (the Rolling Stoned, I call them) bought one of Jimi Hendrix's electric guitars--paying like 12,000 pounds for it--only to give it to his bimbo 22-year-old girlfriend--some Russian porn star or model or whatever the hell she's "famous" for--or could it be she's famous for fucking old dried up and withered Ron Wood. I can't tell you enough how I hate the Beatles and the Rolling Bones--to me, they made a mockery of the music I grew up with in my bones and my blood and then I had to endure those Brit assholes (however well meaning and sincere they were about "our" music) taking all the fame and glory away from the true and honest originators of rock 'n roll, the late Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, Little Richard Perriman, Jimi Hendrix, Larry Williams, Otis Redding--and Geezus Cristo, they took that swingin' music and mixed in Brit church mode and Indian raga bullshit into it and gave us today's nonmelodic (almost Gregorian Chant) bullshit guitar-strumming goofball bands that are weary, monotonous, copycat of each other and all have terrible white drummers--in the meantime, Ron Wood is a member of the big-time Power Elite, the entertainment branch, while the many American originators who they ripped off never even got to make it to the Power Elite of the music they invented--in fact, several Brit assholes made it to the Rock 'N Roll joke Hall of Fame (it's in Cleveland Fucking Ohio for god's bloody sake) before even the great Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin and certainly before Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, Richard Perriman--in fact, are those three in the R 'n R joke Hall of Fame to this day? I'll tell I used to really go for the throat of any Brit swell who came to this country and tried to tell me how to respect the music that I partially invented. Like that rip-off bastard Elvis Costello. God I hate his ass--especially now that he thinks he's an American jazz singer. How embarrassing for an American musician, unless you've got leisure class decorum and have your nose up Elvis's ass. I resent to this day seeing our current culture's music controlled by an unknown black guy, a has-been disco queen, and a true Brit fop--and, yes, music is now totally fabricated and no longer invented--and it really pisses me off when I hear that Simon Farce shithead on Rupert Murdoch's moneymaker, American Idol, talking about the various no-talent kids who scramble like maniacs just to get a losing role on the show. I mean look at the American Idol notalents who are now Power Eliters in the music world, like Carrie Underwear--er-ah, Underwood, sorry--please, what is so special about her? Bonnie Raitt's a better C&W singer and I can't stand privileged Bonnie--her father was John Raitt--and he sent Bonnie to Harvard where she decided she could play and sing the blues as well as any black woman--like Koko Taylor. Or this little fop Clay Aiken or the big fat Burger King-eatin' fool--that big fat black guy--or how 'bout the AmerAsian clown who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket--yet, he became world famous and got booked as an act all around the country--in fact, he's still on teevee occasionally, though not like he used to be. That's a disgrace to this country's at one-time totally unique and most-interesting music--our blues and jazz--and the classical music of Charles Ives--still holding its own against whatever's left of American classical music.

The phoniness is what bothers me about DECORUM. Barack Obama is using his decorum to keep his nose in the buttcracks of the Power Elite Dumbocrats. Like now I'm reading that Barack Obama doesn't like Dr. Howard Dean and that's why he's not letting Dean stay as head of the Dumbocratic Party. Plus, and I must mention this, Obama is still intent on keeping John Brenner on his advisory team--finding out that Congress would be totally against agreeing to him for a cabinet post--so Obama's putting this little jerk war criminal in a position that Congress doesn't have to approve. What's wrong with Obama? His white side seems to be controlling him--a la the character Frank Gorshin played on the famous Twilight Zone where Gorshin played a guy who was white on one side of his body and black on the other--you talk about schizophrenic conflict! Such a shame. What a chance to become a living legend; yet, like all politicians, he's in bondage to the Power Elite that got him elected, and that includes the snakelike Rahm Emanuel--what a snake in the grass that wily bastard is:

Frank Gorshin as the two-race character on Twilight Zone.

I rest my case and my brain, whatever both were dealing with today! It's time for me to tune in, turn on, and drop out.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Some Raymond Loewy Designs for your delectation:

Loewy designed the LS/MFT pack of Luckies--and he smoked 'em, too.

The Pennsylvania Railroad S-1 "Streamlined" Locomotive--designed in 1937. The streamline body of this train was called a "shroud" because it's like a hood set down over the actual steam locomotive that is under it. The first streamline train was on the Union Pacific, "The Route of the Streamliners"--it's cowling was totally different than this one Loewy designed for the Pennsy.

You've seen it hundreds/thousands of times maybe--it was designed by Raymond Loewy!

Raymond Loewy-designed pottery/china

Raymond Loewy's Studebaker Avanti--the supercar of the 1960s. The Avanti set a land speed record for a regular old automobile on the Bonneville, Utah, Salt Flats--going over 200 mph, if I'm not exaggerating.

Raymond Loewy's Super Chef--the world's first countertop oven or "microwave"-looking oven.

Raymond Loewy's Coca-Cola can.

Raymond Loewy's very famous Torpedo-nose Studebaker (1949-50)

Raymond Loewy's first Greyhound bus design--he also designed the famous Greyhound Scenic Cruiser.

The Raymond Loewy House in Arizona--designed by Raymond/architect was Alfred Frey.

For more, here's the official Raymond Loewy Website:

www.raymondloewy.com/