I imagine while growing up Jimmy Carter’s mother kept telling him he was better than all the other children in Plains, Georgia were.  A younger Carter brother missed the lessons but Jimmy made sure he didn’t wipe his mouth with a sleeve and didn’t play in his Sunday best.  At some point, I imagine, Jimmy harbored a disdain for the other kids teasing him for being such a square, a stick in the mud and a momma’s boy.  Brother Billy said “Hell, no”, and popped the tab on another beer.  Billy must have been a racist.

Most of you know I grew up in rural America.  My people were bright but I wouldn’t exactly argue they were mannerly.  My Uncle Frank used a sawed off cardboard milk carton as a spittoon.  He’d spend Sundays on a couch, chewing tobacco and waiting for Grandma to bring him food.  At Thanksgiving, he’d tell dirty jokes and the other adults would just glower at him.  My dad had a reputation in local taverns for being a really, really mean drunk. 

What else I remember of these two men are the long talks I had with them about life.  When I was 13, I went with Uncle Frank in his truck on a long haul.  He explained back home there were people who thought their “s*** doesn’t stink”, and he offered some family histories otherwise.  Every family has an Uncle Frank and a brother like Billy Carter.  Frank marveled at the efforts some people made to distance themselves from their own flesh and blood and from a few neighbors who knew all about the personal demons the swells attempted to wash away.  My old man liked opera and had always regretted he failed to learn to play the piano.  You can say I saw two sides of these men and while one side wasn’t as civilized as many would like it was clear they did use their noggins for thinking.  Sometimes. 

Joe Wilson is learning the lessons the swells want all of us to remember.  You can’t have a say in the public debate until you wash, put on some nice clothes and speak in a refined manner.  In other words, the swells are setting the rules in an effort to exclude.  Swells include most elected politicians, members of the media and a handful of old schoolteachers telling me no longer to send them email messages.  If we don’t talk “real nice like”, we’ve got to go stand in the corner. 

This morning there is a new column from the New York Times David Brooks.  Brooks was once a fire-breathing conservative but then he adopted manners when hired by the Times.  He posits today Wilson and tea party patriots aren’t racists but just the latest strain in populist American politics.  Andrew Jackson wasn’t renowned for his manners.  From Brooks’s pen “We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.” 

“Progressive” is a strange term in that it asserts progress but the folks who cloak themselves in it are following some old rules promulgated by Miss Lillian Carter.  Miss Lillian, Billy Carter, Uncle Frank and my dad are all dead.  Wherever they went, I’m not at all sure there is any specific social order. 

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