(the) American (Novel of)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Etiquette and Missile Defense
ROBIN TRUTH GOODMAN
rom a widespread appeal to family values as an answer to
perceived social dissolution, 1 F to a repeated call to end the bipartisan
bickering in Washington, to the press’s disapprobation
of negative add campaigns without defining what counts as negative, to
the current mainstreaming of the belief that social and political criticism
of policy is both uncivil and unpatriotic, to suggesting that charactertraining
programs be implemented in schools as the solution to youth
violence, even to the culture wars on canon, the mainstream media
have made etiquette newsworthy. The current popular obsession with
wayward behaviors marks a growing sense of insecurity that finds its
parallels in an economy where futures are uneasy, 2 where the social net,
labor and environmental rights, and protections against the business
cycle have disappeared, 3 where jobs are flexible and short-lived.
Like behavior, the market is disorderly. The unruly 1960s has led,
right-wing moralizers would argue, to behavioral disarray, with presidents
who smoke pot and get blow jobs, and the civility of a former
era of integrity, respect, and sexual propriety needs to be restored. Some
have argued that terrorism has resulted from this mismanagement of
values, either because the terrorists themselves have not learned the
proper behavior of tolerance, or because changing academic practices—
feminism, gay and lesbian studies, postmodernism, cultural studies,
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