obsolete concept, that politeness was an obsolete concept – that the United States
itself was an obsolete concept;
f) School teachers who could not speak or write grammatically, could not spell,
could not cipher;
g) The nation’s leading farm state had as its biggest cash crop an outlawed plant
that was the source of the major outlawed drug;
h) Cocaine and heroin called `recreational drugs’, felonious theft called
‘joyriding’, vandalism by gangs called ‘trashing’, burglary called ‘ripping off’,
felonious assault by gangs called `mugging’ and all of these treated as `boys will
be boys’, so scold them and put them on probation but don’t ruin their lives by
treating them as criminals;
i) Millions of women who found it more rewarding to have babies out of wedlock than
it would be to get married or to go to work.
I don’t understand time line three (code Neil Armstrong) so I had better quote Jubal
Harshaw, who lived through it. `Mama Maureen,’ he said to me, ‘the America of my
time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has
eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect
democracy, a “warm body” democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count
equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the
wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and-lack of
self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that
each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and
welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes for his own self-interest as
he sees it… which for the majority translates as “Bread and Circuses”.
`”Bread and Circuses” is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there
is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the
franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, the day marks the
beginning of the end of that state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote
themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the
body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or
in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader – the barbarians enter
Rome.’
Jubal shrugged and looked sad. `Mine was a lovely world until the parasites took
over.’
Jubal Harshaw also pointed out to me a symptom that, so he says, invariably precedes
the collapse of a culture; a decline in good manners, in common courtesy, in a
decent respect for the rights of other people.
‘Political philosophers from Confucius to the present day have repeatedly pointed
this out. But the first signs of this fatal symptom may be hard to spot. Does it
really matter when a honorific is omitted? Or when a junior calls a senior by his
first name, uninvited? Such loosening of protocol may be hard to evaluate. But there
is one unmistakable sign of the collapse of good manners: dirty public washrooms.
‘In a healthy society public restrooms, toilets, washrooms, look and smell as clean
and fresh as a bathroom in a decent private home. In a sick society -‘ Jubal stopped
and simply looked disgusted.
He did not need to elaborate; I had seen it happen in my own time line. In the first
part of the twentieth century right through the thirties people at all levels of
society were habitually polite to each other and it was taken for granted that
anyone using a public washroom tried hard to leave the place as clean and neat as he
Page 143
Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset.txt
found it. As I recall, decent behaviour concerning public washrooms started to slip
during World War Two, and so did good manners in general. By the sixties and the
seventies rudeness of all sorts had become commonplace, and by then I never used a
public restroom if I could possibly avoid it.
Offensive speech, bad manners, and filthy toilets all seem to go together.
America in my own time line suffered the cancer of `Bread and Circuses’ but found a