Most people, even Donald Trump, have probably heard of Miss Manners. They may not know this is the pen name of Judith Martin. I didn’t know this prior to beginning to write this Substack.
In 1978, Martin began writing an advice column, which was distributed three and later six times a week by Universal Uclick and carried in more than 200 newspapers worldwide. In the column, she answers etiquette questions contributed by her readers and writes short essays on problems of manners, or clarifies the essential qualities of politeness.
Martin writes about the ideas and intentions underpinning seemingly simple rules, providing a complex and advanced perspective, which she refers to as "heavy etiquette theory". Her columns have been collected in a number of books. In her writings, Martin refers to herself in the third person (e.g., "Miss Manners hopes...").
In a 1995 interview by Virginia Shea, Martin said:
You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, "We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!" Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them...
Martin identifies "blatant greed" as the most serious etiquette problem in the United States. The most frequently asked question she receives is how to politely demand cash from potential gift-givers (which she answers by stating that there is no polite way to do this), and the second most common question is how much potential guests must spend on a gift (determined by what the giver can afford, not by the event, relationship, related expenses or other factors).
This brings me to something that struck me in the New York Times today. The last two sentences in the following excerpt from their editorial board’s opinion piece “Trump’s Third-Term Musings Are Part of a Pattern” led me to make one comment.
The editorial concldued as follows:
In the decades since 1951, politicians from both parties occasionally called for the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, including Harry Truman and Mitch McConnell. But they did not argue that the amendment was unclear or could simply be evaded. They recognized that somebody who disagrees with a law should follow a legal process to change it. If Mr. Trump and his acolytes believe they have Congress and the states on their side, they are free to start a repeal campaign. What they should not do is pretend that any part of the Constitution is merely a suggestion. It’s the law.
My comment shown above was “What they are doing is treating the Constitution as a kind of Miss Manners guide to etiquette which is easily ignored and unenforceable.”
Next down the page were the following comments. They represent most of the other 168 other opinions and reactions posted at the time of this writing.
Here’s the entire long post from George:
To a considerable degree, of course, Trump is grandstanding to his MAGA devotees with such talk. And it is indeed somewhat concerning given the fact that Trump has revealed that he has no real knowledge of the US Constitution and it's controlling role. But as worrisome as these pretensions are it is perhaps yet another sign too that Trump is not of sound mind? After all, over the past twelve months we've essentially traded in one elderly man for another. And we did so with some concern that the first one, Joe Biden, was suffering from cognitive decline due to aging. So should we really be surprised that we may now be encountering the reality of what happens when a POTUS begins to mentally "slip"? In 2024 the Democrats themselves tore down Joe Biden by calling into question his mental state. It was an act of political self-harming that has had dire consequences for the Nation. We cannot and should not expect the Republicans to act similarly now with regard to Donald Trump. He's apparently mentally slipping badly while tossing out Executive Orders on whim and fantasy. Yet the media remains silent to what is actually going on. I'm not worried about Trump having a third term. I much more concerned with how are we going to survive his second?
Here are the next comments (click to enlarge)
Getting back to good manners and etiquette and Donald J. Trump, who, lest we forget is the president. He’s president of the United States, not the president of Delta Tau Chi fraternity, otherwise known as Animal House.
Trump certainly knows how to mind his manners when he wants to. He just doesn’t give a shit about behaving in a way that adheres to any rules of etiquitte, let alone the rules in the United States Constitution.
Why make sure he follows the Constitution, the Law of the Land, when he treats the simple rules of good manners as irrelevant? These rules, while not actual laws, are all focused on behaving in ways that respect the feelings and sensibilities of other people. They require that one be sensitive to whether things they say, write, or do will offend someone. Offending other countries, which of course are collections of people, fuggedaboutit.
From wearing a blue suit to Pope Francis’s funeral to posting a photoshop of himself as the next pope, he insulted Catholics around the world. According to the dress code required by Vatican officials for Pope Francis' funeral, men were required to wear a dark suit, along with a long black tie. Trump showed up in blue. (Read article in Snopes.)
You can see the contrast in colors between what he wore and what Melania wore below.
Some people on X tried to excuse this by trying to find other men wearing blue suits and noting that Zelenskyy didn’t even wear a suit.
The salient point here isn’t whether or not the blue suit was appropriate attire for this solemn occasion.
The point is that if he gave a damn about good manners he would have worn the traditional black suit with a black or dark tie. I doubt he even thought about this. He probably just decided to wear this on a whim. Below is Trump with his signature red tie when he addressed the United Nations:
At least he didn’t wear a suit with a bright red tie at the funeral, let alone one of these:
Thanks for reading my Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts by email.
Former Vice President Mike Pence decided not to mention his old boss when he went to pick up a ‘courage’ award for defying him.
Pence received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award at the JFK Library in Boston Sunday for his refusal to endorse false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump—which made him the No. 1 target for Trump’s supporters during the Jan. 6 riots.
The JFK Library Foundation lauded Pence for “putting his life and career on the line to ensure the constitutional transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.” Despite this, Pence failed to mention Trump in his 10-minute acceptance speech.
As far as I can tell Trump had no reaction to this and my hunch is that he didn’t watch it. For one thing, it wasn’t on regular TV and could only be viewed on streaming video. It’s possible segments of it will be aired on TV today.
We may never know what Pence was feeling when the following photos were taken:
Pence seemed to worship Trump like he was a deity, if not the Second Coming.
I think he should look at his receiving this award as the beginning of his redemption, but see this only as just the first step. He’s made it clear how he feels about Trump now. Treating him as a character in the Harry Potter books who don’t dare utter the name Voldemort he should emulate Harry, Ron, and Hermoine who called him by name.
This is from an article in Screen Rant:
In the books, Deathly Hallows introduced that a Taboo curse was placed on Voldemort's name. The curse made it possible for anyone who said his name to instantly be located by the Death Eaters, giving them the ability to find whoever said it.
For full redemption Pence has to explain why he was taken in by Trump, reveal how he felt and thought about Trump and what he was doing at the time, and explain how he feels about it at present. He must offer a full throated apology and not be content to bask in the afterglow of what he did on January 6th..
“Tonight, Mike Pence will receive a ‘Profile in Courage’ award from the JFK Presidential Library. Mike Pence is many things, but a ‘profile in courage’ is not one of them.
Mike Pence is an arsonist.”
Thanks for reading my Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts by email.
I made the SS illustration above by adding a U and an A to an SS. The motto of the SS was telling in the context of today's Trump regime. It was Meine Ehre heißt Treue. This translates to My honor is loyalty. Of course their loyalty was to Adolph Hitler. Certainly not all, but some of Trump’s armed thugs, whether in ICE or other so-federal law enforcement agencies, are loyal not to the Constitution despite taking an oath to uphold it. They are loyal, like the Nazis, to one person. That person is Donald J. Trump.
The Trump SS are not upholding the law unless you consider Trump’s law, “The Law.”
They are not what I’d call real cops who protect, serve, and enforce the law. A real cop may write you a speeding ticket, hopefully making you a safer driver, but they also protect you from real ciminals. They get drunk drivers off the road. They help you if you’re in a traffic accident or if someone breaks into your house.
If your child is doesn’t come home from school you call your local police. You don’t call ICE unless you think they were arrested in a raid. I wouldn’t be confident that you’d get a reassuring response in the later case.
The people who may or may not be members of violent gangs are being treated like they are bloodthirsty beasts who, were they not chained and bent over, might turn and rip the throats out of their captors. Who wants to treat fellow human beings this way?
Whenever I see pictures, like the one below, of an ICE officer wearing POLICE on their uniform it enrages me because they don’t deserve to be called police.
I take this personally because I have had lots of experience with the police. This is because I was an auxiliary police officer for 20 years in two different cities.
I feel strongly about this because I knew dozens of police officers. In the two departments where I was an auxiliary officer I rode with regular officers countless times. What we did most of the time on late night shifts was look for drunk drivers. In Mason, Michigan our department was honored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving with their Lifesaver Award twice. As a psychotherapist one of my specialities was police stress. I had the number one website about this for years, Police Stressline, and some of my articles were published in police magazines.
Today the ultimate boss of federal law enforcement has broken, bent, or ignored the law. He is their role model. They not only don’t have an incentive to consider that what they are doing defies the Constitution, but that there would be swift retribution if they refused to follow an unconstitutional or illegal order. As for them being a decent person who feels empathy for everyone except the most brutal criminals? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Studies show that 1-3% of the US population (3% of men) are psychopaths. While this may seem like a small number, if we say the total population is around 350 million this adds up to over 10 million people. There are certainly enough of them to take jobs in one of Trump’s SS agencies.
Sabrina Haake wrote Governance by deception and this prompted me to respond with the comment below.
Drinking the Kool-Aid, indeed, but this well known phrase coming from Jonestown prompted me to wonder what it would taste like. I doubt even Kool-Aid would mask the taste. The following is from a 2006 newspaper article in Australia.
....
The case is a tragedy, but a doctor says it solved a long unanswered question - what does the deadly poison cyanide taste like?
An Indian man who committed suicide left a hastily scrawled note describing the taste of the fatal toxin, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported on Saturday.
"Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid," he wrote, according to the paper.....
This leads me to wonder how brainwashed those who are drinking both his cyanide laced economic Kool-Aid and all his other poisonous policies have to be not to taste it. The sickly sweet drink may or may not mask the taste of the poison Trump is feeding the country.
Trump is using his poison to murder democracy. We don't need a taste test to verify this. We just need common sense.
To 500 to 1000 cc of the solution to be tested add 1 to 2 cc ammonium sulphide, (NH4)2S, and evaporate just to dryness. The final stages of evaporation should be done slowly. Cool, add 10 cc water, stir well, let settle, and filter. To the filtrate add 2 drops of saturated ferric chloride, FeCl3, solution. A red coloration indicates the presence of cyanide.
Thanks for reading my Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.
