A Course in Manners - 21 May 1999

Coming back to San Francisco and going into the elevator - the lift - of my hotel, I did what I naturally do. I took my hat off.

There was only one other person in the lift - a very old man. He was well set, very dapper, dressed in a tweed suit - which immediately told you something about his age.

I say very old, well just, I'd guess, going into his 80s. He wore sparkling glasses with gold frames and he turned to me with a sidelong smile.

"I hope," he said, "you didn't perform that gesture for my sake."

"No," I said, "I don't wear a hat indoors. If you'd been a lady, which is to say a char woman or a duchess, I should have swept it off."

"Ah yes," he said, "I used to but I was too often scolded by women's lib."

"So was I," I said, "but I'm too old to learn."

"Keep it up," he said as he tottered off down the corridor and I went on gliding up.

This reminded me of a small testy incident about two - three years ago which happened when I was on a Fifth Avenue bus and a young woman got up for her stop. She was very pregnant and she had a big shopping bag and as the bus lurched toward her stop she lurched a little trying to put on her coat.

I got up to help her and as my hand reached for her shoulder she positively whirled her great weight around.

"Don't give me that," she said.

I haven't been in a bus since. Not exactly because of that frightening woman. Even so I often wonder, as I follow the unpredictable swoopings and reversals of the various wings of the feminist movement, if it's now okay to offer a woman - and a young woman if very pregnant - your seat.

I'd assumed, until yesterday, that one thing you can be sure of about feminists young and old is that they're all fervently in favour of a woman's right to have an abortion.

The right is now enshrined in the Constitution. Not, of course, as an addition or an amendment in so many words, but in 1974 the Supreme Court decided that one of those lilting vague 18th Century phrases - something like "the equal protection of the laws", or how about "the right of the people to be secure in their persons" - anyway the court found, in that all-foreseeing document, a phrase which sanctioned a woman's right to have an abortion. The case is known as the case of Roe v Wade - one of the most memorable in American history.

And for the past four or five presidential elections a great majority of feminists of any hue voted for the candidate on that issue alone - never mind how he stood on education, welfare, social security, taxes, assisted suicide or any issue however pressing of foreign policy.

But now I see that the great one herself, Miss or Ms - I don't even know how she consents to be called - Madam Germaine Greer says that that landmark decision, before which some of the most eminent church people have sorrowfully given up their campaigns against abortion, is no good.

All that women got out of Roe v Wade, Ms Greer writes, is the right to undergo invasive procedures - that's the new modish word for operations - invasive procedures to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Unwanted not just by them but by their parents, their sexual partners, the government - who would not support mothers, the employers - who would not employ mothers, the landlords - who would not accept tenants with children, the schools that will not accept students with children.

And now, it appears, that all modern medicine - the technology that has to do with women anyway - contraception is an example of "male interference with conception and birth and turns a woman into a manmade non-mother."

In fact, she says, screening for breast cancer is also no help, just destroys a woman's peace of mind. Women, she says, are driven through the health system like sheep through a dip. The disease they're being treated for is womanhood.

Well it seems like comes the revolution and it'll be Germaine Greer against everybody.

Well no sooner had I encountered the nice old gentleman, unpacked my bag, read Germaine Greer and settled to a healing sip of the balm of Scotland, when the news came in that - what do you know? - the first item was from a western state - I'd better be careful - where there's a bill before the legislature to have a state law that requires a course that all taxi drivers and other civil servants must pass before they can get their licence. A course in manners.

I think the "other civil servants" was tossed in there after a roar like a tornado came up on the horizon. A volume of abuse and outrage from the taxi cab drivers. Now, I learn, the bill is to be extended, perhaps switched, to apply to schoolchildren.

The Mayor of New York - Mr Giuliani - had a similar idea a few months ago but it vanished from the agenda before you could say "Taxi!"

I think the problem there was, though a majority of cab drivers said "Yes, manners ought to be taught", they were then likely to specify which groups, which ethnic types, needed them most.

Well I don't know if the mayor or anyone else ever conducted a halfway scientific survey but I can tell you the provisional finding of my own galloping poll, which I've been conducting for at least 40 years, so I can't be accused of the favourite anecdotal failing of the human race - what doctors call anecdotal and logicians call 'the one case induction method'.

I was in the presence of a member of the certified intelligentsia and I mentioned several of the overwhelming statistical studies done in the past 40 years in the United States, Sweden, Britain, France, Germany, Finland - name your country - 200,000 men studied for 10 years with a control group and placebo, so on, to show overwhelming evidence that prolonged cigarette smoking can cause lung cancer.

The man said: "I have a brother-in-law who smokes three packs a day and he doesn't have lung cancer." Enough.

On the question of do taxi drivers need a course in manners 80% say yes and at once tell you which ethnic minority needs it most. There's the rub.

There's no 80% to say we all need lessons. Also it's not an 80% majority in favour of teaching anything to the same lot of people - they all have their prejudices and every ethnic group has its pet scapegoat, always on the assumption that they themselves are pure and polite and without flaw.

If I start telling you which groups immediately make scapegoats of which others I'll be in trouble with all of them. But I have reached a tentative conclusion.

In my experience, which as I'd say goes back to the end of the Second War, in any trade, any part of American life, the incoming immigrants at first resent the established ones and the established resent the new for the natural reason - the oldsters think they're going to lose their jobs. Then the new settle down.

The first big army of new taxi drivers in the 40s and 50s was the Puerto Ricans. They were suspicious of the average New Yorker for a while 'till they became average New Yorkers themselves. Then we had Colombians. Both now feared the old established New York taxi drivers - Irishmen, Germans, Italians, Jews, blacks - but they grew old, retired and their children did not take over, according to the old American theory of a dream that the child always does better than the man.

In the succeeding decades the Central Americans began to fade away. You have to realise that for 30 years or more taxi driving is what they now call an entry profession - a first job. So by now we've had Haitian French and Colombians, Romanians and Mexicans and Russians, Ukrainians and no doubt soon we'll have some Kosovo cab drivers.

The secret conclusion I've discovered is this. In a general city survey throughout the United States 85% of Americans agree that public manners are worse than they were 30 years ago.

Thirty years ago is an odd decade to pick - the 60s, the era of the hippies, the flagrant show-off rebels, the non-conformists in everything who were, themselves, more conforming than the conformity they mocked. They all wore shaggy or dyed hair, torn jeans and played guitars. I never met a hippy who had a Clark Gable haircut, a white shirt - dirty white shirt even - and played the piccolo.

My discovery then is this: that the people who strikingly have nicer manners than their fellow drivers are the recent immigrants from Communist countries.

When I get a driver who says: "Good morning" - or, heavens, "Good morning, sir" - asks me how I am, plays classical music on the radio and enquires - happens about five times a year - if it disturbs me, 10 to one - no 85 to 15 - he's from Russia, Ukraine, Latvia or other collapsed Communist country.

There's a note common to all of them which we never had from our more robust old types, the traditional drivers - German, Italian, Jews, blacks - it's a note of wanting to please but also a note of deference. And then the awful realisation occurs: they have come from countries mediaeval in their manners because they've always lived in regimes where they were virtual serfs and deference was required if not demanded.

I must say it's very nice while it lasts. But pretty soon, as the old rascal Mr Frick - Carnegie's ruthless steel partner - said when an established wave of immigrant workmen called a strike against a submissive new wave of workers, said: "The immigrant, however dumb, however illiterate, learns too soon."

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