The Mean Season : We seem a lot ruder lately--acts of kindness make news. But truth is, we’ve been nasty to each other for ages.

Read this story, dirt bag!

Yeah, we’re talking to you.

And no, we don’t care if it offends your precious sensibilities. In case you’re too stupid to have noticed--and you probably are--this country seems to have turned a lot meaner and ruder lately. To get a clue, try stepping into a crosswalk. As humorist Henry Beard notes: Once upon a time, for a New Yorker visiting Los Angeles, that was an unnerving experience.

“Cars would always stop for you,” he marvels. “You’d hear the brakes screech and you’d assume, being from Manhattan, that the only possible explanation was the driver planned to get out and kill you.”

Today, the once-venerated California pedestrian must dodge traffic like a matador. And Beard sees the change as part of a much larger shift: a meltdown of courtesy, a wave of in-your-face aggressiveness and a collective mean streak that has snaked into schools, churches, the media-- everything.

The kinder gentler nation has fallen and it can’t get up:

* Television commercials used to compare the sponsor’s product to an anonymous “Brand X.” Now, advertisers such as MCI and AT & T openly refer to each other as corporate scum.

* Greeting card companies have added “Drop dead” and “You’re an [expletive]” messages to their product lines. Other entrepreneurs deliver bouquets of dead flowers and revenge-o-grams of rotting fish.

* High school sports leagues have started banning postgame handshakes to avoid fistfights.

* News reports are laced with stories of fatal duels over parking spaces, loud stereos and subway seats.

“We’re playing tag with hate,” says Dr. Mark Goulston, a Santa Monica psychiatrist.

Then again, who even wants to be nice when the chief apostles of it are Barney the Dinosaur and Mr. Rogers?

Still, things could be worse.

Go back to almost any period in history--the Old West, 18th-Century London, ancient Rome--and it’s hard to conclude, despite the absence of Howard Stern, that previous generations were somehow more civil than this one.

“It’s easy to idealize the past,” says historian William McNeill, “but human beings have been very nasty to each other for a very long time.”

People in the Middle Ages didn’t carry swords as a fashion statement, he notes. And frontier America was a far cry from “Little House on the Prairie.”

Indeed, when anthropologists dug up one Old West graveyard a few years ago, they found that two-thirds of the men under age 45 had died violently. Among the victims: William Johnson, whose head was blown off by his father-in-law’s shotgun after he made the faux pas of mentioning at the dinner table that he had fought for the Union in the Civil War.

Even politics had more venom in the old days. Dianne Feinstein and Michael Huffington seem as wimpy as “tastes great” versus “less filling” when compared to their forebears. In 1804, for instance, then-Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel. And in 1856, South Carolina Congressman Preston Smith Brooks repeatedly thwacked a cane onto the head of Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, crippling him.

In short, McNeill says, although “it’s tempting to think we’re going to hell in a handbasket . . . there’s a long way to [travel] before we get back to the levels of the past.”

But others argue that the current decline of civility is unprecedented. And they blame everything from microwave ovens to Jack in the Box hamburger ads.

*

Lauren Burton has had a ringside seat on the passage from We Decade to Me Decade to Up Yours Decade. As director of the L.A. County Bar Assn.’s dispute resolution office, she has noticed a surge in neighbor-to-neighbor combat lately.

In Encino, it was a two-year jihad of lawsuits, countersuits and water-hose fights over the noise of a bouncing basketball. In the San Gabriel Valley, it was spitting, more water squirting and an outdoor light aimed through a bedroom window because of a shedding pecan tree.

In Long Beach, it was a double homicide sparked by a longstanding argument over the volume of a stereo.

Each year, thousands of such feuds erupt in the cities and suburbs of Southern California, Burton says. It’s the 1990s sequel to the Hatfields and McCoys, whose infamous battle supposedly began with an 1860 dispute over a hog and ultimately claimed 20 lives.

“People think of two things now when they have a conflict,” she says. “One is revenge, the other is, ‘Sue the bastard.’ ”

Part of the trouble, she suggests, is a clash of cultures. As neighborhoods become more diverse, the differing backgrounds and desires can create a social powder keg.

Throw in a little overcrowding, take away some religion, add a dose of hippie wisdom and things can get completely out of hand, experts say.

Especially in the United States.

Unlike Japan, for instance, which crams citizens closer together but counters possible side effects with “a culture that has historically chosen rules and conformity over freedom, we took the crowding but didn’t suppress our [liberties],” says Rex Julian Beaber, a psychologist and attorney.

And there’s a price to pay.

“It’s a function of anonymity,” he says. “In a small town, everyone knows everyone and your reputation is changed for life if you do something bad. [In a big city], you can kill in a crowd and walk away.”

Or, as psychiatrist Goulston puts it: “One reason more people are jerks is because they know they can get away with it. Years ago, we thought someone would stop us or punish us or our conscience would bother us. Now, police are overworked, religion is ignored and students have no fear of teachers; teachers have fear of students.”

The effect is disastrous, Beaber says: “As a kid, if you had asked me what would happen if I told my teacher to drop dead, I would have said that life as we know it would end. . . . The great secret of teachers and societies [is that] they control behavior not through actual consequences, but through fear of consequences.

“Once that secret got out--that we can’t really catch everyone and punish them adequately--it liberated evil in our culture.”

*

Some say the seeds of modern meanness were sown--or perhaps smoked--in the 1960s.

“Letting it all hang out was seen as an antidote to the cellophane-wrapped placidity of the Eisenhower era,” says film critic Michael Medved. “Courtesy and gentility [came to be viewed], by their very nature, as insincere.”

Thirty years later, writes syndicated columnist Judith Martin (a.k.a. Miss Manners), “it turns out that dear old hypocrisy, inhibitions and artificiality, daintily wrapped in a package called etiquette, were protecting us from forms of natural behavior that even the most vehement opponents of etiquette find intolerable. . . .

“Oddly enough, the very people who are proudest to be free of those tiresome rules are loudest in denouncing rudeness directed toward themselves. The fact that dispensing with etiquette means becoming the victim, as well as the perpetrator, of rudeness does not seem to have occurred to anyone.”

The ‘60s also intensified another ingredient in the Rudeness Revolution: Technology.

“In our effort to do things quicker and race around, we’ve developed unrealistic expectations about other people and how quickly they should respond to us and understand us,” Goulston says. “And when we’re in a rush, we’re nastier.”

Call it the microwave oven theory of belligerent behavior.

Not everything can be pinned on the ‘60s, though.

The 1970s contributed the cult of the individual, which has elevated selfishness to an art form. “People who are nasty don’t believe in too many things besides their own entitlement,” Goulston says.

Other observers point to the ‘70s as a time of eroding reverence for life--through increased acceptance of abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty--that has filtered into day-to-day dealings.

Also from that decade: the legacy of the burger and cola wars. Jack in the Box started the trend, with an attack ad aimed at McDonald’s. Then Pepsi opened fire on Coke. Today, the practice has mutated into no-holds-barred mud-wrestling matches between politicians, long-distance phone giants and credit card companies.

And it has spread to the populace at large, commentators say.

“There’s a cynicism about playing by the rules,” Goulston says. “Virtue isn’t seen as its own reward. It’s seen as a sign of foolishness. Nice guys finish last.”

Psychologist Beaber adds: “What you got for being genteel in the past was that the other side behaved the same way. Once people began to violate those rules--basically to get a competitive edge--everyone else stopped surrendering their rights.”

*

On Feb. 15, 1994, gentility officially qualified as deviant behavior. That’s when Oprah did a show on people who commit random acts of senseless kindness.

Suddenly, on national TV, an ominous truth set in: Nice people had become the freaks.

The rest of the country seemed to be moving down the trail blazed by New York, which for years had been pioneering new and innovative alternatives to politeness.

It’s gotten so bad, according to the New York Times, that the city “appears to be the most foul-mouthed [place] in the nation, rivaling only prison and the armed forces.”

Close behind in the need- to- have- their- mouths- washed- out- with- soap department are movies and music. Films for adults now average 70 to 80 expletives each, the profanity article notes.

Pop music lyrics have also sunk to an all-time low. In a Newsweek column decrying songs that he believes glorify rape, George Will wrote: “America today is capable of terrific intolerance about smoking, or toxic waste that threatens trout. But only a deeply confused society is more concerned about protecting lungs than minds, trout than black women.”

Still, civility supporters do see rays of hope.

Beaber says a resurrection of manners is already under way among America’s “most savage humans: lawyers.” The L.A. County court system has “promulgated new rules of courtesy” to halt “increasingly volatile, vicious and demonic attacks” between attorneys, Beaber says.

And there’s more to come as society scrambles to deal with phenomena that previous generations couldn’t even have imagined.

“We’ll see increasing attempts to formalize what was before an unspoken social norm,” he says. “For example, it used to be that a manufacturer of children’s games wouldn’t dream of creating a game where you cut off a person’s head and it squirts blood.”

Now, with grisly video games like Mortal Kombat on the market, “The Senate is holding hearings and [might create] rules to stop this,” Beaber says.

Even if such efforts draw fire from civil libertarians, he predicts that “the middle class is sufficiently tired of the effects of the breakdown of [decency] that they’re going to be willing to give up [some freedoms].”

He likens it to gun-control laws. “The Brady bill wasn’t passed because of liberals, who always supported [such regulations]. It was passed because conservatives had seen [so much] carnage in schools and on the streets that they deserted the conservative ship.”

*

Others contend “niceness laws” won’t work. But their alternatives sound hokey, impractical or both.

Dispute-fixer Burton, for example, says, “We should divide the city into 365 areas and hold a ‘Get to Know Your Neighbors Day’ for each of the neighborhoods over the next year.

“It’s harder to be inappropriate and confrontational with someone you really know,” she explains.

Goulston’s advice is merely “count to 10” before reacting to someone else’s behavior. He admits it might sound naive, but says small-scale efforts can pay off: “That’s why some Neighborhood Watch programs are more effective than police.”

Even the federal government has gone altruistic. In February, it announced National Random Acts of Kindness Day, which advised putting coins into someone else’s parking meter, anonymously buying ice cream cones for kids or mailing greeting cards to strangers.

Meanwhile, in New York, satirist Beard--who co-founded the National Lampoon--says what the country really needs is a dose of humor.

With political correctness at an apex, he observes, too many Americans are ready to blow up at the slightest provocation. “It’s an unfortunate combination of events. We’re getting nastier and oversensitive at the same time. People oughta lighten up.”

And then there’s Timothy Miller.

A psychologist and author from Stockton, he insists that the whole meanness thing is an illusion: “People are reacting primarily to what they see on TV news and too little to what’s really going on.”

In truth, he says, crime rates are flat, manners just seem to be in decline because there are more older people and they always think youngsters are beasts, and “events like freeway shootings--although appalling and emotionally gripping--are extremely rare.”

*

Most other observers, however, suggest oblivion could be just around the corner.

The so-called era of gentility, they say, which began in the 1850s and lingered into this century, was an aberration, a fluke.

And it’s comatose.

History is on the side of harshness and brutality, says McNeill, a retired University of Chicago professor and author of 25 books.

What changed things in modern times was the Industrial Revolution. Before that, says historian Richard Maxwell Brown, major cities were racked by riots and street crime.

“Because industry couldn’t thrive with [that kind of] disorder,” a massive crackdown began on public drunkenness, vagrancy and other crimes, he says. Modern police departments evolved--modeled after the bobbies of London, who debuted in 1840.

And a heavy value was placed on order.

“That held through the 1950s,” he says. “In the 1960s, we began to move out of the industrial era into the Information Age. In a way, society and all the values just fell apart.”

The term coined in the ivory towers is “post-industrial chaos.”

The national short fuse.

“I’m not sure if this is a transitional phase or if we’re stuck with it,” says Brown, who teaches at the University of Oregon. “I don’t know if you can put the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Ultimately, discussions of this sort come back to a question of human nature.

Call it Original Sin, call it a biological inclination to violence, call it a reaction to improper toilet training, but the story is still the same: The human heart is clouded by darkness.

“One of the great attempts to civilize man,” says psychologist Beaber, was in Okinawa in the 1600s. The Japanese conquered the island and banned all weapons. The result? Okinawans created karate, which translates as “empty hands,” a method to fight without weapons.

“We are so dedicated to violence that even when weapons are taken away, we figure out another way to do battle,” Beaber says.

And that impulse is still there.

“If you could read the mind of Joe Blow Civilized Driver after he gets cut off on the freeway, it is as bestial, vicious and rapacious as a tiger,” Beaber says. “He may not act it out by beating the [other driver] with a tire iron, but that’s his impulse and his fantasy.”

In a 1994 pastoral letter, America’s Catholic bishops sounded a similar theme, saying, “It is futile to suggest we can end all violence . . . merely by our own efforts. . . . We must realize that peace is most fundamentally a gift from God.”

Any solution that doesn’t include prayer, they wrote, will inevitably fall short.

Goulston suspects another element is needed.

“Americans never act until there’s some sort of a wake-up call,” he says.

Could that be the Oklahoma City bombing?

Goulston doesn’t know.

“But if that isn’t it,” he wonders, “then what kind of wake-up call will it take?”