Michael, Bill and the Coarse Chorus

It was anticlimactic, coming the day after Michael Jordan resigned on live television as president of the planet.

Yet the televised Senate trial of that other president with deceptive fakes and moves, Bill Clinton, went forward anyway Thursday with House prosecutors unfurling charges that his actions in office--tumbling out from the Monica Lewinsky affair--merit his removal. And with some Americans hoping that he would follow Jordan into retirement, banking that the nation would fare much better without him than the hobbled NBA and Chicago Bulls would minus Michael.

Now right on cue also, as the nation’s elected elite continue growling at each other, comes a PBS trio of fairly closely matched “National Desk” documentaries that find an “erosion of civility” in U.S. life.

Tonight’s opening program is reported by managing editor Morton Kondracke, whose most regular TV gig these days is as commentator on the Fox News Channel. Encumbered by his deadly narration, its menu of lecturing heads ranges from serious academics to radio know-it-all Laura Schlessinger and prissy “Miss Manners” columnist Judith Martin. Some of these sound bites are engaging individually, but together unpersuasively support the hour’s title, “We the (rude) People.” Only some of the people.

And even this depends on your point of view. As actor Richard Dreyfuss notes tonight: “What is one person’s courage is another person’s rudeness.”

Another Fox News Channel regular, NPR’s Mara Liasson, is reporter for next week’s second and strongest of the hours, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sleaze,” and humorist-director David Steinberg for the third, “The Popular Culture: Who’s to Blame.” It’s an amusing, but familiar finger-pointing narrative on the arts that unfortunately ignores those media threads that connect life on the mean streets with entertainment. As in somber news events being presented on TV as entertainment, narrowing the gap separating “NYPD Blue” from the body bags viewers face at 6 p.m.

CBS News Oils the Rancor

There’s a lot of untested common wisdom in these documentaries that air on consecutive Fridays, the assumption being that the U.S. has become a fast lane where road rage prevails. And to some extent, that’s true. Look around, and what do you see if not impoliteness, from ever-coarser entertainment to media spewing all the Drudge that’s unfit to print to a federal government at war with itself, freeze-framing Clinton in political limbo the way Jordan once hung in the stratosphere en route to the hoop.

CBS News oiled this rancor Wednesday night with an interesting profile of David Schippers on the solid premiere of its new “60 Minutes II.” Schippers is the salty Chicago Democrat and ferocious true believer who, as counsel for the GOP majority on the House Judiciary Committee, urged its attack of Clinton--whom he twice voted for--that led to this week’s trial.

Correspondent Carol Marin reminded Schippers what many of his fellow Democrats say, that “he’s a moralist, he’s a purist, he’s an old-fashioned . . . Democrat . . . who doesn’t get it.” To which Schippers’ bristled: “I get it. I get it plenty. And if I have my way, everybody else is gonna get it before I leave town.” He surely didn’t mean “get it” in a lethal sense. Yet his menace recalled scowling Clinton toadie James Carville bitterly declaring war against Republicans seeking the president’s ouster.

Not friendly. Not civil. But stepping back from this cannibalizing epicenter, are these carnivores any more representative of Americans than the road kills who perform for Jerry Springer?

The ever-dignified Jordan was not uncivil Wednesday. Unless it’s rude to be 15 minutes late to your own televised press conference and then routinely credit yourself with erasing Chicago’s “gangster” image, as if the town that Frank Sinatra sang about were famous only for Al Capone prior to Jordan and the Bulls assenting to the heavens in the 1990s. In this case, though, better a gent than historian.

If American civility is eroding, moreover, try squaring that with stunning U.S. declines in violent crimes. The national murder rate for 1997, the last year for which U.S. figures are available, was the lowest in 30 years, and the number of all violent crimes the lowest in 24 years. And in Los Angeles, where newscasts send viewers to bed with visions of thugs lurking outside their doors, homicides dove 28% last year, the sixth straight year of decline. Doesn’t this indicate more civility?

Not that there aren’t plenty of hotheads who are quick with a weapon, an epithet or middle finger when something ticks them off. Or hip-shooters who are fast on the dial with an angry call.

In tonight’s “National Desk” segment, Deborah Tannen of Georgetown University cites technology, from telephones to the Internet, for providing a cover of anonymity for angry Americans who would be less likely to launch a tirade in a face-to-face encounter.

Is it just as possible, though, that Americans are no less civil today than in the past, but that it seems that rage is rising only because it is magnified out of proportion to reality by some of the technology that Tannen notes? That television and talk radio, too, are echo chambers that swell vocalized emotions to choruses of ear-piercing shrieks by virtue of their extended resonance? Or that paranoia-feeding TV newscasts give a false impression by ignoring statistics and continuing to suckle crime and mayhem like new babes out of the womb?

No wonder nostalgia is so soothing.

Remembering the Good Old Days

Yet beware of amnesiacs calling for a return to the good old days when Andy Griffith was still sheriff of Mayberry, as “National Desk” seems to be doing, with former Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder speaking wistfully next week about “the civil society that we grew up with.” Oh, sure. What Schroeder and others of a similar mind refer to is an age whose miseries they’ve erased from memory.

The notion that the U.S. was once significantly kinder and gentler--that our backwaters of history include a Golden Age of Civility--doesn’t quite track. Just ask casualties of McCarthyism or African Americans and other minorities who earlier were victimized by prejudice in those civil, silk-stockinged good old days. In my own history, there was nothing civil about the kids who called me a kike in school. Or in my own behavior when I and other heavily pimpled teenage male connoisseurs of femaleness make fun of girls whose looks (the operative word was “pig”) didn’t meet our elevated standards.

Just as Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp have received that treatment in comedy monologues that express publicly feelings that have been expressed privately for generations. So where is the erosion, whether in the chambers of entertainment or a Senate putting on trial someone whose behavior gave his enemies this opening?

Which brings us full cycle to Michael Jordan and Bill Clinton, one having the grace to step down, the other hoping he has spring in his legs for one more miraculous jumper before the clock expires.

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* “National Desk” airs at 9 p.m. Fridays on KCET-TV.