From: word_chemist@hotmail.com   
      
   Dalrymple on Manners - amusing as always:   
      
   'A problem arises, however, when all such rules, arbitrary as some of them   
   might be, are eroded to the point of total informality. The culture of any   
   society becomes graceless in the absence of all formality, a development   
   that is peculiarly evident in my own country, Great Britain. Here,   
   gracelessness has become, by a peculiar ideological inversion that has   
   occurred in my lifetime, a manifestation of political virtue. My father's   
   view of the whole matter of manners has triumphed all but completely.   
      
   The argument goes something like this: formality is etiquette, and etiquette   
   is a manifestation of an unjust, class-ridden, patriarchal society. The   
   rejection of etiquette and the formality it entails is therefore a sign that   
   one is on the side of the angels, that is to say, of the egalitarians.   
   Modern egalitarians, at least in Britain, do not content themselves with the   
   kind of abstract or formal equality before the law that allows any amount of   
   difference in wealth, status, taste, and sensibility; they demand some   
   progress towards equalization of everything, including manners.   
      
   Of course, egalitarians are just as attached as everyone else to their own   
   material possessions and wealth and have no real intention of forgoing them   
   by radical redistribution, at any rate, of their own money and possessions.   
   The struggle for equality-of the actual rather than the formal kind-has   
   therefore to be transferred to fields in which it will cost the egalitarian   
   nothing, or nothing material and financial.'   
      
   http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_04_10/article.html   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)