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The lie, basically, was the moral debris of the 1960s, the sentimental notion that just about anything goes, that everything is relative or simply a matter of personal choice. In the Reagan era, many things now look different to the hard-pressed graduates of the baby boom. "They were told," says Martin, "that if you are good-hearted and natural and mean well, you can do anything you want, and there are no rules, and everything will be fine. When they got to the age where they cared what people thought of them, which is to say, when they fell in love or wanted a job, well, then they found that this wasn't true."
It is common to speak of etiquette or manners as a question of which fork to use at a formal dinner (and who goes to formal dinners anyway?). But that is not the problem (or if it is, use the fork farthest to your left). The real question is how people treat one another, in late 1984, at a time when all relationships keep changing, in both the two-job home and the unisex workplace. The conflicts are small but significant. Some people are offended at being called by their first name; some people are offended at not being called by their first name. Some people get infuriated by cigarette smoke and start shouting at the smoker; some people are at least equally infuriated by such shouting. And is it or is it not acceptable for the (male) Democratic presidential candidate to touch the (female) vice-presidential candidate?
In addition, technology keeps changing things. Some people dislike having a telephone call answered by an answering machine, so they hang up. Some people find the resulting gap on their answering machines unnerving (maybe a lost job, or maybe a sex freak was on the line?). And what is the correct response to transistor radios at the beach by people who cannot bear the sound of transistor radios at the beach? And the computer: If the terminal in your office beeps with an incoming message while the telephone rings and somebody has just approached your desk, who should be answered in what sequence?
Miss Manners prospered. Her thrice-weekly column became syndicated; it began appearing in the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle—nearly 200 newspapers by now. Her first collection of admonitions, Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, hit the bestseller lists in 1982. Her new book, Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children (Atheneum; $19.95), is out in a printing of 100,000 copies, and already the reviewers' praises are swirling around her.
Now Martin is working the TV talk shows around the country to preach her message, that "manners are the basis of civilized society." Says she: "One of the biggest sorrows in America is that people want to retaliate against rudeness with rudeness. One of my main missions is to say, No, there is no excuse for rudeness. Ever. Period."
As part of the process of making herself a national institution, Martin likes to affect not only a Victorian prose style but a Victorian look: high-necked blouses, a brooch at the throat, hair upswept in a chignon worthy of a Gibson girl. "You look like Miss Manners," says the cashier at a drugstore near her office in a town house just off Washington's Dupont Circle. Says Martin, as she pays for some new stockings: "I am."