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Despite the evidence of a revived interest in manners and elegance, a number of people would argue the exact opposite, that manners continue to get worse and are nearing the point of invisibility. "Manners have taken a beating these last 25 years," says Eppie Lederer, a.k.a. Ann Landers, the advice columnist. "It isn't just that men aren't opening car doors for women or offering them seats on subways or buses. It goes deeper than that. The high crime rate is one thing that discourages openness and courtesy to strangers. The chances are that a man who takes an old lady's arm to help her across the street may be planning to grab her purse."
Fran Lebowitz, who made her mark as a caustic social critic with Metropolitan Life (1978), also feels that things are getting worse rather than better. "I don't think people have manners," she says. "I don't think people teach their children manners. I think boorishness is the order of the day. There has been a return to convention, but that's all nostalgia. It's just fear, and fear isn't the same thing as manners."
Lebowitz's catalog of boorishnesses is somewhat eclectic: zealous nonsmokers, people who go to work with colds, waiters who introduce themselves before handing out menus. Worst of all, says Lebowitz, who once drove a cab, are cab drivers. Says she: "Manners may be too polite a word. Many cab drivers just seem to be mildly insane. I would rather pay and just let the guy sit in the back while I drive."
There is something about driving in general that seems to bring out the beast. "It's almost a game to see how many people can make it through a yellow or red light," says Steven Beebe, a professor of communications at the University of Miami. In New York City, it is more than a game; the number of pedestrians hit by cars, many of them running lights or crowding a curve, runs to 15,000 a year. In Houston, where traffic altercations periodically lead to violence, the Chronicle offered a few friendly tips: "Try to release your anger in constructive ways. Running another automobile off the road is not constructive or legal . . . When all else fails, do not pull out a gun."
Such behavior, of course, can be interpreted as part of the antimanners of an elaborate antistyle. Not everyone is wearing a blue blazer and short hair. At the crowded Astor Place Haircutters, a few dozen blocks from the orchid-scented salon of Monsieur Marc, the walls are decorated with a cellophane-taped montage of punk haircuts: the teeth cut, the rainbow cut, the fungi cut, the oh, s&$151;—— cut ("We call it that," says Owner Enrico Vezzo, "because that's what the customer says when he looks in the mirror").
Vezzo's salon, which used to be a very nondescript establishment, boasts 20 red leatherette barber chairs, and the young customers wait in line seven days a week. The elaborate cuts start at only $6 for men and $8 for women. The atmosphere is, as they say, informal. "There's no etiquette here," says Vezzo. "I keep a baseball bat next to the door in case there's trouble."