Why Pretty Lady Talks with Morons

Pretty Lady cannot help but notice that there has been a bit of Contentious Conversation on her blog, of late. She has been a bit snarly, herself; it seems as though Pretty Lady has a few buttons of whitherso she did not know existed, until someone came along and obligingly pressed them. So we learn, and so we grow. And so Pretty Lady has no right to Call People Out for their rudeness to one another, having disgracefully Lost Her Temper with an innocent, or mostly innocent, gentleman.

She is calling them out anyway.

For it strikes Pretty Lady that Manners are the last bastion of Civilization. All other tenets of such can and have been called into question; there is no common consensus as to Religion, Politics, Mores or Culture. There is none, and there shall be none; these differences are, in Pretty Lady's experienced observations, irreconcilable.

Nevertheless we may ALL grit our teeth and shake hands, except for those unfortunate African persons who have lost their hands to bandits, but Pretty Lady doesn't like to think about that. She stopped reading the New York Times for five years after they posted those pictures.

So, darlings, be grateful that you have hands, and shake them. And be aware that in Pretty Lady's worldview, there is almost No Such Thing as a Moron.

There may be people who disagree with her. There may be people who espouse strange and extremist world views. There may be people whose capacity for comprehending Socratic irony is nil. (There may be an awful lot of those, indeed.) There may be persons who develop Irrational Personal Vendettas against Pretty Lady, even. The depths of depravity to which human nature may sink knows no bottom.

But Pretty Lady, by and large, gives everyone a chance. She gives them several chances, in fact. Sometimes she stops giving them chances for a decade or so, then gives them another one. Something imprinted deep in Pretty Lady's psyche believes that each of these people is a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, and they have a right to be here. (This was imprinted on Pretty Little Girl while she was having her hair dried, in fact. The poem was framed on Mommy's dressing table. It is now framed in Pretty Lady's bathroom, next to the hair-dryer. Such predictable little robots are we.)

You see, darlings, we are all humans, but before that we are robots. We are creatures imprinted with reality-tunnels of our progenitors' devising. And since we all come of different progenitors, we all inhabit different realities. There is no shame in this; it is how we are.

Thus, a large portion of Human Opinion is not voluntary. It is programmed. And when two persons with different programming meet and discourse, each of them decides that the other one is a moron. That decision was programmed, too.

When persons with the same programming meet and agree, even more terrible things may happen. These groups of lockstep robots reinforce each other, and become dangerous. They may decide, for example, that a certain Third World Dictator possesses the capacity to blow up the world, and act accordingly, despite an overwhelming lack of concrete evidence to support their decision. For when all the Intelligent robots around you believe something, you believe it too. Thus are disasters made.

So, in Pretty Lady's view, the only way to prevent planetary annihilation by warring groups of robots is Manners. Manners are the simple act of suspending judgment and treating people as equals, whatever your opinion of them may happen to be. Manners allow a bit of breathing space, in order to assess one's programming before dropping the hammer. They do not require any form of ideological consensus, except upon Form itself; this neutral abstraction has the least chance of offending anyone's programming, no matter how arcane or bizarre that Form may appear to be.