A Nation of Finger Pointers

The busybody and the crybaby are getting to be the most conspicuous children on the American playground.

The busybody is the bully with the ayatullah shine in his eyes, gauleiter of correctness, who barges around telling the other kids that they cannot smoke, be fat, drink booze, wear furs, eat meat or otherwise nonconform to the new tribal rules now taking shape.

The crybaby, on the other hand, is the abject, manipulative little devil with the lawyer and, so to speak, the actionable diaper rash. He is a mayor of Washington, arrested (and captured on videotape) as he smokes crack in a hotel room with a woman not his wife. He pronounces himself a victim -- of the woman, of white injustice, of the universe. Whatever.

Both these types, the one overactive and the other overpassive, are fashioning some odd new malformations of American character. The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance -- a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms. In Freudian terms, the busybodies might be the superego of the American personality, the overbearing wardens. The crybabies are the messy id, all blubbering need and a virtually infantile irresponsibility. Hard pressed in between is the ego that is supposed to be healthy, tolerant and intelligent. It all adds up to what the Economist perceptively calls "a decadent puritanism within America: an odd combination of ducking responsibility and telling everyone else what to do."

Zealotry of either kind -- the puritan's need to regiment others or the victim's passion for blaming everyone except himself -- tends to produce a depressing civic stupidity. Each trait has about it the immobility of addiction. Victims become addicted to being victims: they derive identity, innocence and a kind of devious power from sheer, defaulting helplessness. On the other side, the candlesnuffers of behavioral and political correctness enact their paradox, accomplishing intolerance in the name of tolerance, regimentation in the name of betterment.

The spectacle of the two moral defectives of the schoolyard jumping up and down on the social contract is evidence that America is not entirely a society of grownups. A drama in Encino, Calif.: a lawyer named Kenneth Shild built a basketball court in his yard, 60 feet from the bedroom window of a neighbor, Michael Rubin, also a lawyer. The bouncing of the basketball produced a "percussion noise that was highly annoying," according to Rubin, who asked Shild and his son to stop playing. Shild refused, and Rubin, knowing that his rights allowed him to take action to stop a nuisance, sprayed water from his garden hose onto the neighbor's basketball court. Suit and countersuit. Rubin's restraining order limiting the hours of the day during which the Shilds could play was overturned by an appeals-court judge. Each side seeks more than $100,000 in punitive damages. Shild argues mental stress. Rubin claims that his property has been devalued.