ALL OF THE FOLLOWING IS EXCERPTED FROM WSJ.COM, AND OVERALL I THINK PRETTY MUCH HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD
Rich Man, Boor Man We live in an age of great wealth--and lousy manners. Friday, July 27, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
By Peggy Noonan (God forbid I fail to attribute properly.)
So we are agreed. We are living in the second great Gilded Age, a time of startling personal wealth. In the West, the mansion after mansion with broad and rolling grounds; in the East, the apartments with foyers in which bowling teams could play. Or, on another level, the week's vacation in Disneyland or Dublin with the entire family--this in a nation in which, well within human memory, people with a week off stayed home and fixed things in the garage, or drove to the beach for a day and sat on a blanket from one of the kid's beds and thought: This is the life.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit 14000. The wealthy live better than kings. There isn't a billionaire in East Hampton who wouldn't look down on tatty old Windsor Castle. We have a potential presidential candidate who noted to a friend that if he won the presidency the quality of his life would go down, not up.(sad, huh?)
The gap between rich and poor is great, and there is plenty of want, and also confusion. What the superrich do for a living now often seems utterly incomprehensible, and has for at least a generation. There is no word for it, only an image. There's a big pile of coins on a table. The rich shove their hands in, raise them, and as the coins sift through their fingers it makes . . . a bigger pile of coins. Then they sift through it again and the pile gets bigger again.

A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you--orthodontist, store owner, professor--that means he's not rich. But if it's a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn't understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in--well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire.

There are good things and bad in the Gilded Age, pluses and minuses. I write here of a minus. It has to do with our manners, the ones we show each other on the street. I think riches, or the pursuit of riches, has made us ruder. You'd think broad comfort would assuage certain hungers. It has not. It has sharpened them.
Here's a moment in the pushiness of the Gilded Age. I walk into a shop on Madison Avenue daydreaming, trying to remember what it was I thought last week I should pick up, what was it . . .
"Hi! Let me help you find what you're looking for!" She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark. That would be me.
"Mmmm, actually--"
"We have summer sweaters on sale. What size are you?!" Her style is aggressive friendliness.
In another shop, as soon as I walk in the door, "How are you today? How can I help you?" Those dread words.
"Oh, I'm sort of just looking."
"I like your bag!"
"Um, thanks." What they are forcing you to do is engage. If you engage--"Um, thanks"--you have a relationship. If you have a relationship, it's easier for them to turn you upside down and shake the coins from your pockets.
It is like this in all the shops I go in now, except for the big stores (Macy's, Duane Reade drugstore), where they ignore you.
There are strategies. You can do the full Garbo: "Leave me alone." But they'll think you're a shoplifter and watch you. Or the strong lady with boundaries: "Thank you, if I need help I'll ask." But your reverie is broken. Or the acquiescent person: "Take me under your leadership, oh aggressively friendly salesperson." But this is bowing to the pushiness of the Gilded Age.

You leave the floor for the street and meet the woman with the clipboard. "Do you have two seconds for the environment?" Again, not a soft question but a challenge. Her question is phrased so that if you don't stop and hear her spiel, you are admitting you won't give two seconds for the environment, or two cents for it either. You give the half-smile-nod, shake your head, walk on. She looks at you as if you're the reason the Earth is going to hell.
Do they know they're being manipulative? If they have a brain they do. Their trainers certainly know. Do they know it's also why no one quite trusts them? Do they care? Why would they? They're the manipulators on the street.
Or: I'm in a local restaurant with a friend. We sat down 40 seconds ago and are starting to catch up when: "What do you want to drink?" An interruption, but so what? We order, talk, my friend is getting to the punch line of the story when: "We have specials this evening." Not, "Let me know when you're ready to hear the specials." We stop talking, listen. The waiter stands there, pad in hand. "You ready?" If you ask for a minute, he'll nod and be back in exactly one minute. "Do you know yet?" Again, this is not a request. One is being told to snap to it. Get 'em in, get 'em out. Move 'em.

It's funny. In a time of recession, you'd think salespeople would be more aggressive, because so much might hinge on the sale--a commission, a job. In a time of relative wealth, you'd think they might be less aggressive. But the opposite seems true.
Technology has not helped in this area. Cellphones are wonderful, but they empower the obnoxious and amplify the ignorant. Once they kept their thoughts to themselves. They had no choice. Now they have cellphones, into which they bark, "I'm on line at Duane Reade. Yeah. Ex-Lax." Oh, thank you for sharing. How much less my life would be if I didn't know.
BlackBerrys empower the obsessed. We wouldn't have them if the economy weren't high and we weren't pretty well off. Once, a political figure in New York invited me to a private dinner. I was seated next to him, and as the table conversation took off he leaned back, quietly took out his BlackBerry, and began to scroll. It occurred to me that if I said something live in person, it would not be as interesting to him as if I'd BlackBerryed him. It occurred to me that if I wanted to talk to him I'd have to BlackBerry him and say, "Please talk to me." And then he would get the message.
It is possible that we are on the cellphone because we are lonely and hunger for connection, even of the shallowest kind; that we BlackBerry because we hope for a sense of control in a chaotic world; that we are frightened of stillness and must interrupt conversations; that we are desperate to make the sale in the highly competitive environment of the Banana Republic on 86th Street and must aggressively pursue customers.
It's also possible we have grown more boorish. I think it's that one. Many things thrive in the age of everything, including bad manners.

Dante's Self-Help Book
'The Divine Comedy' charts the path to a new beginning
By HARRIET RUBIN July 28, 2007
There are monuments to Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) everywhere in Italy, where three years of study in Dante's "Divine Comedy" are required for young people to learn how to lead the best possible life. One cannot imagine Italy's culture without Dante's 14th-century work -- any more than one could imagine Britain's without Shakespeare or America's without the Declaration of Independence.
Unlike most other world classics, "The Divine Comedy" is a self-help book. People read Shakespeare with no expectation that they will become Shakespeare. But many read Dante expecting to mimic his results and transform themselves from seekers, lost in their own questions, into poets, certain and transcendent. (Is this at all possible? Somone please explain to me how, then. Maybe I just have to read the book.)
"The Divine Comedy" tracks the journey of Dante, who wakes up lost in a dark wood in the middle of his life. So far, so true. The pope had issued a warrant for the arrest of 359 men, charging them with breach of duty. The sentence carried a steep fine and death to those who could not pay it. (Death threats issued by The Pope? One could ponder THAT concept as easily as any other.) Being named in this warrant was the major event in Dante's otherwise minor life. He was a forgettable poet, a small-time politician and a husband with a roving eye. Instead of fighting the charges, he fled his home and wandered in exile for nearly 20 years. Under desperate conditions, homeless, anonymous, he wrote this masterpiece.
A scene from 'Inferno 26' as depicted by William Blake.
How did Dante go from mediocrity to misery to greatness in only half a brief lifetime? He stopped seeing himself as a figure of tragedy and saw his life as a comedy.
In "The Divine Comedy," Beatrice, the woman Dante truly loved, catches sight of him lost and suffering in that dark wood from her seat at the height of Paradise. She asks the poet Virgil to bring Dante to her. Virgil tells Dante that Beatrice asked him to join her in Paradise -- and that to get to her, they must descend into hell and then up the steep purgatorial mountain. "The way up is the way down," was Dante's discovery, now a therapeutic convention. (And, perhaps, that say it all.)
In hell, the "Inferno" section of the work, Dante sees that all crimes involve loving the wrong things: money, power, oneself or another's spouse. In divine justice, the punishment fits the crime. Adultery doesn't end in divorce. It doesn't end at all: Sinful lovers are locked in eternal and numbing coitus. The malicious float in a river of their own excrement. Narcissistic parents dine nauseatingly on the brains of their suffering children.
Of the "Comedy"'s 14,000 lines, the most unnerving are the 143 that comprise "Inferno 26": the circle of liars, thieves and consultants.
In this circle, Dante encounters the hero Ulysses. His soul, no longer hidden by his mortal body, is not a pretty sight. He had been a deceiver, a trickster who won the battle for Troy by creating the Trojan Horse, promising gifts of peace and then murdering the Trojans he deceived. Ulysses burned with brilliantly clever ideas in life; in hell he simply burns. This leader, this enflamer of men, is now encased in fire.
Ulysses tells Virgil -- he considers Dante not worthy of his high rhetoric -- that he persuaded his old companions (lines 119-120) to risk everything once more, this time for a glimpse of the truth. "You were not made to live like brutes but to pursue virtue and knowledge," Ulysses told them. They set sail for Mount Purgatory, but their boat encountered a storm. "Three times made whirl round with all/the waters; at the fourth, made the stern rise/up and prow go down . . . the sea was closed above us."
For a terrifying moment, Dante see himself in Ulysses. Dante, too, revels in the art of persuasion. Is his own journey to Paradise another mad pursuit, his own cleverness a form of deception? Dante reasons that to Ulysses, virtue and knowledge were the same thing. But Dante concludes that they are not. To use superior wisdom in deceiving others is spiritual theft. Leaders must use skill and cleverness not for personal gain but to promote honor, to create a just state. Personal happiness is not possible in a divided state. And ambition without virtue is madness. This realization makes "Inferno 26" the turning point of "The Divine Comedy" and conveys how Dante's entire masterpiece may be read at a deep level, one that Osip Mandelstam, a dissident writer in Stalin's Russia, said works as a kind of literary medicine, curing those who read it of their self-created ills of ego and reckless opportunism. Mandelstam had such faith in the curative power of "The Divine Comedy" that he smuggled a copy into his prison cell.
In "Survival in Auschwitz," Primo Levi writes of how "Inferno 26" gives him perspective on the world that produced the camps. In 1944, Jean, a junior guard in Auschwitz, assigns Levi the task of helping him carry the day's watery soup from kitchen to barracks because Jean wants to learn Italian. Both men dream of a life beyond the barbed wire of the camps. For Levi, the job is a great reward, though the hundred-pound kettle could buckle the knees. For a few minutes a day he could walk in the sunshine. He chooses "Inferno 26" to teach Jean, but Levi's memory falters when he gets to the line in which Ulysses tries to crash through a barrier, inspiring his men: "Consider your origin:/you were not made to live like brutes,/but to follow virtue and knowledge." For Levi, as for Dante, the question is whether his voyage through hell would become a new beginning or an end.
Charles Dickens believed Dante's journey to be true. His Scrooge confronts his criminal past (Inferno), fixes his mistakes (Purgatorio), and invents a future so loving it had to be a miracle (Paradiso). The dreams Sigmund Freud analyzed in his "Interpretation of Dreams" echo the nightmares the souls endure in "Inferno"; Freud backdated the publication of his own 1901 masterpiece to 1900, in homage to Dante, who claimed hell opened its doors to him in the year 1300.
"Inferno" made Dante famous, though he was never pardoned. When he passed a group of women in Verona, one of them noticed the soiled hem of his coat and remarked, "Isn't that the man who goes down to hell as he likes . . . and brings back news of them below?" The scientist Galileo spent years fruitlessly searching for the doorway to hell that Dante used. Readers find it easily in Dante's work, and through it they discover that they too may find the ascending path to a happy ending.