R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

Many thanks to Dan and the gang for having me back.  I'm looking forward to a fun month.

Like many, I have been appalled by the lack of respect demonstrated toward President Obama by some (including these two).  It may be, as some allege, that a degree of the incivility is due to racism, but I am not entering that discussion; the impropriety is plain simply from the fact that there is some feeling that it is socially or culturally acceptable for those with a pulpit, so to speak, to be openly and unproductively hostile toward the President (and his family).  Hurling utterly disrespectful vitriol at leaders isn’t exactly new (Clinton springs to my mind, and I’m sure others have memories that are significantly more expansive), yet it seems worse to me now than it was even with Clinton—more directed, more ubiquitous, more tolerated.

The occurrence is not only in the States, of course.  In fact, this blawg post was spurred by (my astonishment at) a recent tidbit about a press conference with Gordon Brown, in which he was asked if he takes medication for depression.  Whether a citizenry should be on notice about its leader’s health to that extent is perhaps debatable, but this question was based solely upon an Internet ‘find’—one blogger’s ruminations, labeled as news.

How did we get here?  Why is this acceptable (to the point where such actions are defended)?  My initial thought was the pervasiveness of the media, both online and broadcasted.  Various media outlets (including private bloggers) compete for news and information, for readership.  With 24 hours to fill, broadcast media give air time to angry citizens who might otherwise have been ignored or seen fleetingly at best (see: the Birthers); that sheen of legitimacy, however slight, is picked up by others in the media and by some politicians, then used, if not as a template then as a justification, for lashing out.  But there seems to be something more in the acceptance of the behavior, particularly in the personal nature of some of the attacks and inquiries.  With respect to our leaders, the discretion, the propriety, has been lost—or at least severely diminished.  This could be because our society is moving in the same direction generally—that what was once protected by notions of discretion, privacy and ‘personal space’ is now perfectly acceptable fodder for public viewing (or feasting).   Numerous articles have lamented our collective loss of decorum to social networking.   Perhaps our willingness to reveal all, to expect all, via Tweeting and status-posting and sharing publically photographs best saved for an album only in one’s mind, has turned us into a society that refuses to recognize boundaries, even in once-hallowed halls.  And while this may seem generational, remember-- it’s not the young ones who are obsessed with Twitter.        

So:  what constitutes permissible behavior by the media and/or by politicians toward a nation's leader(s)?  Is it appropriate to levy personal attacks, to abandon good manners, to make inquiries into deeply personal matters?  And if the answer to these is ‘yes,’ has it always been this way, or has our recent shift in ways of communicating/interacting made it so?