Nice Plague
PLEASANTVILLE
(Choking in the epidemic of nice)
(c) David Astle
A college in Islington, North London, offered a two-day course called The Nice Factor, a cute name for a nasty bit of education. At a cost of 150 quid, students could learn the lost art of being blunt, how to speak your mind without fear or favour. Needless to say, enrolments went through the roof.
Self-assertion is one thing, but The Nice Factor went further. Hundreds filled the lecture hall in the hope of regaining some grit in their lives. How to tell a lacklustre colleague they lack lustre. How to verge on rude, or slice through platitude. How to send gazpacho back to the kitchen, or tell the boss his innovations stink. In short, how to be free.
‘The disease of niceness cripples more lives than alcoholism,’ says Robin Chandler, a co-founder of the London course. ‘Nice people are simply afraid to say no. They’re constantly worried about what others think of them, and never getting to do what they want to do.’
As part of The Nice Factor, students turned nasty on each other.
‘Do you like my shirt?’
‘No.’
‘Am I boring you?’
‘Yes.’
When it comes to contagion, niceness has far more ‘carriers’ walking the street than crusaders. I’m not talking good manners but that sweet-lip service we all pay at cost. A faux kind of etiquette that stifles freewill. Admit it. When was the last time you held your tongue and the problem persisted? As a result the niceness bug is infecting our waterways, our home life, our staffrooms and playing fields, our shops and media and schools.
Social researcher, Hugh Mackay calls these times the Age of Anxiety. We feel impotent in the workplace, the global media, the political arena. We are scared for our futures, and just as scared of seeming that way in the public gaze, so we plump for nice, that neutral no-offence middle ground. Until a flashpoint comes along. Road rage, or Iraq. The million Australians who marched against war last month had as much to do with peace as the release of deepset insecurities. For many the rally was cathartic, a less-than-nice means of expressing the gagged self.
Nice, the word, has a convoluted history. Adopted from French in the 1200s, nice once meant ‘foolish or senseless’ and 800 years later, the old meaning looks set to resume the saddle. We are puppets to insincerity. Our world has become a giant bed-and-breakfast where the guestbook teems with praise despite the dripping tap, the lumpy mattress, the cold scones.
What sort of world sees 30 classmates of a Year 1 boy invited to his birthday party so as none will feel left out? Call-centre staff, trained in niceness, recite replies of cordiality while your reason for calling is bounced around the building. Publicists make pleasant undertakings, and then do little by way of action. So you phone them again, and the politeness chases its tail. Everyone nice and passive-aggressive until that Lovely Grim Reaper arrives.
Actor Simon Hughes sums up the disease in his autobiography Didn’t You Use To Be Someone. After a show, an actor’s friends will file into the green room and make ‘nice’ remarks about the performance. Often the fakery among friends will trump the evening’s playacting.
Once upon a time, phrases such as ‘feel your hurt’ or ‘register your concern’ had substance, even among the pollies who coined them. But times have changed. Insincerity has blossomed. A phrase like ‘coalition of the willing’ is nothing but a spoonful of sugar to help the reality go down. We are spun into servitude, disengaged by twee slogans, manouevred and muted. Words of empathy in the mouths of orators and human resource personnel ring with irony and duplicity. Crocodile words. And we smile in the brunt of it, or try.
‘Niceness is the enemy,’ writes author and social critic, Philip Roth. ‘Every soft stroke from the the society is like the pffft of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms of our brain’s delicate ozone, and furthers the cretinization of our profession.’
Open-plan offices seem to ferment the disease. In a world of diminishing privacy, with shrinking job security, we are pummelled into glibness. Group-think. Tribal orthodoxy. Gone is the era of the upbraid, the dressing-down in the manager’s office. Embarrassment is the new taboo. Direct speech the latest phobia. The modern worker is too cowed by ‘performance indicators’, midterm assessments and the very real penalties built into the tyranny of ‘harmonious work relations’.
So how did the virus start? Like the green monkeys of Africa, every disease needs its scapegoat. Our culture of blame demands a fall guy for this syrupy epidemic. Let’s cast the first stone at political correctness.
WOGS OUT OF WORK
Judith Grad, an art gallery owner from Virginia, is a keen Scrabble player. At least she was until a friend played JEW on the board in 1993. ‘That needs a big J,’ she argued, assuming her friend meant to infer a member of the Hebrew people. But the debate turned nasty when a dictionary was consulted and a small-j jew was found. A verb in fact, meaning ‘to bargain’.
Ms Grad however wasn’t prepared to bargain with anybody. On finding other kosher words in her Merriam-Webster Third Edition – fatso, fart, blowjob, dago – she lobbied the game division of Milton Bradley to purify their wordlist.
‘I was livid,’ she told a local paper. ‘(Scrabble) is a game. These words have no business in a dictionary used to support a game.’
Grad got in touch with the Anti-Defamation League, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and other august bodies. She prompted a letter-writing blizzard to all media outlets branding Scrabble as a ‘game of hate’. Until Milton-Bradley relented. The next players’ dictionary appeared with 167 words removed.
Life is a game we play every day. Just like Scrabble tiles, we are equipped with the means to communicate with our fellow players, but lately the rules have shifted a little. Thanks to PC, or political correctness, unguarded English invokes penalty. Attitude is a dirty word. We must play a NICE game in order to be invited back to the table. We can’t seem too ambitious, too graceless, too spontaneous, even though we live with all three from square one. At the end, we must shake hands and say ‘well played’ no matter how well played it wasn’t.
Such a ‘game’ is eerily familiar to Cavan Hogue. Ex-ambassador to Mexico, USSR and Thailand, Hogue describes his diplomatic career as an exercise in ‘tactical niceness’. ‘It’s a means to an end. It’s related to this great question of good relations.
‘Niceness oils the wheels of social interaction. But if you’re going to pretend to be nice, then you should do it well. Plastic niceness assumes you’re an object. A diplomat tries to pay people the compliment of everyone being human beings.’
After 40 years of ‘taking the Queen’s shilling’ around the globe, Hogue is relishing his days of comparative leisure. ‘Now that I’ve retired one of the great joys is not so much being rude – but being able to speak your mind. Because you were paid to push the party line, you shouldered your musket and that was the deal. If you didn’t like it, you could leave. Now of course I can say what I like. If I want to say the King is a fink I can. It’s freedom.’
FINK has survived the Scrabble revolution, unlike other four-letter words. But the major impact of PC is reduction. We may have more to say, yet less words to say it in. Smiling is the new screaming. Eager for equality across class and race and gender, we have widened the boundaries of no-man’s land – sorry, no-person’s – and act as though the alienation isn’t there. Happily.
At least that’s one theory. Who else spawned all these shiny happy people? Let’s cast the second stone at those $#@*# service industries.
LOW-FAT WAFFLE FROM BOLIVIA
Jim Schembri, movie critic for The Age, doesn’t want to talk about movies. Another time maybe, but today he’s got another bee in his American Pie 2 baseball cap, and dammit, Jim’s going to talk about it. Plastic niceness, he believes, stems from the service industries.
‘You ask a supermarket kid do you have low-fat cheese or whatever, and instead of saying yes, or no, they will give you a routine. ‘Well that particular brand comes from Bolivia, and this is Tuesday, and usually the truck comes in Wednesday….’
‘On occasion I say – it’s okay to check. Or say if you don’t know, to say I don’t know. People don’t need this routine because they know its insincere. (Employees) think they’re being nice by furnishing you with all this waffle….’
Schembri’s eyes start rolling. Thoughts of fake niceness turn him into Nicholson from The Shining (3 stars). If it’s not the supermarket kid, it’s the photocopier guy.
‘Our office machine won’t effing print,’ says Schembri. ‘So I phoned the service department. I’ve been very careful not to get abusive – I don’t want to start barking at him. But my reservoir of niceness is rapidly being depleted to a very, very low level.
‘I know the service guy is just someone trying to do his job….but certain phrases started coming up. This fluffing of language, this insincere niceness, is meant to build up our tolerance for all this inefficiency. Phrases such as ‘issues’. He says I have issues with my copier. He says there’s a glitch, that things don’t work 100%. They are not issues, they’re problems! World hunger is an issue. Global terrorism is an issue. We’re talking about problems with a copy machine.’
The critic catches his breath. ‘I’ll always make an effort to show a genuine expression of niceness. But if someone’s not doing their job properly, they can thrown all the have-a-nice-days at me, whatever, I will make a stand. I have certain friends, when we go to a restaurant, they’re sometimes a bit scared, because they know if something’s wrong, I will complain. My position is we’re here now – let’s do something about it.’
Faced with a dud meal, Libby Skeels won’t always make a scene. As a relationship counsellor, Skeels spends her days helping couples spot the difference between
hostility (fake niceness) and compassionate exchange (the real stuff). But one day, served a rank risotto, Skeels defied her own counsel – and kept herself nice.
‘The meal was hopeless. I wanted to complain but my second husband – a nice man – said not to make a fuss. The wine was lovely and I didn’t want to spoil our evening. If I’d been on my own I would’ve told the chef this is not my idea of risotto. But I stayed nice. When you’re assertive you have to choose when it’s a worthwhile cause.’
Relationship counsellor? Second husband? No matter how nice a journalist I try to be, I can’t let that sort of irony slip through my fingers. Skeels is ready for my question.
NICE GIRLS DON’T
‘The price for a lot of women,’ says Skeels, ‘for being too nice to everybody is that they deny their own needs – they’re so busy being nice to their husband and nice to their kids and nice to their neighbors but underneath they may be quite angry and not knowing how to be assertively angry with people. Nice people often get caught up blaming other people. Unconsciously they can think how come the world is being so bad to me when I’m such a nice person?’
More often than not, says Skeels, niceness hides the anger underneath. ‘I know a family through my children’s school. They are very artificial and so supersweet all the time, and they say never say anything negative – and people don’t trust them. They intuitively think, I wonder what they’re really thinking.’
But getting back to your second husband….what happened to Mark 1?
‘I was in a passive marriage where I didn’t say what I thought at all. And we didn’t fight, and we were very nice to each other. But underneath neither of us were happy at all. And we couldn’t say it to each other. Eventually that marriage broke up with hardly a fight. I learnt that being nice wasn’t the way to go.’
So what is? How can we beat this pleasant plague? Is honesty the antidote? ‘I prefer the word authenticity,’ says Skeels, ‘coupled with assertiveness.’ She maps out a three-point continuum (see box), a character guide she regularly issues to clients as a means of keeping the plastic nice at bay. Though at times, she admits, a person has to fake it.
‘Say your partner is sick or depressed, and you feel they’re not looking after you at all. You feel quite angry with them, but because you love them you think I’ll let them get away with this one. I’ll be nice to them. I’ll make them a cup of tea.’
But nice should never substitute for character. Or quality. Or musical ability, in the case of Tommy Dorsey. Back in the 1950s, the jazz great was assembling a band, and needed a trumpet player to complete the combo. A friend endorsed one apprentice trumpeter as a nice guy. ‘Nice guys are a dime a dozen,’ barked Dorsey. ‘Get me a prick that can play!’
ACCIDENTAL ANTIHEROES
American humorist Gerry Volganou mocked up a phrase book for the ‘ugly American tourist’. The joke went around the wires with inquiries of sales and syndication. Here’s the sort of stuff the phrase book listed:
I know this is your national dish. But is it supposed to taste like sweat socks?
Badges? I don’t need no stinking badges.
Soccer players are all wimps.
I’d like the room with the fewest cockroaches.
Less phrases than outbursts. Less a source of niceness than a sign of our growing asphyxia. We are silenced by niceness. Gagged and gagging. For ‘ugly American’ you can read ‘Not-nice Anyone’ and the medicine still works a charm. Spoofs like this, plus sitcoms and movies help us escape the niceness epidemic.
Why else would Austen Powers, Ali G and Ozzy Osbourne climb to such cult status? Our nice lives seem chided by the maverick spirits of Cosmo Kramer and Bridget Jones, the sharp sass of Doctors Becker and House, the potency of Xena and Samantha Jones. We envy their impunity, their spontaneity, the dead-eye phrases that stream from their mouths.
Make a list of fictional characters you covet and none will embody the qualities of nice. Nice in fact is heresy to the screenwriter, a synonym of colourless, and not to be tolerated.
‘Nice characters are very boring actually,’ says RMIT’s screenwriting tutor, Roz Berrystone. With Film Victoria, Berrystone had helped to develop such ‘nasty’ gems as Chopper and Muriel’s Wedding.
‘Sitcoms in particular – such Roseanne and Seinfeld – play up the negative aspects. So you might have one character – if you met them in real life, they might be a bit obnoxious, but what the writer does is tweak them up, exaggerate them. Screen magnifies faults and virtues.’
Think of a film like American Beauty where niceness is cast as the enemy. Script doctor Linda Aronson describes the smash hit as ‘a siege film in which the group is trapped by social roles, in this case the social mores of Middle America.’ Enter Lester Burnham, the Kevin Spacey character, who vents his bile in numerous un-nice ways, and the radical healing begins.
By contrast, a recent Australian film, The Hard Word featured three nasty brothers, and nearly caused Jim Schembri a heart attack. He hated the movie. As a critic, he has to leave his plastic niceness with the usher, watching and reporting without paymaster. He gave the flick the flick, awarding it a dog symbol, which wasn’t too nice. (‘A professional critic has to say why a film stinks.’) But imagine meeting the movie’s star, Guy Pearce a week later.
‘I was so anxious before the interview about the things I had to ask without being insulting. But the best way to air a criticism is to confront the person. Being genuine is a sincere form of niceness.’
Thanks to Pearce’s good grace, Schembri felt safe to put the hard word on the film. ‘If you phrase your questions intelligently, and put them in the right context, you’re actually showing respect.’
Though such tactful honesty came at a price. ‘After lunch I gotta tell you – I went into the men’s room and put my bag and tape recorder down, and I just grabbed the counter and breathed out. It felt like I’d just come out of a three-hour maths exam.’
The agony evokes a quip from playwright George Kaufman. A noxious aunt was coming to stay in the family home for the week, and George’s mother put it to her son: ‘It wouldn’t hurt us to be nice, would it?’ Apparently the young writer shrugged. ‘That depends on your threshold of pain.’
SIBEBAR #1 – NICE NUANCES
REAL NICE vs FAKE NICE
Considerate Dishonest
Cordial Craven
Empathetic Ulterior
Complimentary Flattery
Pleasant Perfunctory
Tact Tactical
Heartfelt Suppressed
SIDEBAR #2 – SIMON HUGHES’ VIEWS: What The Actor’s Friends Really Mean
Remark: That was interesting. (Meaning: But for all the wrong reasons.)
You were wonderful. (At least you weren’t worse.)
Great costume. (Pity about the performance.)
You seemed to be having fun. (You were – we weren’t.)
Thank you for tonight. (Things conspire to make good actors look like amateurs.)
[From Didn’t You Use To Be Someone? Simon Hughes, Allen & Unwin, 2002]
SIDEBAR #3 – NICE ADVICE
When tackling emotions, we fall into three general character types, though at different times we may exhibit symptoms of each. Libby Skeels of Relationships Australia calls it the ‘emotional continuum’ where the middle ground is often the most beneficial.
1 PASSIVE people are the ultimately (plastic) nice people. When angry – they often have a smile on their face, or can be sulkers.
2 When angry, ASSERTIVE people calmly tell others how they’re feeling. ‘I’m furious about what you did last week…’ They’re very authentic, and are capable of fair arguments.
3 AGGRESSIVE people deny all others a right to their feelings. They are as likely to punch someone as block out all contrary opinion.
SIDEBAR #4 – UN-NICE SLICES
JERRY: What are you doing?! Don’t tell a woman she looks like a man. And George doesn’t want to hear his girlfriend looks like me, and frankly, neither do I.
KRAMER: Well how should I have broached the subject?
JERRY: You don’t broach – you keep your mouth shut!
(Seinfeld)
SAMANTHA: (in the fitting room) Look, if I have to be a bridesmaid I’d at least like to look good.
CHARLOTTE: Well, you don’t have to be my bridesmaid.
SAMANTHA: Then what am I doing here?
CHARLOTTE: I didn’t want you to feel left out.
SAMANTHA: I would love to be left out! I could be in bed with a hot Scot right now!
(Sex and the City)
KATH: Kim, you can’t handle the fact that while your marriage is on the rocks, Kel and I are getting ours off.
(Kath & Kim)
GOODMAN (the self-help guru): What made you yell out that remark?
BART: I dunno.
GOODMAN: You just wanted to express yourself, yes?
BART: (shrugs) I do what I feel like.
GOODMAN: That’s marvellous! I couldn’t have put it better myself. ‘I do what I feel like.’ People, this young man is the Inner Child I’ve been talking about!
(The Simpsons)
TED DANSON (on Becker): He’s a type of character that says everything you’ve ever thought, all the evil things that have crept into your brain. He’s the one that will actually voice it for you.
[Sunday Life, March 2003]