Turn the other cheek if you wish, but we’re going on the, um, offensive.

July 2006

Never mind the gunfire. Thousands of times every day, right here in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul (not to mention in the suburbs), someone is getting sneezed on, preached to, visually assaulted, or cut off at a busy intersection by some drooling moron who doesn’t know a right of way from his right elbow.

We at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine are shocked and dismayed by the decline in public manners and rise in bad behavior, not to mention all the bad haircuts. Cell phones are a huge part of the problem, but not all of it—though, frankly, we don’t know who or what else to blame. According to one theory, now that many of us have stopped being publicly abusive to Jews and African Americans, we’ve turned on each other—but that doesn’t explain why Jews and African Americans are rude to each other and the rest of us. Some so-called experts cite the mass media—particularly situation comedies—for, if not creating coarse behavior, making it both sexy and funny. Other alleged culprits include the 1960s, public schools, Darwin, and Bill Clinton.

At any rate, you don’t have to specify a cause to be repulsed by the effects—the now all-too-familiar examples of public crudeness, sloth, stupidity, bad taste, cheap emotion, self-importance, indifference, indolence, insolence, and unhygienic idiocy that lead us to fantasize about life on a Tibetan mountaintop—or the lethal heft of an Uzi. On the following pages, having polled the better angels of our acquaintance and added our own pet peeves, we’ve listed several of the more egregious outrages we’ve encountered lately, attached a few interesting sidebars, and applied our own significance index:

Merely Annoying:	Asinine:	Hanging Offense:	Sign of the Coming Apocalypse:

Turn the other cheek if you wish, but we’re going on the, um, offensive. Our objective is civic improvement. The Twin Cities can be a kinder, sweeter, more elegant place—but first we have to slap some heads and get the morons’ attention.