This is one of the most thoughtful and acute pieces of social analysis that I've read in years. One problem we have her that makes the effect you note worse is that these changes occur on a timescale that is relatively long compared to the amount of time it takes a person to grow up. So people don't easily see the decay, which is actually rather precipitous by the timescale of an entire life. If narrow down from manners in general to what is acceptable culturally you can see it too. Look at an old youtube of a game show like "What's My Line" which ran from 1950 to 1967. Look at the way people speak to each other and treat each other, and compare it to a similarly good-natured show of today. The people in the older game show treat each other like they are characters in a Jane Austen novel. It's lovely. Now they treat each others like unsupervised children. Similarly, I remember when I was a teenager there was a national scandal when the Liggett and Meyers tobacco company put out an ad with the line "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." People talked about the grammatical atrocity for years. Literally years. How many people do you know today who can even identify what's wrong with that sentence? It's not that everything was so great then, many things were worse. But the best was set up as an ideal to which people of all levels in society aspired. Look at old Disney films--filled with classical music. In the sixties we shifted to a demotic culture, in which the common was celebrated, and the elite culture decried. The trap was that initially, it was great! The dominant elitist culture got a massive injection of what was essentially folk culture and the result was things like the explosion of music in the late 60's and 70's, experimentation in cinema, etc. The trouble is all that excitement was essentially living off the cultural capital of the elite culture, which was no longer supported and essentially died. The entire culture came to be dominated by pop--for and by uneducated teenagers, essentially. Within memory, Elvis was too vulgar to be allowed on the radio, let alone on TV. Now you have WAP as mainstream and that's tame compared to what is coming up. Anyway, congratulations on an excellent piece!