Published: March 15, 2008 09:21 pm         

Can you name what’s missing in our world?

This just in: a movie review in the Washington Post that actually called a new movie (“Miss Pettigrew”) “nice” — and then recommended it! Instead of making fun of it! Will wonders never cease?

Because there’s something missing in our world these days, and that’s what it is — niceness We keep hearing all the time, for instance, that good girls always go for the bad boys. Or that being nice is boring, and anyone who is nice and at the same time under 30 is just too dull to live.

If you’re one of the ones trying to live up to that rule, I’ve got news for you. Stop acting like a brat. It turns people off. And — I know this is hard to believe nowadays — it gets you into trouble. Plus, early-onset decency is good practice for the future. That’s because you might get away with being a villain when you’re young and adorable, but an old villain gets no sympathy at all. The problem is, once a villain, so often, always a villain.

Besides, being nice makes you a happier person. No mean person I have ever heard of was a happy person, and that includes Wiley E. Coyote.

Niceness is a non-starter in our culture of cannibalism and car crashes. Can you think of a rock star, or a a hiphop “artist” or a movie star, or an author, or a radio host who has made it in the past 20 years for being nice? (OK, maybe Oprah, but there’s always an exception to the rule.What’s more, she takes a lot of guff for it.)

Look at the movies that competed for Oscars this year, all but one a glorification of violence. Check out the leading TV sitcoms syars of 2008 — name one that could be called “nice” as Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore, Dick VanDyke, Andy Griffith, and Lucille Ball were nice.

Nice, my young reader says, is boring and old-fashioned.

But, even if you don’t approve of it, you miss it when it doesn’t happen.

For instance, Skip Squires tells an outstanding story of unniceness. A church he knows of had decided to help out a very poor family that lived nearby, so, in an early example of Extreme Makeover, they rallied around and went to work fixing the roof. Meanwhile, the father and sons of the family got drunk and spent the day throwing stones at the workers.

Now, folks, that simply wasn’t nice.

Am I wrong that people used to be nicer than they are today? I don’t remember a single bully in my grade school when I was growing up. You’d think I would have noticed, because I was the kind of kid that traditionally gets bullied nowadays, overweight, wearing very thick glasses, and reading three or four books a week. Maybe I was so out of it, I didn’t even know I was being bullied, which is probably the best way to be bullied.

I don’t remember any teeny queenies either; most of the prom queens I knew in high school and college were not only pretty but — nice. And, unlike some of the ones who came after them and remain with us to this very day, years later they still are nice.

And what is this, anyway, about girls always falling for the bad guys? Back in (my) day, some did, but then they weren’t that nice either. They deserved each other. There were plenty of nice guys around to end up with the nice girls, and everybody was happy.

Even more important, to me anyway, was that I found out that it was the nice guy who usually had the best sense of humor. Every bad guy I’ve ever known has had a lousy sense of humor, mostly based on mockery, shockery, and jockery. Give me a guy who finds a rueful amusement in the universal everyday situations of life, and I’ll show you a nice guy.

Besides that, my definition of a nice guy is “one who values truth, beauty, honesty, goodness, loyalty, excellence, work, and concern for others.” But then, what do I know? I grew up in the post World War ll days, and you weren’t ashamed then to honor such things. I’m inclined to think that maybe that was the best of all worlds to grow up in, except perhaps for racial minorities. Victims would disagree, but even then you could make an argument that the very urge to be nice in those days may have played some small part in guaranteeing to everyone the liberties we take for granted nowadays, at least in theory. Niceness has its uses.

Not that you’d notice nowadays, since niceness is forbidden. Mean Girls and Desperate Housewives and generally spiteful behavior are celebrated on TV. “Cool” is the character trait of choice, and that’s about as different from “nice” as cats (cool) are from dogs (nice).

Can you imagine the ridicule that would greet such a prayer as this one, that used to be said after the Pledge of Allegiance in the public schools of Smith Island (off the Eastern Shore): “Make me, dear Lord, polite and kind to everyone, I pray. And may I ask You how You find Yourself, dear Lord, today? Amen.” It’s so nice, people would even laugh in church.

Joanna Trollope, a seasoned novelist, apparently does not approve of modern trends to nastiness in books. Some years ago she wrote “It is a mark of good fiction that the writer’s eye is a kindly one — that there is a sense that we’re all in this together.”

You don’t hear that kind of thing much anymore.

In a gift shop recently, I saw a sign that I wish now I had bought. I would have hung it right next to my front door. It said, “Be Nice Or Leave.”

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland free-lance writer. Her column appears on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.