Newportance

You think you’re important? Fine, you may be. But newportant? That’s another story.

Last fall, Commissioner David Stern wanted a dress code for his players in the National Basketball Association, and he got one. The new standard is now “business casual.”

Not too many of these highly paid athletes supported the move. Some suggested he was biased against the hip-hop culture, and was denying the players the freedom to express themselves.

Noooooooo, he said, you can hip and hop, you can bag, sag, zig and zag all you want — but not when you’re at work.

This fracas led — again — to a discussion of the demise — or at least decline — of civility and rational discourse in public life. The matter has been the subject for years now of reams of print commentary and hours of electronic pontificating by talking heads positioned at all points along the political spectrum.

“Why, whatever do you mean, Alfred?”

That to which we refer are the events that happen every day on the streets or soccer fields of America, in the...