Standards of Conduct

An article on the front page of yesterday's Baltimore Sun is headlined "NBA suited for new image: Players are told to cross over from hip-hop to business attire." It says the nation's main pro basketball league will be insisting from now on that its players wear "no T-shirts, no baggy jeans, no retro jerseys, no hats, no chains and no athletic shoes at team or league events." Instead, they will be fined and possibly suspended if they don't wear "a sport coat and dress shoes" at games (when not suited up) and "business casual" attire at other professional functions.

To which I can only say, hooray!

I don't care that the new policy can be read as a slap at African-Americans, in that the now-banned styles of attire are supposedly out of "hip-hop culture." I don't think there's any racial bias here. I think there's a bias in favor of something we've all lost as Americans: standards of conduct.

Sadly, of late, we Americans — black, white, or any other hue — seem to have deep-sixed any vestige of our erstwhile standards of comportment. I'd like to know how it happened ... or, actually, why, since I think I can answer the how question myself.


When I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s, I have to admit, people of my age did quite a number on society's mostly unwritten standards of personal comportment. I remember lighting up cigarettes with my buddies in the backs of public buses, for instance. I would do anything to avoid wearing a coat and tie. It just didn't seem important to retain the standards of a bygone age.

Or, for that matter, any standards of conduct. It was my generation that coined the phrase, "Do your own thing." (Though I wouldn't be surprised if that shibboleth originated with black Americans; most "edgy" stuff did, and still does. Amen to that. I'm not against bending the rules; I'm against tossing the rule book out entirely.)

When I traveled with my parents on a pleasure trip to London as a 24-year-old in 1971, I refused to pack "dress-up" wear ... and had to knuckle under when the famous restaurant Simpson's on the Strand insisted I don a tie. I was in a huff about that, I can tell you.

Now I look back and say, how wrongheaded, how immature I was.


For I now recognize that standards of conduct, far from being foolish and arbitrary, unite us. They serve as a nexus for community solidarity. They are quintessentially democratic, in that they apply to the lowest and the highest of us equally. They say we care about the integrity of the social fabric: all of it, from hip-hop culture to the nerdiest of the nerds, from people who are just making it to the Donald Trumps of this world.

Baseball guru Bob Costas writes in Fair Ball, a book about what Major League Baseball is doing wrong to squander its legacy as America's pastime, that we have "few areas of common ground left in an increasingly splintered society" (p. 42). Baseball ought to be one of them again, he says; I say so should our regained common standards of behavior and comportment.

A few years back, I went with a friend, a season ticket holder, to a performance of the Baltimore Symphony. It was the first concert of the year, and as is customary the orchestra led off the season with the National Anthem. Everybody in the audience rose ... except, that is, a group of about four women in the front row opposite us across the stage-side balcony. They remained seated, and later on it became clear it was not due to age, infirmity, or physical handicap. Nor was it apparently a political statement. They just couldn't be bothered.

That kind of stuff ought to stop ... if only because we desperately need to cease being so "splintered" as a society.

And, yes, NBA players ought to be required to "dress nice" when they are in the public eye.