Be good.

It's been a while since I did a book post on a Wednesday, but don't get all happy -- I am not prepared with time or commitment to bring back the Humpback Writers feature. That, of course, never involved writers with hunched backs, but ran on Hump Day, and was and remains the worst name for a book feature online. So no, I'm not doing that right now.

Nevertheless, it is Wednesday, and here's a book. 

The Good Citizen's Handbook: A Guide to Proper Behavior, compiled by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz and published in 2001, is a look back at handbooks from the 1930s to the 1960s, designed to help Americans live healthy, worthy, happy lives. 

The pages inside are not altered from the original handbooks, except for the addition of headers ("A Good Citizen..."). To the credit of the writer and publisher, the book's endnotes have citations for all of the originals, printed in the smallest type you ever saw in your life. 

So let's get to it: What ought a citizen do in order to be a Good Citizen? 

All right! But surely there's more to it than that?

Hmm. Seems a bit familiar, yes? Like everything being shouted at the citizenry in 2020? Not that it's bad advice for avoiding being sick, but it was also our Civic Duty to ruin our lives to save them in 2020. So is this old pamphlet really goofy and out of touch, when it was exactly what we saw four years ago, just with updated clothing on the models?

In fact, while the book looks like it's intended to poke fun at the earnestness and innocence of the past (à la Nick and Nite's "How to Be Swell"), it can't help but shine a light on the aspirations of an America that wanted to be better and safer for all its citizens. 

Better dressed, too. 

I like the "Clean Play" page. The rules of good sportsmanship are the same as they always were. But the last professional sportsman to follow them that I know of was Barry Sanders, who didn't show off or brag when he scored his many touchdowns and show up the other team. These days we tell kids in school not to be dickweeds, but then we behave like dickweeds ourselves everywhere else. More is caught than taught.

Happiness through purpose, friendship, communication, exercise, and faith. This is the precise advice we still from mental health professionals, except that now the “spiritual values” one is always (and I mean always, 100% of the time) illustrated by photo of a young woman meditating in the lotus position.

This book may have been compiled to chuckle at the innocence of the past, but what sane person would not prefer to live in a society where people really do want to strengthen the republic, help one another, and bolster goodwill? "Today good citizenship means less to us," writes McKnight-Trontz in the introduction. "We worry far more about our demons than our duties.... We belong to fewer civic groups, vote less, and spend far more time doing things ourselves, for ourselves. No wonder it feels like everything is going to Hell." And that was written before the invention of the smartphone! 

Of course, the America of the 1930s through the 1960s had all the problems we can imagine -- tragic family trauma, addiction, racism, poverty, corruption, misogyny, war, whatever else you want to add. Despite that it was a high-trust society, especially compared to the current moment. Two-tiered justice systems, handwave treatment of violent criminals, election theft, tribalism, stores locking up goods, institutions run by fools chosen for the shallowest reasons, children being miseducated if educated at all -- this is all part of our new low-trust society. The Good Citizen's Handbook is a window to the past, not as it was but as those living then wished it could be. We don't even have that now. Whenever I see art depicting a hopeful future now it shows a multiculti group of young people, no children or oldsters, dressed like bums, doing no work, and if a white male is in it, he's probably dressed like a woman or a unicorn. The future is dumb.

Sadly, the handbook is out of print, although as I write this McKnight-Trontz has another Chronicle Books title out: How to Be Popular. Which I know I could use. Perhaps then I could learn How to Be Swell. Nick at Nite didn't really help that much.