Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my wife and I left a restaurant after a pleasant family dinner, to find under the windshield wiper of our rental car a piece of paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook. Someone, I thought, must have hit or scraped the car while parking and left a note—a mark of civility as universally recognized in our society today as any there is. Why, even the “Seinfeld” gang, who all went to jail in the 1998 series finale under a “Good Samaritan” statute for laughing at someone who was being mugged, devoted a whole episode to the inescapable etiquette of leaving a note in these circumstances. Who says that Americans have no remaining standards of honor or decency? So sure was I that the note had to be from some such latter-day Galahad that all I could think of as I extracted it from the wiper was the lengthy correspondence with car rental and insurance companies I was in for once I had got back home and to work again.

But the hit turned out to be of a different kind. On the note was written the following in large capital letters that took up the whole sheet of paper: asshole! learn to park, jerk. Actually, although I’m pretty sure that this is verbatim, I don’t remember if the writer used the vocative comma before “jerk”—and, having thrown the note away in a nearby receptacle shortly after reading it, I cannot now check. My guess is