l Gore A.K.A. King Cranium, Lord of the Internet, Chancellor of the Calculator, Exchequer of School Desks, and Potentate for the Poorest 99 Percent, would do well tonight to remember that he is not running for the monarchy.
In his first joust last week with George W. Bush, Gore thought he was in a medieval court where he could dispatch bad jesters and other insufferable minds by looking askance and snapping his fingers to call for the hangman. This explains the now famous sighs and smirks while Bush was talking. Like most people drunk on themselves, King Cranium could not stop even though Bush was saving the kingdom security costs by walking voluntarily to the gallows of foreign policy and abortion.
King Cranium thought everyone would ignore his rudeness in the presidential debates because he cast himself as more of a ''populist'' than Bush. Gore assumed that people forgot that there was not a whole lot of difference in their elite childhoods, Gore playing Lincoln Logs in his D.C. hotel living suite and Bush assuming that his Tinkertoys were derricks.
Gore now knows that he reinforced his image as a pompous populist. The problem is not that he is rich. A lot of people want to be rich. We don't watch ''Who Wants to be a Middle School Teacher?'' Nor is the issue that Gore knows how to say chlorofluorocarbons while Bush never got much past hydrocarbons.
The issue is that there are still a few sturdy pillars of etiquette left in an America where children now call teachers and barely familiar adults by first names and where former expletives litter prime-time sitcoms. Americans still do not want wealth and brains thrown in their face.
Candidates fib, fake, and fabricate, and we still elect them. But we do not want them to flaunt. As Charlotte Hawkins Brown wrote in ''The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, to Wear'' in 1941: ''Truly learned people are the last to parade their knowledge to the disparagement of those who are less advantaged.''
So if King Cranium does not want to sigh his way out of the presidency, he should remember the old maxim that a gentleman is a man who can disagree without being disagreeable. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ''A gentleman makes no noise.'' William Phelps said: ''This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.''
Mark Twain said, ''Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.'' Cicero said, ''I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.'' William Shakespeare wrote, ''Give thy thoughts no tongue/Nor any unproportioned thought his act/Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.''
George Washington: ''If any hesitate in his words ... interrupt him not, nor answer him till his speech be ended.'' An African-American folk rhyme warns, ''Befo' you says dat ugly word, You stop an' count ten.'' George Eliot said, ''Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.'' Emily Post's book of etiquette says, ''Obviously, it is impolite to interrupt another unless you need to communicate a dire emergency immediately.''
In talking about the importance of manners, Edmund Burke wrote that they ''are of more importance than laws.... Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us.'' Lord Chesterfield said, ''Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way through the world.'' P.J. O'Rourke wrote that ''good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste, and style mixed together so that you don't need any of those things.'' Conversely, Eric Hoffer wrote, ''Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.''
One would assume that King Cranium, somewhere during his Harvard education, ran across at least one of these lines. Given his propensity to play the pompous populist, it might help him to remember that Alexander Pope wrote that ''unruly manners or ill-timed applause wrong the best speaker or the justest cause.''
We will see tonight if Gore learned his manners. The late columnist Murray Kempton wrote, ''To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.'' If the debate swings again to foreign policy and abortion and Bush once again tries to save the kingdom security costs, Gore, before hissing a sigh, should remember the words of Otto von Bismarck: ''Every courtesy to an opponent, even to the gallows.''
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
