Discourse with an edge coarsens today’s uncultured culture. Do anything but bore. The wiseacre deserves praise, not bile. Welcome to our me-first cesspool age.

Consider the Internet’s hot website, the narcissistic MySpace. Most film is profane and/or pornographic. Turn on television: It will turn you off. King is hip and irreverent: a.k.a. hard and mean.

I come to praise an exception — even as we bury an embodiment. The exception: the Western, where white hats win, good guys teach, and right outlasts wrong. Its metaphor: actor Glenn Ford, recently dead, too young, at 90.

Unlike Henry Fonda, Ford was not a laconic ikon in the saddle. Unlike John Wayne, few called him Paul Bunyan via Pecos Bill. Unlike Jimmy Stewart, Ford became neither institution nor caricature: the shy fox taken as a naïf who ends up taking the taker.

Instead, Ford was Everyman: trim, old-shoe, and solid, counted on by viewers as Hollywood counted his receipts. He evoked baseball’s Bill Dickey, recalling teammate Lou Gehrig: “Any day, every day, he just went out and did his job.”

Ford projected depth, stoicism, and guy next door. By 19, he wanted to act. “It’s all right for you to try,” said his father, “if you learn something else first. Be able to take a car apart and put it together. Be able to build a house, every big of it. Then you’ll always have something.” Learning, the tyro did.

At Ford’s late 1940s-’60s peak, he worked on wiring, plumbing, and air-conditioning at home. At one time or another, he was a roofer, plate glass window installer, and $5 a week Santa Monica bartender. Years later, now famous, Ford drove regularly by the bar. “There are too many places here that won’t let me forget how I started.”

Imagine Madonna aping such modesty, Main Street ethic, and blue-collar heart. You can’t: The dots don’t connect. In one five-year period, Ford took off an average 21 days between movies: in 1960-61, filming four simultaneously. “I like to work,” said the actor, simply. He made 85 films.

In “Blackboard Jungle,” the native Quebecer was a valiant teacher. “Pocketful of “Miracles” vaunted a bootlegger of bon homie. “Dear Heart” cast a lonely businessman. “The Big Heat” bared a vengeful cop. Such amalgams are hard to find.

Ford’s genre was the big-skied/hearted Western –”Cimarron,” “The Man From Colorado,” “3:10 to Yuma,” “Cowboy,” TV’s “The Hacketts” — ideal for his dry born-for-the heartland voice. Like Jim Davis, Morgan Woodward, the grand Ben Johnson, the great Ward Bond, he embodied the frontier’s dirt and sagebrush: everywhere, impatience with limits of any kind.

The Western prized Gulliver vision: also, old-world duty, honor, nobility, and independence. Diane Holloway said of 1950s TV/cinema: “[They] and we were kinder than today. Life in general was more polite.” I once asked Bob Costas why columnist Maureen Dowd wrote: “We’re cruder, more self-involved, and more over-the-top than ever.” He said, “Television and film have a lot to do with it.”

Ford mourned how to some decency had become for squares. In a cycle of irony, squareness made him special. It let him refuse to throw good taste after bad, even as culture became our lounge lizard, and America the lounge.

A friend once said that Glenn Ford was a star because he was a great character actor. Aptly, the actor’s core was character. There are worse lessons to learn, or live.

Have PoliticalMavens.com delivered to your inbox in a daily digest by clicking here