Cranky Conservative Goodness

This week George Will displays all the qualities that got me into bow ties and horn-rim glasses to begin with:

Many people have no notion of propriety when in the presence of other people, because they are not actually in the presence of other people, even when they are in public.

With everyone chatting on cell phones when not floating in iPod-land, "this is an age of social autism, in which people just can't see the value of imagining their impact on others.'' We are entertaining ourselves into inanition. (There are Web sites for people with Internet addiction. Think about that.) And multiplying technologies of portable entertainments will enable "limitless self-absorption,'' which will make people solipsistic, inconsiderate and anti-social. Hence manners are becoming unmannerly in this "age of lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive social insolence."

And a bit later:

Because manners are means of extending respect, especially to strangers, this question arises: Do manners and virtue go together? Truss thinks so, in spite of the possibility of "blood-stained dictators who had exquisite table manners and never used their mobile phones in a crowded train compartment to order mass executions."

Actually, manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related -- as a foundation is related to a house -- to the word civilization.

Ahhhhh.......Go read the rest.

The column, by the way, is in response to the latest book by Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. She's the author of that punctuation-crank barnstormer, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a book I bought a while back but have not yet read. Sounds like I need to add her latest effort to my Gimme List as well.