NO to zero tolerance

A call to arms for the shy and retiring or an excuse for letting off steam? Bob Morris reads about asserion therapy

Do you feel unappreciated for holding doors open? Are you barely able to keep yourself from knocking down errant skateboarders? Do you ask cabdrivers to turn down radio talk shows and mutter viciously when young people saunter four abreast on the pavement? Are you appalled at lenient parents? Do you want to yell at a dentist chatting with a hygienist while you're waiting for the drill, “I'm not unconscious, you know?”
Well, without knocking anyone down on the way, hurry to the bookstore (where you will most likely be ignored and otherwise mistreated by an aggressively negligent clerk) for a copy of “Talk to the Hand.” Lynne Truss, the finger-wagging stickler from England who lamented the collapse of punctuation in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” has returned with a rant about manners.
Or is it a shriek? Even though she aspires to be a low-impact member of society, one who doesn't carry on, litter or behave in an overly familiar way with strangers, she cannot keep herself from being an anti-vulgarity vigilante in a nasty little world. There was the day, for instance, when she told a cashier at her market (who was ignoring customers while telling another cashier a gruesome story) to knock it off. “I had to say something,” she writes. But of course. She is, after all, England's self-proclaimed queen of “Zero Tolerance” who is always looking for “more things to find completely unacceptable.” High on the list is the belligerent and dismissive Jerry Springer palm in your face (indicating no intention of listening) for which this “big systematic moan about modern life” is named.
“I feel it is important to establish that reeling in horror at other people's everyday impoliteness may just go with the territory of being civilized,” she writes. In fact, there has been clucking at bad behavior since at least the 16th century, she claims. Polls indicate that people always think their world is becoming ruder, with books such as Norbert Elias's “Civilizing Process” and Mark Caldwell's “Short History of Rudeness” supporting the notion. But rarely does anyone (other than Judith Martin, a k a Miss Manners) go into such denigrating detail with such unmitigated glee.
With the painstaking care of a professional hairsplitter, Truss breaks rudeness down into six categories, which she hopes will both save the world from philistinism and herself from “going nuts.” They include an inability to say “thank you”; the predominance of personal space; the passive-aggressiveness of the Internet and other automated service technologies that make us do the work; and a disregard for authority and community.
Will any of this hit home in a society in which there are more than enough rude people ready to accuse others of rudeness at the drop of a hat? Truss isn't so sure. “Basically everyone else has bad manners; we have occasional bad moments,” she writes.
A former BBC host and newspaper journalist, the author does not try to make the suggestions found in etiquette books. But while she doesn't tell you how to use a fish knife, she does tell you where to stick it if you're a credit card company keeping her on hold, a passenger talking across her on a plane or a clerk ignoring her at the counter.
“I wave in people's faces,” she writes. “I say aloud, ‘I'm sure I'm standing here.' “
Truss is good at contextualising, and seems conversant with Pascal (“I have discovered that all human misery comes from a single thing, which is not knowing enough to stay quietly in your room”), Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Henry James, Erving Goffman and others. While there are single references to Emily Post and Letitia Baldrige, there are two to Larry David and the instructive manners minefield of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” She may be handing out incivility citations in England (which despite its mannerly history, now has antisocial behavior laws) but she might as well be describing David's Los Angeles. In fact, one can almost imagine her as David when a stranger doesn't thank her for holding the door: “Finally, you HATE the person,” she flames. “It's amazing we don't wrench doors from their hinges, run after people and say, ‘Here! Open it yourself next time. O.K.?' “
Is this book actually useful? Probably not. While the author believes that studying a problem can “defuse” it, her book is more likely to empower her fellow sticklers to set themselves upon the world, causing, in this rage-prone age, more incivility, not less. On the other hand, beyond her comic ranting and frenetic fuming, Truss makes a sincere and well-researched attempt to shed light on the dismal decorum of this darkest age. If she fails at the task, she does so winningly.
Long Live the Queen of Zero Tolerance. And heaven help the rest of us.
© The New York Times