KEITH C. BURRIS: PET PEEVES, FROM MUZAK TO THE INTERNET

Some years ago the late art critic Robert Hughes wrote a book called “Culture of Complaint,” which touched on the habit of self-pity and victimization in America.

Hughes said Americans were turning into a nation of whiners.

William F. Buckley Jr., on the other hand, held that Americans did not complain enough about things we should complain about — bad food, bad television, politicians without honor or eloquence.

Could both diagnoses be true? Americans join groups to complain about things that mostly cannot be “fixed” — like social and economic inequality or the excessive influence of money in politics. (”Life is unfair,” said John F. Kennedy.) Yet we put up, quite passively, with the little things we could change, such as indifferent or incompetent service in stores or restaurants. (Who does not rejoice in actual competence, in any realm?)

We all have peeves — small things that drive us nuts and we should speak up about, because they are mutable. Feel free to send your own list.

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Music piped into restaurants, what we used to call Muzak.

This stuff is gone from elevators but present in nearly every bistro. And it has been turned up.

It is almost always too loud. It is almost always bad. It is never classical and very seldom jazz. But it’s usually not really rock or pop either. It’s a weird, “covered” amalgam of jazz and pop. You cannot find the tune, the beginning or the end of this bilge.

The sound itself offends. But, most of all, that no one asked for it offends:

OK if I put on some Muzak? Thanks, but no thanks.

In Italy, a guy may be playing a fiddle or an accordion at an outdoor cafe. But it’s live. It’s a person making a living. It’s real music with a melody you recognize. It’s music, not oppressive, intrusive noise.

And that guy takes social cues as well as tips and requests. Guests who are not responsive cause him to move on.

Years ago, you could play a jukebox in a restaurant. Anyone could. But an actual person was responsible for the selection, paid for it, and, like it or not, the song, which was an actual song, ended at some point.

I was recently in a restaurant with a friend and we asked for a quiet table — away from the sound. The hostess said no such table existed, and that she could do nothing about the music — as if it were an act of nature; a blight on the apples.

This is a new level of helplessness — as if turning a knob to the right is unfathomable.

I am used to making the request for lower volume and nothing happening (my children are used to rolling their eyes) but not to the declaration of passive acceptance before the God of distraction.

Good restaurants keep the Muzak low, so that it is a kind of white noise and helps muffle other noise. And great restaurants don’t have it at all. What you hear is the low murmur of something increasingly rare and almost sublime: People conversing with each other.

• Bad diction.

I often ask my wife these days: “Am I going deaf or is that person not speaking clearly?” She usually says something like: “You very old, but, no, that person is not speaking clearly.”

My two sub-peeves in this regard are, first, people speaking publicly as if they are in a phone booth passing on a secret code. For example, a person reading the scripture on Sunday inaudibly and without enthusiasm. When someone reads St. Paul as if the words are cereal ingredients, it’s a downer.

But worse is the instructor, perhaps in an academic class, or for a group taking a survey, perhaps for CPR instruction, perhaps for a yoga class, who cannot be understood. I swear there is some sort of special diction curse that has fallen upon many 20- and 30-somethings. It is a cross between a mumble and a slur. I want to say, but do not: You have taken on a role here. Your is to communicate. And you are slurring and sliding through words with no regard for where or if they land.

“Only connect,” said E.M Forster. I sometimes get the feeling that fewer and fewer of us really care whether we are connecting.

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I have two peeves to be left, mostly, for another day, but they are, to me, giant ones:

One is ministers who give dreadful and long sermons. Some simply repeat the Gospel story we have just heard better told. Some pile words and cliches one on top of the other. If you cannot be eloquent, be brief.

The other is establishments that sell food and drink but have no public restrooms, even for customers. There ought to be a law against this, especially when these places are along a highway. A legislator who took up this cause would be a hero.

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But let’s end with the internet, and internet rage.

Rudeness should be one of the Deadly Sins. And I think there a special place in hell for the person who does not speak when spoken to in the workplace.

But we live in the Epoch of the Rude — the loud boor at the end of the bar, the senator who interrupts the witness, the man with the ball cap on in the restaurant, the broadcaster who talks over the person he is interviewing, the person who invades personal space.

But our greatest bane these days, perhaps, is the internet bully. He feels entitled.

People seem to think they can say anything online or in emails. Nothing is too much or out of bounds. Any and every verbal assault is permissible. The internet has done for rudeness what it has done for porn. It has both proliferated it and made it more toxic. Rage is all the rage. And insult is now the common currency of our electronic social interaction — the way we signal to each other, like primates.

The insults are delivered to our fellow citizens with a deep presumption: I have the right to condemn and then dismiss not only your views, but

No such right exists.

This way of addressing each other (I hear regularly from a reader whose salutation is “Hey, a--h--e”) not only destroys civility, but the ground of civility.

And the meanness eventually spills over into real life — not just virtual but actual human interaction — so that the awful things that people say to each other online, with impunity, eventually become the things they say out loud. I fully expect to be cursed out one day when I ask a person on the phone to repeat what he or she has just slurred. Or, when I ask for the Muzak to be turned down, to be punched in the jaw.