It’s a better thing to travel hopefully than to arrive, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote back in 1881. I find myself inwardly repeating that line almost every time I venture out to a public event. Whether it’s someone’s phone repeatedly inserting the klaxon-like intro to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” into the hushed denouement of a play, or the musical hooliganism of the idiot who chats his way through Paul McCartney singing “Eleanor Rigby” (it’s the Beatles classic we came to hear, mate, not a monologue about your dog’s bowel issues), it seems that narcissistic self-absorption is the rule...