Rules of the Rude
THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB
LOUD hoots and yells: ‘Get out o’ that!’ ‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’ ’Honk! Honk!' ‘ What do you mean parking there?’ ‘Hey, git outta my way!’ ‘I don’t hafta!’ ‘You do hafta!’ ‘Who says I hafta?’ ‘I say you hafta!’ ‘You big stiff!’ ‘ Aw, you rummy! ’
Our five-year-old son is playing Traffic with Chester, his bosom friend. These two boys, we think, and Chester’s parents think, are as pleasant-dispositioned and wellmannered a pair as you will ordinarily encounter. Not only are they bred to be courteous, but, being healthy, cheerful boys, they are just naturally well-behaved social creatures. But when they play Traffic they sound like the toughest and brattiest of brats. They bark, they honk, they shriek. The tumult and the shoutings rise to constantly new crescendos.
Go out to still the racket and calm the angry passions and you will find that the racket is genuine, but the angry passions are merely synthetic. The boys are n’t really mad — they are just pretending to be automobile drivers. Since they are accurate observers and auditors of automobile manners, they are attempting to reproduce what road experience has taught them. The verisimilitude is startling and shocking.
Hearing the children at their game, I was led to reflect upon what happens to the ordinarily courteous, thoughtful, and considerate human being when he slips himself under the steering wheel of an automobile. Here is a typical example: —
I am walking to the curb and am about to step into my car when I unintentionally brush a passing woman’s arm. ‘Sorry,’ I say sincerely. ‘Awfully clumsy of me.’ ‘Not at all,’ replies the woman with a smile as she moves on, grateful for the amenities that smooth such contacts. I step to the running board and slide behind the wheel. She gets into her car half a block up the street. I start, she starts. Both of us are moving when the traffic light changes and I crash into the rear bumper of her car. She gets out and so do I. No damage done to either bumper. But she says, with a more or less ladylike snarl, ‘Why don’t you watch the lights? No excuse for bumping me that way!’ And I say, ‘What’s the matter with sticking out your hand, lady? You women drivers give me a pain in the neck!’ The simple act of stepping off a curb and into an automobile has effected in both of us an instant reversion to barbarism, and changed us from agreeable social creatures into bad-mannered, quarrelsome boors.
We would not think of crowding into a line at a ticket office, though the only danger would be that of being shoved out again. But we will go whooping down the road on the wrong side, past a line of cars, forcing oncoming drivers into the ditch, and taking advantage of the good nature or the weak-mindedness of those in line to let us in so we may avoid the collision we richly deserve. If we ‘make it,’ we plume ourselves on being smart when we are only reckless bad sports. If we don’t ‘make it,’ we may smash up a couple of cars besides our own and get into the police court, the hospital, or the morgue.
On foot and in a crowd, we don’t elbow and shove and push and trample; we don’t yell at the man ahead of us, ‘Get out of my way! I’m in a hurry!’ We move as the crowd moves and await our chance to get out of it without kicking any shins or knocking anybody down. But let us get into a car, and promptly we start crowding and shoving and splitting eardrums with our raucous horns. There might be some practical excuse for us if such behavior served to advance our progress by even a few minutes, but all it is likely to get us is a dented fender and a barrage of poison-gas language.
In a hotel lobby we would not set down our suitcases in the middle of the main path to the desk, where everybody would stumble over them. But most of us park our cars wherever we happen to be stopping (if there is any room to park) — across a driveway, on the blind side of a curve, beside a street excavation, or exactly opposite a truck that already occupies eight feet of a fourteen-foot roadway. And if anybody happens to catch us at it and inquires courteously (as motorists have infrequently been known to inquire) if we don’t realize we are impeding traffic, we gently retort by asking what business it is of his.
We would regard as a total social loss a person who would sneak into our seat at the theatre while we were waiting for somebody to move over; yet we will sneak into a parking space while somebody else is manœuvring to enter it, and grin a grin of smug self-satisfaction at our cleverness.
Why the average mild-tempered and decent-mannered individual is metamorphosed into a roughneck by the act of getting off his feet and on wheels is a question for the psychiatrist to answer. Meanwhile, I have a cure to recommend. The American Automobile Association might well finance it, and it would be a useful aid in solving part of the unemployment problem.
My suggestion is that ten thousand motorists, carefully chosen in different traffic territory, be enlisted as the Civil Automobile Vigilantes — civil in the sense of being good-mannered. They will undergo a course of intensive training in traffic rules and traffic conduct, and be required to sign an oath to behave as courteously behind the wheel as they do afoot. Then beside each of these ten thousand drivers there will be placed a six-foot husky with a liking for battle and a hard and remorseless pair of fists. He will be under strict orders of the picked driver.
These selected pairs will then be sent forth to tour the highways, driving carefully but not pokily, and observing the amenities of the road as they should be observed but seldom are. Not looking for trouble, not instigating it, but prepared. When they encounter the road hog, the cutter-in, the passer-on-curves, the incorrigible honker, the beater of lines and lights, the crowder, and the bumper-shaver, the Civil Vigilante will remonstrate courteously and reasonably. And when this has accomplished nothing — nothing being just what it would accomplish — the driver will say to his ham-fisted companion, ‘Hop to it,’ and the offending motorist will have sense and good manners pounded into him or the daylights pounded out of him.
About a week of this empiric treatment would do more to solve the traffic tangle and make motoring once more a pleasure than would the expenditure of a billion dollars on newer, wider roads for the rude to ruin again with bad manners. The idea is probably quite illegal — but how I’d like to see it tried!
BERTON BRALEY