Vexed!

George Will has found another indication that—well, here he quotes Bill Buckley, who was inconvenienced one day by having to endure a train commute during which he suffered a long delay:

“Buckley, who was gifted at discerning the metaphysical significance of the quotidian, thought that he saw civilization tottering on its pedestal. He was not mistaken:

‘It isn't just the commuters, whom we have come to visualize as a supine breed who have got onto the trick of suspending their sensory faculties twice a day [they probably read a book or the newspaper] while they submit to the creeping dissolution of the railroad industry. It isn't just they who have given up trying to rectify irrational vexation. It is the American people everywhere.’”

Okay, a long delay on the train is now civilization tottering on its pedestal. What would George or Bill have done to rectify these irrational vexations? Would they have lobbied the government to invest more money in infrastructure? Insist that government get completely out of the mass transportation business so it can be privatized and run more efficiently by private enterprise? Buy a helicopter (the latter probably being the only real solution to this problem and available only to the super-rich, so I’m going with 3)?

George doesn’t say. He just knows he’s vexed.

Of course, George is writing today about the invasive new pat-down procedures at airports for those who refuse to go through the full body scan which allows screeners to see through our clothes.

First of all I’d like to say, it’s finally arrived! The x-ray glasses that allow me to see through people’s clothes, advertized in all the comic books and reputable periodicals like Mad Magazines I read as a kid, are here! Oh, how I dreamed of being able to look through the clothes of all my little female classmates in junior high school. (In grammar school I was still dreaming mostly about a new bike. In high school, well, in high school my sexual fantasies had evolved in directions I’m not yet prepared to discuss publically.)

Me, I can’t say about the pat downs. Apparently the threat of carrying on explosive devices taped to your penis or hidden in a lady’s butt crack is real, so the TSA is doing what it thinks necessary to keep us safe. Let’s face it: if someone gets through and brings down a plane, it won’t be a sign of civilization tottering, it will be just one more example of the monumental incompetence of the Obama administration. Remember, Bush kept us safe, at least if you’re not in the military serving in Afghanistan or Iraq, and he did it through a few noninvasive ways such as tapping our phones, screening our email, and waterboarding the occasional actual suspect.

The solution to the airport vexation, though, is obvious in three parts: get in the boarding line and either walk through the scanner or let some stranger of the same sex (damn it!) pat you down; turn around and walk away from the security checkpoint and stay home for Thanksgiving; or charter your own plane.

Again, for George, I’m going for 3. I'm staying home anyway.

For another perspective on the subject, Kathleen Parker today is more amusing and instructive than Will while being far less popinjay. And I'm with her, really. I'd rather fly and assume the small risk that another passenger has mastered the technology challenge of the TNT butt plug than have a complete stranger with no medical training check me for hernias and prostate cancer (although I can get a note from my doctor testifying that both have been remedied.)

But that's the trade off, and interestingly, the same people who found the Bush-era concessions to security to be reasonable and necessary find the same errors on the side of safety to be excessive under Obama. Something about black men with Muslim names wanting to put their hands on our white women, I suppose.

Tweet

I used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy on PBS when his show was on in the 90s. I don’t even like science, but his delivery was so entertaining that I didn’t care if the subject was asexual reproduction in newts or the birth of black holes, between which there is probably some connection. I even taped several episodes and took them with me when I went to Japan to teach English, expecting that Japanese students would think he was as funny as I did.

They didn’t.

So it was interesting to read just now that he still does public appearances and speeches at colleges. Yesterday he was speaking to an audience of hundreds at USC when he collapsed at the podium. He made it to his feet and even joked about it a little before he collapsed again.

The most interesting part of the story to me was that one student reported nobody went to his aid because they were all busy posting tweets about what was happening: “Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy just died!” Except it probably looked like, “BN SciGuy xxx!” I don’t actually speak tweet.

Thus does the next generation confuse digital life for what we used to call real life. Imagine what George Will would say since he first said that digital watches marked the end of civilization. Then it was the designated hitter rule. Then blue jeans. Most recently John Stewart calling Barack Obama “Dude.”

No report yet on how Bill’s doing. Can’t we get a tweet from somebody in the hospital?

And he died in a fiery crash. . . .

My friend Broschat [ http://www.michaelbroschat.com/MontlakeBlog/ ] is buying a new Miata after fifteen years without a car. This is not a midlife crisis since we’re neither of us midlife anymore, (we're more like “zesty sexagenarians”: I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a sexagenarian?) And why put a negative spin like “midlife crisis” on a spontaneous exaltation of the life force? Not that anybody has, but just in case.

The second comment to his blog announcement, though, while well-meaning I’m sure, is exactly the kind of response I often if not usually get when I mention that I ride a motorcycle: “I think the closest I ever came to dying in a car [his respondee responds] was in a Sprite when I was 16. I wasn't driving. The throttle stuck and we went over the edge of a road with a 5' drop off. We ended up on top of and in line with a stone fence that was below the drop off. If the car had rolled we would have had our heads driven into the ground.”

People can’t seem to not make statements like this about motorcycles and apparently sports cars. It’s a curious, almost instinctive response. If I say I take frequent showers, nobody ever responds that showers are one of the most dangerous things you can do in your home. If I say I have to get out my ladder and clear out the rain gutters, no one asks if this scares me more than the thought of a home invasion by Islamic terrorists looking for evidence that I eat pork and read Salmon Rushdie. (Yes and no.)

So I just say something like, “I try to be careful.” I’m very superstitious, so I would never mention that I’ve ridden since I was seventeen without an accident or injury, which wouldn’t be exactly true anyway but too complicated to explain further. (Knock on wood.)

I don’t mention that my wife rides horses and has had numerous accidents, one serious enough to put her in a hospital and wheelchair, followed by months in a cast and on crutches. But no one ever says to her, “Oh, horses are so dangerous. My husband has been in a coma for eight years, ever since he fell off his horse and hit his head on a fence post.”

I never point out that when these folks pick the kids up in the minivan after school and drive them to karate lessons, they’re risking the whole family’s life and are at far greater risk of calamity than I am on my motorcycle. Not mile for mile, but over the course of their lives. Yet I think almost no one puts their kids in the car with a sense of impending doom. They’re more like, “I hope nobody says “Happy Meal” before we get to karate lessons."

Not to mention karate lessons.

None of these fatalistic responses to riding bothers me particularly; I just find them peculiar. But I would like the world to know that if I get squashed like a bug under the wheels of an eighteen-wheeler, I’d rather it happen on two wheels than four. And that I consider horses to be four-legged killing machines, secret carnivores that will run you into the low branches of a juniper tree and feed on your broken corpse until the paramedics arrive, but I’m glad my wife rides and has so passionately enjoyed it these several decades. And I hope Broschat loves his Miata to death (I could have chosen a better expression here) and drives it safely without a scratch on either it or himself for a long as he can still pass the vision test when he renews his license.

But if the unthinkable should happen, I’ll feel better on learning that he was out driving a little too fast on a beautiful spring day with the top dangerously down, rather than getting jostled on the Metro platform and pushed in front of a train. Also, I’ll hope he was with a beautiful woman, no older than forty-two, and miraculously uninjured.

Now rock climbers, though, those people are fucking nuts.

No comment

I have nothing to say about last Tuesday’s election. Nothing.

It’s all been said by the zillion pundits of the many media, including the blogosphere, and since I’m just a freelance pundit, I don’t feel a need to jump in.

Not one word.

(Bunch of assholes.)