Counter-Currents
John Fetterman
2,591 words
Stuttering John Fetterman: A National Embarrassment
Last Sunday, when I read that a section of Interstate 95 passing through Philadelphia had collapsed, a cold grey fog of sadness invaded my Pennsylvania-born heart. The Cradle of Liberty, precious land of my unplanned birth, had lurched yet closer toward becoming a Third World coffin.
I’ve endured multiple head injuries and survived at least one gigantic brain tumor, but at least I’m able to clearly enunciate the word “infrastructure.” Senator John Fetterman, who was born in southwestern Pennsylvania just like me and our walking sarcophagus of a president, is not nearly so lucky.
Standing bald as a cue ball at six feet eight inches, ghoulish-looking and hunched over with giant, floppy Dumbo ears, Fetterman comes closer than any politician in American history to resembling the pinheaded “Schlitzie” from Tod Browning’s 1932 horror classic Freaks.
But unfortunately for Fetterman and the rest of the country, that’s not the scariest thing about him. Word has it that he was relatively lucid until May 13, 2022, when Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s then-Lieutenant Governor, suffered a debilitating ischemic stroke that has rendered him permanently unable to finish a sentence without sounding as if he’s been hit in the head with a sledgehammer non-stop since infancy.
By last May, Fetterman was already running as a Democrat for a seat in the US Senate against Dr. Mehmet Oz, and the sick irony of a TV-celeb physician competing against a brain-damaged movie monster was only lost upon the brain-damaged among us. Democrats insisted that a candidate’s “health” shouldn’t matter. These were the same Democrats who insisted that both Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan were demented vegetables who were clearly unfit to hold public office.
During his televised 2022 debate with Dr. Oz, Fetterman notoriously opened the show by saying, “Hi, goodnight everybody,” which may be the funniest thing I’ve heard since Groucho Marx’s, “Hello, I must be going.” When asked about whether he’d flip-flopped on fracking, Fetterman flip-flopped in his frickin’ answer: “Oh. Uh, I, I I do support fracking — I don’t, I don’t — I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.”
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
Thanks for clearing that up, Senator Schlitzie.
Signifying that we are clearly a nation in the throes of late-stage dementia, Pennsylvanians voted Fetterman into office anyway. Barely a month after being sworn in, he was hospitalized for lightheadedness. Two days later, citing the mystery illness of “depression,” he was again hospitalized, this time at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he spent nearly two months being spoon-fed tapioca pudding while watching Three Stooges marathons. (I made up the parts about the pudding and the Stooges only because they seemed plausible and also because I doubt that anyone can definitively prove me wrong.)
Last Wednesday at a meeting of the Senate Environmental Committee, Delaware Senator Tom Carper asked Fetterman to pour everyone a glass of his thoughts regarding the I-95 collapse. Fetterman regaled the crowd with the following dark and inscrutable Zen koan (I very carefully transcribed Fetterman’s ululations, even repeatedly listening to them at half-speed to ensure I didn’t fuck up any of his fuckups, so nothing is misspelled here and is instead faithfully represented as it was spoken):
Uh, no, I, I, uh, would, would, would just, uh, really like to, you know, the 95, 95, 95, you know, um, you know, obviously, that, you know, you’re pretty much preoccupied with the, uf, uh, 95? And I know I certainly am, too, and we know it’s a major, uh, atery, not just for, for Pennsylvania, but for the East, the East Coast. And a lot of Pennsylvanians are worried that delays in repairs bring to its, standstill deal.
On Saturday, ostensibly to make Scranton-born Joe Biden appear to be less senile than everyone knows he is, Fetterman spoke on the I-95 collapse as Biden stood next to him, nodding and probably thinking, “This is good for me — this is very, very good for me”:
And now, I’m standing next to, uh, the president again, next to, uh, a collapsed bridge here, and he is here to commit to work with the governor and, the, the, delegadation to make sure that we get this fixed quick fast as well, too. This is a president that is committed to infructure, yeah, and then on top of that, eh, the jewel, uh, well, kind of, uh, eh a law, of the infra—, infruct—, yeah infration, uh bill, that is gonna make sure that there’s gonna be bridges all across this like this, uh, all across America getting rebuilt.
John Fetterman is living, breathing, drooling, stuttering proof that nothing in America is getting rebuilt. His stroke-addled brain epitomizes the current State of the Union.
New Poll Suggests Americans May Be Suffering From BLM-Induced Neeg Fatigue
Last Monday was my birthday, and I vow to hold every reader who failed to send me a present in lifelong contempt. I spent the day of my nativity 0ut in Savannah, Georgia with my wife. As we were waiting outside in the humid coastal Southern summer heat for a tony restaurant that serves alligator and venison to open, a young black male approached us mumbling some gibberish about how someone was dealing drugs in a nearby alleyway. The next thing out of his cartoonishly puffy lips was something along the lines of, “America is a racist country, and if you don’t agree with that, you’re a liar.” I suspect that he thought I’d be intimidated instead of laughing and saying, “It’s my birthday — give me a fucking break, man.” Possibly sensing that I was not willing to hand over my wallet without a right good street scrap, he ambled away.
I’m really getting tired of these blacks and their endless guilt-tripping schemes.
A new poll by the Pew Research Center suggests that I am not alone among my co-ethnics. Negro Fatigue — or, as I prefer to call it, “Neeg Fatigue,” because it bears more of a snappy, hip-hop lyricism to it — seems to be setting in among the Ghost People after three dadblamed years of shamelessly stupid and often gleefully violent black misbehavior, much of it egged on by the media-governmental-corporate triumvirate based on provable lies about George Floyd’s death.
After three years of blacks raping, robbing, looting, killing, smashing, bashing, burning, defaming, degrading, destroying, extorting, and lying, somehow everyone is still expected to believe that white cops are the main problem. It doesn’t even matter that Black Lives Matter has led to More Dead Blacks — keep your eyes on the prize and find inventive new ways to blame, frame, and shame whites.
Seriously, when was the last time you saw a clear-cut case of a white cop wantonly brutalizing a black criminal suspect? Can you think of even one during this century? Meanwhile, a simple search will bring up endless videos of blacks, sometimes in choreographed chimp mobs, gleefully and sadistically smashing white heads. Just like Joe Stalin’s famous line about how it’s not who votes, but who counts the votes, it’s not the number of videos that show interracial violence, it’s who gets to cherry-pick the videos designed to give an unforgivably skewed perspective on who’s committing most of the violence.
Pew’s poll was conducted online from April 10 to 16 among 5,073 American adults. Major findings include:
- 51% of Americans say they support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, compared to a historic high of 67% in 2020.
- 84% of Democrats and “Democrat leaners” still support BLM, whereas 82% of Republicans and “GOP leaners” oppose it.
- 81% of blacks support BLM, whereas 63% of Asians, 61% of Hispanics, and a robustly low (but still too high) 42% of whites support it. That Asian quotient is unacceptably high. Apparently, the endless black-on-Asian beatings of the past few years haven’t dampened the slants’ misguided ardor for their dusky tormentors.
- All racial groups say they’ve seen the overhyped videos of white cops allegedly brutalizing blacks, but only whites say that publicizing such footage makes it harder for cops to do their job.
- 57% of Americans say BLM hasn’t improved black people’s lives; 61% of Americans say it hasn’t improved race relations, either.
- 59% of Republicans say the word “dangerous” describes BLM, whereas 54% would agree that it’s “divisive.”
- A paltry 14% of white Republicans support BLM, whereas 45% of black Republicans place their race over their political party.
- 64% of those aged 18-29 still support BLM, whereas 41% of those over 65 approve — but sure, keep blaming the goddamned boomers for everything, kids.
According to Pew: “The decrease in overall support is mostly due to the declining share of White [sic] adults who say they support the movement.”
WAY TO GO, WHITE ADULTS!
Elderly Bike-Riding Female Professor in San Francisco Equates Hatred of Bicyclists with Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia — and I Agree, but for Wildly Different Reasons
What’s worse than a bicyclist? A black bicyclist. What’s worse than a black bicyclist? A black lesbian bicyclist. What’s worse than a black lesbian bicyclist? Nothing. There is nothing on Earth worse than a black lesbian bicyclist.
Ruth Malone looks like she’s been run over by a car at least once in her life. She’s not black, and I can’t confirm whether or not she’s a lesbian, so at least she has those things going for her. But she is a bicyclist. What’s worse, she’s a bicyclist apologist. And by that, I don’t mean that she apologizes for being a bicyclist, which would at least humanize her in my eyes. No, what I’m saying is far more sinister: She attempts to justify everything that’s unjustifiable about bicyclists and their so-called lifestyle. Whereas anti-Semitism is often called “the world’s most ancient hatred,” hating bicyclists is the world’s most justifiable hatred.
Malone, a professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, recently had the moxie to write an article called “Hate is Dangerous, Including Against Bicyclists,” and the San Francisco Chronicle had the temerity to publish it. One would think that people who inhabit a city that is one of America’s most topographically beautiful metropolises — a place that in classic films such as Vertigo and The Birds was nigh on perfect, but that’s now crammed with street-shitters who desperately rummage through the feces of other street-shitters hoping to find a flake or two of undigested fentanyl — would have learned how to feel shame, but one would think wrong. Malone wrote it, the Chronicle published it, I had the misfortune to stumble across it, and now I’m feeling a dangerous level of hatred against bicyclists.
Malone kicks off her piece assuming that anyone beyond her and a handful of likeminded bicyclist apologists were aware of the death of USA Cycling champion Ethan Boyes — whose corpse Malone gravely dishonors by misspelling his surname as “Boyce” — who was struck dead by a car in April while being foolhardy enough to be riding his bike in San Francisco’s Presidio district.
Whenever I hear that someone was struck dead by a car while cycling, my first instinct is never to think, “Golly, that’s horrible.” Instead, my mind leaps straight to, “That’s what you get for riding your bicycle on roads that were built and intended for automobiles, buses, and trucks.” It matters not to me that, according to Malone, Boyes “had been riding in a properly designated bike lane when the speeding driver swerved across the road and hit him head-on.” To me, that’s as silly as lamenting the death of an anchovy that had been swimming in the same waters as a great white shark and wound up being eaten head-on. The plain fact is that when I was a child and the world was a far better place, no one in their right mind thought that roads should have “bike lanes,” just as no one felt that any anchovy foolhardy enough to share underwater spaces with sharks didn’t deserve being eaten by them. Just as it would be reckless to place kindergarten-age judo students in the octagon with heavyweight mixed martial artists and expect them to fare well, anyone who justifies placing bicyclists on the same thoroughfares as buses and trucks and expects a thin painted line to keep everyone safe is either naïve at best or a psychopath at worst.
Malone relates her “growing horror” at having to read comments under the article about Boyes’ cycling death to the effect that bicyclists disobey traffic laws, do “insanely dangerous things,” and “need to be more mindful.” She also appears to feel that the following comment is hateful rather than perfectly sensible:
I question how one can value their life while literally putting themselves in voluntary danger. (San Francisco is among the) top 5 most dangerous cities to ride in. I’m so confused on how cyclists are on here accusing drivers for deliberately trying to kill them, then hop right back on the bike. If I thought someone was out to kill me, I would not continue to put myself in that position.
Why, it almost sounds like black people who never stop flapping their purple gums about how living in a majority-white country is a source of endless danger and anguish, yet who never seem willing to cash in their chips and buy a one-way ticket back to Mother Africa. And this is where Malone, just like me, begins to make the connection:
Just as those who tolerate or encourage racist, sexist and homophobic or transphobic comments on social media contribute to emboldening the people who attack and menace particular groups, people who parrot stereotypical comments about cyclists on social media subtly encourage those who would harm them — tearing down a memorial, close-passing a mother with a child on her bike or aggressively edging their car into a bike lane to menace and squeeze a bicyclist. . . .
Ultimately, hate of bicyclists comes from the same place as racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia: a desire to cling to the status quo power arrangements that favor some over others. As the bicycle becomes re-popularized as a legitimate form of transportation, there are inevitably more conflicts with those who continually and mindlessly assert that “streets are for cars.” But just as gay people are no longer willing to stay in the closet, nor women in the kitchen, bicyclists are no longer willing to settle for crumbs in terms of use of our public roadways.
One again, I concur with Malone. Bicyclists, along with gays and women, are getting increasingly lippy and obnoxious. So what’s the solution, Ruthie girl? The answer is obvious: legally enforced segregation!
The answer, of course, is to support protected or separated street infrastructure that will allow people on bicycles to go places safely. Until that time, those of us who use bicycles — for our errands, our commutes to work and school, our grocery shopping — will continue to assert our rights as users of the roadways. We don’t deserve to be placed at added risk by hateful stereotyping.
Putting aside the fact that Malone misspelled “infructure,” whether or not any animate being “deserves” the relatively benign indignities of “hateful stereotyping” or the existence-terminating horror of being struck forever dead is a subjectively metaphysical question, which means that you can make up any answer and feel good about it without having to prove a thing.
But on one matter, Ruth Malone and I agree: Bicycles and motorized vehicles are not equal. As long as they are quarantined in separate spaces rather than forced together in some delusional egalitarian ecotopia, it is for the best of all concerned.
Where she and I would disagree is whether the same sensible standard should be applied to the innate and intractable differences between good ol’ regular human beings and blacks, women, and homos.
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44 comments
We used to have a higher class of hobos.
https://youtu.be/zP3icZB3HEo
And after the gringo John Huston gave Dobbsy that peso he went and got himself a swell haircut.
“I made up the parts about the pudding and the Stooges only because they seemed plausible and also because I doubt that anyone can definitively prove me wrong.”
Like Mencken and Thompson before him, Jim realizes that American politics is so cartoonishly fucked up that only a resort to outright fiction can convey the “reality” of it with any degree of authenticity. If someone reported that Fetterman or Biden was hopelessly addicted to Ibogaine I would have no reason to have any doubts about it.
Pardon my naivety, but was the whole ibogaine thing true with Ed Muskie as Thompson wrote about in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72? It’s too bad Hunter shot himself. I think one of the things he said before he died was “it never got weird enough for me.” If only he held on a few more years. Trump being elected, men playing in women sports LARPing as women… and Fetterman, arguably the the coup de gras. The thing is, at this point, Gonzo journalism would be obsolete.
Thompson, when challenged, said that he was just elaborating on a rumor that was current among the press assigned to the Muskie beat. Later, he admitted that he had started the rumor himself. It’s a technique still used by fake news outlets outlets today.
Let’s hear it for pedestrians.
When writing something, I try to state my most important point as close to the beginning as possible. With that, and the fact that I am a cyclist, in mind, I need to say “Fuck you Jim!”
Having gotten that off my chest, let me add that we do have one point in common. I agree that cars and cyclists are not equal, and are just barely compatible on the roadways. But couldn’t you say the same about sedans and semis? There are about 5000 fatalities and over 100,000 injuries per year resulting from truck-car accidents. Remember the old CB jargon used by truckers to describe compact cars, “roller skates”? Or for VW beetles, “pregnant roller skates”. Is everyone who has been killed by a truck some kind of stupid fucking moron for daring to drive on the same roadways?
How about other incompatibilities, like motor vehicles and trains? There are about 5000 of those accidents, resulting in 600 deaths and 2000 injuries.
Why not condemn all 42,000 people killed annually in all auto accidents? Shouldn’t they have known better than to go for a drive? How about the stupid pedestrians who have the temerity to cross a street, or jog therein? And then there are all those pesky children, pets, and animals that slow us down while we are texting, talking or gawking while driving—do they deserve to die?
As a cyclist I have a legal right to use the road. Beyond that, I am not ashamed to say that I make my own rules. Rule #1: Survive. Rule #2 (which enhances the first rule): Don’t needlessly piss off drivers. I say “needlessly” because a certain percentage of drivers (like you) are going to be pissed off at me just for existing.
Jim, the roads are a chaotic and dangerous place for all users. You are exhibiting the despicable human trait of having contempt for smaller and weaker things. Here’s a test: next time you see a group of cyclists ahead of you who are slowing you down, ask yourself how you would be thinking and acting if the cyclists were replaced by a pack of slow-moving Hell’s Angels.
Sheesh. Lighten up, Francis.
Cars, increasingly few that there are these days, must share the road with trucks. Trains, at certain limited, well marked points, must cross roads. And lots of people are killed in bona fide car-truck wrecks, but far more survive. A bicyclist who loses chicken with a car is a polytrauma case study, if they wake up.
Most bike lanes are flanked on either side by safe and wonderful sidewalks and are often located within minutes of motor-vehicle-barred trails, which are infinitely more beautiful than urban shitscape routes. The whole thing is suicidally elective.
I will never understand how anyone can willingly put their lives at risk through blind trust in drivers approaching from behind while riding with traffic as opposed to against it.
Happy belated 39th birthday Mr. Goad
Haha, yes, I adopted the Jack Benny Method decades ago.
Play your violin on your next episode of Hardballs
Fetterman is a race traitor because he failed with white women and defaulted to some Brazilian mestizo. His kids will probably end up whitening generationally (Blanqueamiento) since we all know he doesn’t live in the ghetto. That’s usually how it goes. Although race traitors are relatively small in number, the ferocity of their treachery cannot be understated. They will feed their own race to the wolves and triangulate to get ahead since they failed with whites.
I always thought that John Fetterman looked like an uglier version of Michael Berryman, but holy smokes, he does look like Schlitzie!
If he ever runs for president (perish the thought), his campaign slogan should be “Gabba, Gabba! Hey!” and his campaign song should be “Pinhead” by The Ramones:
D-U-M-B
Everyone’s accusing me
“Gooba gobba! Gooba gobba! We accept her! We accept her! One of us! One of us!”
I prefer to refer to the Pennsylvania Senator as “Uncle Fester man” not only for his resemblance to Jackie Coogan, but for his freakish height reminiscent of Lurch who, come to think of it, had a similar level of eloquence with his catchphrase Yoouuuurrrraaanng?
I was disappointed that in the thread of politicians visibly deteriorating there was no mention of the increasingly cadaverous Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Jeez louise! She looks like that ol’ crypt keeper on HBO’s Takes from the Crypt back in the 80s. Maybe Jim Goad is over his word count and will save it for next time?
Next worst week is another day!
Five-star Goad. Even snuck in my secret bias against aggressive bicyclists. Yes, they do indeed have the right-of-way, and I myself have participated in Times Out and Transportation Alternatives rides, while pajeet taxi drivers honked and cursed at us as we spread out across Sixth Avenue…but these days bicycles are more a danger than a deliverance. And so self-righteous. Ticket them all!
But the Fetterman stuff. O bliss and heaven.
Standing bald as a cue ball at six feet eight inches, ghoulish-looking and hunched over with giant, floppy Dumbo ears, Fetterman comes closer than any politician in American history to resembling the pinheaded “Schlitzie” from Tod Browning’s 1932 horror classic Freaks.
As I was reading the section about Ruth Malone, I thought of Sepulveda Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway in Los Angeles. Bike lanes. Suicide lanes.
I can understand why people would want to bicycle (or roller skate, roller blade, skate board, stroll, etc.) in areas with much beauty (a wilderness area, near the ocean, in a park), but placing lanes for these activities in places meant for vehicles is just insane, or, psychopathic.
I never understood why anyone would risk those highways in L.A. on a bicycle. I always worried about accidentally hitting a cyclist. Imagine it. There you are, driving along, minding your own business and the speed limit, staying in your lane, and then a cyclist accidentally loses control, or comes out of nowhere (and they often do), and/or runs the red light, and you hit the cyclist (killing or wounding him). You would have to live with that the rest of your life. Even if it’s not your fault. Why would anyone place anyone else in that situation? It’s selfish, reckless, inhumane, even. But anything can be justified, as we are all seeing everywhere now.
There are motorcycle enthusiasts, too, on the road that probably belong in asylums. It seems to me that most of them aren’t suicidal, though. But yeah, they can be erratic and dangerously inconsiderate, too, as they cut in front of you or weave in and out of lanes. But I have more respect for them than I do bicyclists. Bicyclists belong on designated lanes in parks, or they should be taking the bus to work or to shop.
That’s it. I don’t have a point other than to comment about my annoyance with bicyclists. Yes, I have a bike. But it isn’t a weapon for “social justice.”
When we are pedestrians we hate bicyclists and when we are drivers we hate the bastids. Very soon will start le Tour de France which causes an event akin to the awakening of cicadas as these middle-aged dopes wheel out their multi-thousand dollar bicycles, wipe off the cobwebs, don the lycra and dark glasses, and infest our roadways – roadways that were built specifically for cars and trucks.
As appalling as Brandon and Fetterman are, they would not even be in the news were they not elected – the real problem is those that vote for such demented individuals.
I don’t understand this generalised contempt for bicycle riders. Sure an annoying minority of them refuse to accept the meek attitude of deference formerly acknowledged by all as appropriate to a weak and vulnerable minority. The mentality is a liitle similar to reclaim the night marches where women activists want the state to make it safe for them to roam the streets at all hours. I think of road riding as an expression of the Faustian spirit, a calculated risk, an attempt to enter into a state of nature within the confines of the city. And I respect road cyclists for that, but not the idiots who blithely obstruct traffic or disobey road rules.
Also bicycles ruled the roads before the advent of the motorcar. I have frequently been regaled with stories from old men, now long dead, who during the 1920s would ride sixty miles to get to a dance on a Friday evening.
I suspect that many cyclist-haters are secretly envious of people who have more courage and stamina than themselves.
I was less than ten years old when I was taught bike safety rules. I never once considered obeying them. My young brain calculated that it was insane to ride with traffic. Ever since then I see bike commuters riding along right there in traffic every day and notice that they tend to be high earning yuppies; doctors, executives. I’ve thought “gosh they have so much to live for… what makes them do this?” The only answer I come up with is that they have, since childhood, never experienced bad luck of any kind.
Totally agree. Someone above posted how its legal for cyclists to use the road and is upset at Goad’s post. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s smart. It’s legal for me to purchase cigarettes and chain smoke them but I’m also increasing my risk to sever health issues. I had a buddy of mine, cycling enthusiast, who got broadsided by a car just going 30-40 miles an hour on a country road. Guy was in the hospital for about a year and had a chunk of his thumb removed.
The bike lanes are all smoke and mirrors of it’s on the same surface where automobiles can cross over. Cyclists asking motorists to share the road are like someone asking to share your lover’s orifice. Things are going to get messy.
There are groups of adult cyclists, in the area I am from in UK , who regularly take groups of young children 7+ into traffic lanes used by cars, buses, and trucks, as a political gesture.
Jeepers, I suppose I’m kinda/sorta glad that the segment on bicyclists sparked some kind of discussion. I’m also a bit surprised that people took it so seriously and didn’t read it as it was intended—a lampooning of the very notion of “hatred.” I’m shocked to read some of these comments and hear a giant whooshing sound over a million bicycle helmets. I thought the whole bit about great white sharks and anchovies should have been obvious, but I’m coming to learn that you simply can’t make the joke obvious enough for some people to get it.
The Fetterman transcription was probably the funniest thing I’ve read in 2023, out of control laughing. Thanks.
For reasons that escape me, bicycle hatred seems to be endemic on the right side of the political spectrum, and I do mean the entire right side, not just this little sliver on the extreme end. Many years ago, I participated in another exchange with statements and comments that ran along the same lines as this one, but on the American Spectator, where it would be a mortal sin to suggest that Negroes might possibly have a lower IQ than Caucasians. It seems that anytime an author mentions, even only in passing, the word “bicycle” on a right-leaning site, it precipitates a number, and sometimes a torrent, of denunciations of the character of bicyclists and all their transgressions, as has been the case with the amen chorus here. It has been my experience on the road that upwards of ninety-nine percent of drivers are tolerant, and that must include a lot of conservatives, so luckily, the ugliness mostly comes out while spouting off in an article or its comment section.
Fine, fine, but do you really think you’re helping dispel widespread impressions that bicyclists tend to be smug, self-righteous, touchy, and humorless? This is why I drew analogies between them and other professional victim groups.
This is the most fun I’ve had on this site in a while.
What’s wrong with being smug, self-righteous, touchy, and humourless?
“bicyclists tend to be smug, self-righteous, touchy, and humorless…”
And they are like that off the bike, too. I have a couple of them in my office now.
People across the right also tend to regard speed-limit enforcement as a violation of their human rights, particularly when done with cameras. I suspect that men who love cars and fast driving are more likely to be right-wing, and cyclists and speed cameras get in their way and spoil their fun.
LOL @ “Neeg Fatigue”!
Anyway, I predict that we’ll be seeing a lot more bikes in the future, because 1) the price of cars has become exorbitant, and 2) public transportation in most American cities sucks. In my younger days, I’ve done so to get to work. Where possible, I’d use sidewalks rather than roads, simply because I wanted to avoid the multitudes of drivers who believed the road was their personal property and I should be grateful they didn’t run me over. Still, I noticed a big difference between roads and sidewalks – the roads were smooth as a baby’s butt, but the sidewalks were quite often uneven and cracked, usually never maintained, making it a real pain to ride on them.
As someone who used to ride six miles to work and back through Phoenix traffic, and whose eight ball finally came up as “very doubtful,” I can’t resist commenting.
For one thing, Murphy’s Law. No matter how much of a hot-shot you think you are maneuvering your pedal-powered Pea Picker in traffic, a collision with a bigger vehicle is a very good bet.
And regardless of the heft of your “pedicycle,” there is no beating two-tons of chrome bumper. Mine was a heavy steel Raleigh, not one of those metrosexual carbon fiber horrors.
I rationalized my choice of daily commuter cardio with the idea that tens of thousands of students and staff do ride bicycles to and from and around campus, often in traffic. But I must have missed something in Probability class.
I did take precautions. I used the desert botanical park and bike paths and did not mix with traffic unless I had to. I also took advantage of wide sidewalks, if possible, even though local laws prohibited bicyclists from riding on them. Better a ticket than a car concussion. Still there were two or three busy streets that had to be crossed somehow during rush-hour.
When I crossed the last street, I was watching closely for those home-bound commuters coming down the hill fast that don’t like to stop for red lights. The junkie was coming from the other direction, however.
I waited for the light and did not dismount in the crosswalk when I got the signal. That is probably a good thing, because instead of going under the wheels, I slammed over the hood and smashed the windshield and then sailed about forty feet. The car was banged up pretty bad and the junkie pulled over in wonderment. A cop later showed me a Polaroid of his car and it was basically totaled.
The junkie was stuck in jail still sobering up a day later. His blood alcohol content was only 0.03 at the time of the collision, less than a half of being legally drunk, so whatever he was shooting or smoking in addition to the beer must have been the good stuff. As soon as I was critical but stable they released him without bail.
When he fled the state the day before his conviction for aggravated assault, I actually tracked his ass down in Illinois, got him extradited, and then he did a little over three years in the poky. Fleeing was not a smart call for him because I told the judge not to show him any mercy.
I have no memory from the time that I entered the fateful intersection until a week later in the ICU when I woke up to a bunch of giggly candy-stripers shaving my face. Very weird.
When the girls left, a guy with a Hindi accent came in and started asking me who the President was. “President of What?” He didn’t get the Snake Plissken joke.
I knew the answer to the U.S. President question but for some reason there was dwarf inside my head holding up a cue card that said “Jimmy Carter,” and no matter how hard I tried to answer “George W. Bush,” or simply “W,” the man in the control seat literally forced me to put the peanut farmer from Plains back into the Oval Office. Very weird.
The deadpan brain doctor then asked me to count backwards from one-hundred by sevens. That I could actually do.
The other good news is that when he stuck my extremities with a pin I flinched badly. “That is good,” the man said.
One day I was visited by the chief trauma surgeon who was the first one to deal with me long before I was conscious. He was the one who did the happy-knife exploratory surgery since their MRI machine was broken. He asked if I was wearing a bicycle helmet during the collision. My clever answer was that I did not wear a helmet on my bike because I did not wear one at my destination. That answer seemed like it made sense at the time. The doctor just shook his head and said, “You are very lucky.”
Yeah, so when I drive in traffic I now get really paranoid about hitting a random pedestrian or a soybean cyclist on the road. Mexican nationals never cross the streets at the crosswalks, and most everyone on any kind of “cycle,” pedaled or otherwise, darts around like they own the lanes.
As far as I’m concerned, non-motor vehicles should not on the streets at all. And if we have to have bike routes for commuters, then neighborhood paths should be built so as not to mix with vehicular traffic. Bicycles in traffic just make no sense ─ and I am living proof of it.
What saved me was that I had decent health insurance that eventually paid a two-million dollar medical bill ─ plus the accident occurred just a few hundred feet from a fire station, and I was only about three miles from a top trauma center.
Unfortunately, it was a “teaching” trauma center because I had to put up with pimply-faced resident doctors bothering me all the time, but acting clueless if I actually asked them anything not related to Japanese cartoons. But the Registered Nurses were knowledgeable (and very hot).
Since that time I took the bus to work and walked part of the way as physical therapy whenever I had the time. Decent parking is prohibitively expensive unless you are a Marxist professor with tenure.
There is a light rail system but it is crowded and full of homeless people sleeping in the air conditioning. And the buses are filled with homeless people carrying bedbugs from one roost to the next.
I used to care about my “carbon footprint,” but now I pay the exorbitant parking fees and just drive a car. No more bikes or buses for me.
If you ride a bicycle on the street, my advice is “don’t.”
🙂
Scott: damn right.
25 years ago I was a bike commuter to both work and call-idge in what was then the tenth largest metropolis in the country. It added up to about 22 miles a day. If I rode in the bike lane, by my rough estimate it would have saved me at least 50% of the physical exertion and time. Instead I mountain biked through ditches, jumped curbs, cut through every parking lot, behind stores and businesses. I was happy and proud to flout every bike law including those regarding reflectors and lights (I had a good smuggle compartment for my marijuana). Still came close to being run over twice.
Yeah, the odd thing is that it took me far less time to ride (and bypass most of the red lights on the route) than to drive the six miles in traffic, LOL.
🙂
That is a sad story, but I’m glad that you seem to have fully recovered. I do not dispute any of your conclusions. In fact, I could say that your warning at the end could be extended beyond riding on the street; a professor in the department where I worked was going downhill on a path in the park, hit a slick patch, went over the handlebars and landed on his head. He was wearing a helmet, but broke his neck. His last year was spent paralyzed from the neck down. And my nephew was flying down a hill on a mountain trail when his handlebar stem broke and launched him. He spent a month in the hospital but thankfully completely healed. So bike riding can be dangerous in more situations than traffic.
My own “collision” story was the other way around: I was ticketed after punching a GMC Yukon that passed dangerously close to me on my way to work one day. The driver got out, flashed a badge at me, announced that I was under arrest, and called 911. Two cop cars showed up. I angrily asked one of them if he was going to charge the guy with reckless endangerment. Fat chance. The guy was one of those prosecutor’s investigators, so the cops naturally buddied up to him. The dent that he claimed I caused was not even where my hand landed and looked more like hail damage. He worked for the county DA, but this occurred in the jurisdiction of a municipality within the county. To no one’s surprise, the city attorney sided with him and charged me with property damage. Luckily, the judge enjoyed cycling occasionally and noticed that in order for me to have struck the vehicle as claimed, placed it way closer to me than the safe distance prescribed by law, and threw the case out.
I estimate that I have cycled about 150,000 miles, equally divided between commuting and recreation. It would only bore you if I tried to describe how much richer my life has been as a consequence; suffice it to say that if, God forbid, after surviving it all, I am yet struck and killed someday, the risk will have been worth it. Could anyone say the same about driving a car? And driving is safer, but not risk-free.
Finally, considering the website where this discussion is occurring, it is worth observing that the roadways are an effigy of the culture at large, with a diversity of users, often in conflict, and proposed solutions involving segregation.
Was the head injury the origin of your capacity for writing incredibly long and (although not on this occasion) tangential comments?
No, I’ve always done that. I don’t try to be deliberately annoying, ha ha. But it’s probably why I’m not in the writers’ big leagues with Mr. Goad and the rest. TRS had to ban me from the comments section for some reason. I guess they don’t like the long-winded “well actually” guys.
🙂
When I first replied to your comment, it seemed callous and inappropriate to say that I really enjoyed the narrative of your very unfortunate experience. I do disagree with one thing you said in your following comment—I believe that you are “in the writers’ big league with Mr. Goad and the rest.” (I acknowledge that Mr. Goad is very talented. My beef with him was for dancing on the grave of that cyclist killed in San Francisco, and then extending his diatribe to cyclists in general, seemingly a pet peeve of his). Your writing is first rate. You obviously have a very healthy sense of humor. And technically, your writing is not full of bumps and pot holes: I didn’t have to backtrack looking for the antecedents of pronouns or try to figure out where a clause began or ended. Also, you are adept at leading a reader’s mind around, like when you specified that it was your face that the candy-stripers were shaving, which kept the reader from jumping to conclusions about what part of your body the candy stripers were attending to, at the same time allowing for that pleasant alternative interpretation. Perhaps that was subconscious, but that just means that you do it naturally.
Thanks! 🙂
By way of contrast, I recall that in around 2018 Transport for London published a paper which described cycling in the capital as dominated by white males (obviously bad and in need of change).
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