The Foot, The Wheel, and the Road to War

In his book, The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McCluhan wrote that because the wheel is merely an extension of the foot, it is possible to tell a great deal about how a person will drive by examining closely the way that they walk.

The other day, I was leaving to go to work and trying to understand the football fan fervor with which people who support the invasion of Iraq express that support. I was sitting at an intersection listening to NPR and preparing to make a right turn onto a four lane road. Two separate cars made left turns onto the same stretch of road, neither one of them turning into the lane nearest them, as is the law, but rather both turned into the far lane–the one I was turning onto. Both honked and made rude gestures at me, shouting what I could only perceive as rage that I had made it difficult for them to break the law.

This is what reminded me of McCluhan’s book. As I thought, and as I drove, I came to a traffic light which was turning yellow. I slowed to stop for the red light which I knew would follow that signal. As I did so, a large Ford truck with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker honked and the person in that truck flipped me off as he passed me on the shoulder and ran the red light I had anticipated. Again, I had enraged someone simply by not making it easy for them to break the law.

While driving on the interstate toward my job, I was in the left lane traveling at between 65 and 70 with my cruise control activated. I was in the left lane because I was passing a line of four vehicles moving at a slower rate of speed. Because I was traveling at only a few miles per hour in excess of the speed limit, it took several minutes to pass the cars and trucks in the other lane. Once I got past them, I used my signal and got into the right lane. The first car in the line of cars behind me during this maneuver honked at me and was waving his cell phone at me as he sped past at what must have been at least 85 miles per hour. I can only think that he felt that my reckless proximity to the actual speed limit had been caused by my using a cell phone which did not exist...again, someone was enraged at me for making it difficult to do whatever they wanted to, regardless of the laws supposedly in place to protect us both.

Contemplating these observations led me to reflect on my mother’s recent car accident where someone made a left turn into the parking lot of a bar without taking into consideration the possibility of oncoming traffic, and now it is very possible that my mother will be in a wheel chair for the rest of her life. When the insurance agent for the person who hit her finally contacted my mother in the hospital, he actually made the comment that because the air bag had deployed in her car the only reason she suffered any injuries–which included an ankle so badly shattered it needed to be replaced with an artificial one and a leg which was broken in two places–was because she had applied the brake. Clearly his client should not be held responsible for injuries which resulted from her poor decision making.

And there the penny dropped for me. I understood why there was so much support for the war. I am not saying Bush suffers from road rage on a global scale, but I am saying that if you objectively look at how people in this country drive...the way they don’t use signals, the way they buy bigger and more "rugged" vehicles which use alarming quantities of gas, the way no one pulls over for emergency vehicles any more, the volume at which they play their music, the speed at which they drive...even the way the police on patrol seem to feel traffic laws do not apply to them...well, if you do that it won’t make you happy, and it shouldn’t make you proud, but it might help you to understand something which really ought to be inconceivable...an invasion without a clearly demonstrable provocation. (pause) What we need to realize is….

Evil is as Evil does.