Breaking the Rules

The following was written in the Spring of 2010, and I hope it's still relevant/amusing:

“I wish you wouldn’t break the rules. I’m a cyclist, too, and you give us a bad name”. This was said to me the other morning, by a lady from the cozy confines of her cream-colored VW Bug. I was on my bike and had just broken a “rule”; she had seen me and felt inclined, perhaps obliged, to pull up beside me, slow down, roll down her window, and say, “I wish you wouldn’t break the rules...” What had I done? From my perspective: I had stopped at a red-light, looked left and right, front and back, seen that there was no traffic to speak of (except for the VW Bug sitting at the light, stopped, beside me), no cops present, exercised my judgment, and crossed the street, making a left turn. It was just after 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday, so most people were still asleep. I was on my way to work. From The Law’s perspective: I had run a red light, broken the law, committed a ticketable offense. From the lady in the VW Bug’s perspective: I had broken “the rules,” and needed to be informed of both the fact of my breaking “the rules” and the fact that I was tarnishing the good name of cyclists, like her.

    Immediately after being told “I wish you wouldn’t break the rules...”, I was pissed, flabbergasted, struggling to process what had just been said, both in terms of its possible motivations and in terms of its illocutionary qualities, peddling furiously, trying to come up with my response. According to Wikipedia, J.L. Austin defines an illocutionary speech act as an act “(1) for the performance of which I must make it clear to some other person that the act is performed [i.e. it’s important that the other person hear me], and (2) the performance of which involves the production of ‘conventional consequences', e.g., rights, commitments, or obligations” (Austin 1975, 116f., 121, 139). It is clear to me that what the lady said was an example of what Austin calls an illocutionary speech act: it was necessary, if the act was to be successful, that I, me, the guy on the bike who’d just broken the rules, hear it (otherwise...); it also seemed to be implying a set of obligations/commitments for me, the hearer, the guy on the bike who’d just broken the rules, to abide by, ones that I clearly hadn’t already internalized and needed to be reminded of (notice, she did not let me know which rule I’d broken, rather, she assumed that I already knew...). Now, do I think that the lady who said “I wish you wouldn’t break the rules...” knew that she was performing a kind of illocutionary speech act and/or all that the performance of such an act entails? No, no I don’t. I actually think that she had no idea what she was doing, nope, not really, otherwise she might have bitten her tongue.

What was the lady in the VW Bug doing? Well, I know what H. Arendt or M. Foucault might say: enforcing and creating a social/behavioral norm, which, in this case, was/is that “Cyclists need to obey the law, too! And consider how their actions might negatively effect the image of cyclists the world over!” Or, perhaps, she was performing her citizen’s duty, making sure that I know what the laws are; perhaps making sure I was also aware that some-one/thing other than God/The Police bears witness to to my transgressions? But before getting into any of those possible motivations for the LVWB’s speech act, and her very real enforcement/creation of a social/behavioral norm, let’s break what she said down, doing, down according to J.L. Austin’s definition of an illocutionary speech act.

“I wish you wouldn’t break the rules. I’m a cyclist, too, and you give us a bad name”.

Part 1: what I was supposed to hear. As far as I can tell, I was supposed to hear the following: that I was breaking a rule (she said rule and not law, which is somewhat interesting); that the lady in the VW Bug is a cyclist, too, like me, i.e., were both cyclists; that I was giving cyclists like her/me a “bad” name. OK, so, I know that I was breaking the law, let’s just get that out of the way, and I feel little/no remorse about doing so, at least not in this case. So I heard that. As for whether the lady in the VW Bug is a cyclist like me, I disagree: not only did her VW Bug have an Oregon State sticker on the back (go Ducks!), but I am the sort of cyclist that clearly doesn’t mind breaking the law, while she clearly thinks of herself as the sort of cyclist that does; further, I do not drive around chastising cyclists, like me, for breaking “the rules.” So I failed to hear that part of her speech act. As for whether I was giving cyclists a “bad name”, I would say that I was giving cyclists like her a bad name, sure, but not cyclists like me. So I heard that.

Part 2: the set of obligations/commitments that I need to start abiding by, if I successfully managed to hear the lady in the VW Bug (which I didn’t, not really). As far as I can tell, the set of obligations/commitments that I need to start abiding by is as follows: first, I need to start following “the rules,” otherwise known as The Law, and not just any old rules/Law, but the rules and Law of the road as it applies to cyclists, even when such following conflicts with my better judgment; second, I need to start considering how my actions reflect on other cyclists, of which I am one, and hold myself accountable to upholding our name/image in the eyes of... Each another? Drivers? Both? Both, probably.

In response to what I take to be the first obligation that the Lady in the VW Bug offered to let me take on and internalize, that I need to start following the rules/Law even when following the rules/law conflicts with my better judgment, I have to respectfully decline. As I already said, I do not consider myself a cyclist like her in the sense that I am not a cyclist that minds breaking the law. Now, does this mean that I go around breaking the law willy-nilly, cutting off cars, bombing on and off curbs at my leisure, or just blowing through stop-signs and stop-lights whenever I feel like it, yelling “F*ck you!” at pedestrians and motorists alike? No, it does not. It means that when I’m on my bike I try and do my best to exercise my judgment to determine whether or not it makes sense for me to, for example, stay stopped at a stoplight when the situation does not demand it for any reason other than upholding the law. Why don’t we let motorists exercise their rational capacity and run red lights when they deem it to not make sense for them to stay stopped? Because when drivers judge wrong, automobiles are thousand-pound plus machines that can not only do tens of thousands of dollars worth of property damage, but can injure or kill people other than just their drivers (and multiple people, at that). When a cyclist judges wrong, on the other hand, the only person that they’re likely to injure/kill is themselves; sure, someone else might have to live with a twinge of guilt if they accidentally injured/killed a cyclist that judged wrong, but it’s the cyclist that’ll have to bear the brunt of their own injury/death, not to mention the medical bills; and besides, it is not the law’s duty to protect people from future/present/past emotional distress, is it?

    In response to what I take to be the second obligation that the Lady in the VW Bug offered to let me take on and internalize, that I need to start considering how my actions reflect on other cyclists, I accept, sort of. Let me be clear, I do not want my actions/cycling tendencies to contribute to drivers resentment of cyclists, especially if I think that resentment might manifest as aggression, which is why I do my damnedest to be a very cautious and courteous cyclist when I’m sharing roads with cars: taking up as little space as possible, signaling turns and lane changes well in advance, actually coming to stops at lights and stop signs, not spitting on cars as I pass them while they’re stopped in traffic, etc. But, what’s curious about the case at hand, is that the person who got pissed at my exemption of myself from the rules was a fellow cyclist, not just some random driver. Sure they were in their car, but they’re a cyclist like me, and they still wanted me to abide by traffic laws, which I find curious...

   

I don’t really have a conclusion to/for the above. All I can say is that in the months that have followed, I have indeed found myself more consistently abiding by the rules/law, even when it goes against my better judgment, unless it’s 5:00 in the morning and I’m trying to cross Barbur when there’s no traffic and am expected to wait for that totally retarded light to change...

"Nice Tie"

           So, I’m sitting at my local Grand Central Bakery, drinking my coffee, reading my Hegel, when an older man, wearing a slick top hat and an aqua sweater, settling in at a table beside me says, “Nice tie,” to which I respond in good faith, “Thanks,” to which he quips, “I sold mine,” before turning away in apparent embarrassment, for me, to share a cackle with an audience that consisted of few more old people at another table and a younger couple of would-be dance instructors at another. At that moment, I couldn’t help but feel like somehow, someway I’d managed to wander into the butt of a Rodney Dangerfield joke, circa Caddy Shack; “Nice hat. What, I bet you get a free bowl of soup with a hat like that. Oh, but it looks good on you though.”

Now, I didn’t respond to the older man wearing the stupid top hat and ugly aqua sweater (take that!), but not because I didn’t have possible responses kicking around in my head (e.g., “Hey buddy, this tie’s Italian!”); rather, I was so totally dumbfounded as to what the possible motivations of this old man wearing the stupid top hat and ugly aqua sweater could be, that my body and mouth plumb locked-up, froze, stuttered; I ended up just numbly returning to my coffee and my Hegel, doing my best, for whatever reason, not to tap the the older man on the shoulder and ask, “What the hell was that all about?”

Thought of the Day comes from Jean-Francois Lyotard, who writes, “When you can simulate in vitro the explosion of the sun or the fertilization or gestation of a living creature, you have to decide, what you want. And we just don’t know” (“Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy”, The Inhuman, 53-4)

Handjobs Signify What, Exactly?

    Recently I was helping my younger brother edit a piece he'd written back during his college days, some years ago at the University of Oregon's school of journalism. The piece was about that equal parts failed, grandeous, and distinctly American institution named Amtrak: the federally owned and operated passenger train system that covers a pretty decent swath of the continental U.S.
    My brother, on the verge of applying for a staff-writer position at the LA Weekly magazine, needed the piece to be cut with a slightly more adult blade than the one he'd cut it with back in his early 20s, back when it was still acceptable for him to call women his own age "girls." I was up to the task, or so I thought...
    The piece was interesting, sure. It was well thought out, pertinent, and filled with the kinds of factoids and experiences and reflections that make for meaningful journalism. And yet there was one problem, for, amidst all the interesting factoids and experiences and reflections my brother'd gathered over the course of a trip he'd taken from Portland, Oregon, to Cincinnati, Ohio (to visit yours truly), one question remained unanswered for both him and myself: what, if anything, should he do with the handjob story? See, one of the most interesting things to have happened to my brother over the course of his adventure across 2/3 of the continental U.S. happened in a steamed-up sleeping car between him and some girl from South Carolina who was unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on your perspective), clad in nothing but spandex.
    Which prompted me to ask: what, exactly, is the significance of a handjob in our day and age?

A Magic Lesson

A Lesson from Magic

            There is one, big, giant, massive, important, quintessential, fundamental, totally un-perfunctory, etc., etc., lesson to be learned from playing the incredibly dorky/fun “Magic the Gathering” card game that emerged in the early 90s and which my parents initially kyboshed under the auspices of “You spent all your baby sitting money on what?” but which I recently picked up again under the auspices of “My parents are no longer the bosses of me!”

The lesson in question emerges some time after you lose your first game and you have the following thought: all I need to be able to beat the opponent I just lost to is “X,” where “X” is some card or cards that would either: (1) get me around whatever their primary means of defense were (e.g., “If I just had more flying creatures...”; (2) allow me to stop them from being able to carry out their primary means of attack (“If I just had more counter spells that target green creatures...”).

Now, if there were not going to be any more games after the first one, e.g., if I were only allowed to play the same opponent once, then the above “following thought” wouldn’t even pop into my head, but I am, and it did. Secondly, if my opponent weren’t capable of modifying their own deck as a function of having exactly the same post first defeat thought as me, i.e. had to, for whatever reason, play the same deck every single time, then my efforts would most definitely be successful (but I would probably get bored playing real quick, unless I took some kind of sick pleasure in defeating my opponent...), but they are capable of modifying their own deck (e.g., “If I just get some protection from black, then...”); thus, any and all of my efforts to get around their primary means of defense and/or stop them from being able to carry out their primary means of attack are going to be, eventually, countered, at least insofar as they want to continue playing against me and aren’t satisfied with having their asses handed to them day-in, day-out.

The only other thing that might potentially stop our tete-a-tete is a shortage or funds or lack of willingness to spend more money on cards (which I’d chalk up to loss of desire to play), which, ultimately, aren’t that expensive (Dear Mom and Dad). OK, so maybe there is more than one lesson here, but the primary realm in which I’m thinking about applying any/all lessons from the above is the following: the current debate about airport security vs. terrorism in which exactly what I seem to be describing above seems to be playing itself out, “Oh, so you’re going to hide bombs in your underwear? Well then we’re going to search every one of y’all’s underwear!” Hegel’s name for such a dynamic is “bad infinity”...