an incident on ponce: a narrative
subheading: what the confrontation teaches us about miscommunication and assumptions based on sloganeering in an election year, as told to us by a midtown cyclist.
“i have a surplus of stickers and i am running out of street signs and phone booths, so i decide to place one on the back of my bicycle helmet, as it travels a wider area than do the lamp posts and parking meters that usually get them. after it was cropped and strategically placed to cover the graphic of some type of demon’s face which the helmet manufacturer had placed there, i set out on bicycle to acquire some provisions for the next couple of days, namely cultured soy – provided it is on sale.
i only bike a quarter of a mile, from midtown to the red light at krispy kreme, before my first confrontation with the operator of an automobile. the passenger leans out the window and states, “get out of the road…[unintelligible]”. this declaration is so common and uninspired, i respond with an appropriately conventional hand gesture.
this is where things usually end; the driver would continue on to popeye’s or hardee’s for a fatty, high-sodium dinner from a bag, and i would bike down the path for split peas and elephant garlic. however, the gesture must have been too much for the pride of the driver, as she slams on the brakes and swerves in front of my bike, apparently wishing that i fall, perhaps receiving an injury. i have brakes on my bike, as well, however, so i sensibly arrest my forward motion towards the car. the car speeds away from me a second time.
my first thoughts as you haul ass away from our opening confrontation are about how interesting, though understandable, it is that you chose to sit next to me at the light on argonne for half a minute in silence, waiting until you were safely driving past me before offering your advice that i get off the road. then i contemplate what you could have said; your ranting went on until you were too distant for me to hear you, so it seemed to be more than the usual, ‘get the fuck out of the road’. were you mocking my pants? they are too heavy for cycling. is my helmet too bright? i confess that it is. remembering my helmet, i wonder if you were saying something about the sticker on the back. this couldn’t be, though, as the sticker has only been there for about one minute, surely not long enough to already receive attention. besides, there is nothing on the sticker that would inspire any perturbation in a fellow citizen, as far as i can imagine.
in addition to my musings on your motivation, i also have in mind some information about ponce which i believe that you do not share. seemingly unbeknownst to you is the fact that you will be stopped in traffic less than a mile up the road. i am not foretelling the future; i am reflecting the knowledge gained by traveling up and down ponce for almost 30 years. there is no possible way for a car to make it through the sequence of lights from charles allen to monroe without stopping at least once. combined with the traffic two gas stations and five fast food joints, you are headed into an automotive quagmire. at this time of day, it is almost certain that you will be stopped at both. in other words, i am going to catch up to you in a minute or so.
granted, i am pedaling so hard to make it past the light at taco bell that i almost pass you. i know you are at the light in front of church’s chicken, so i break an important rule of mine by moving onto the sidewalk in order to be able to pass the truck to your rear and pull beside you. as mentioned, i am pedaling furiously, so i when i skid to a halt when i see the car tag and the scrunchy in the blonde hair of the driver, i visibly lose my balance. though it was only a little wobble, i concede this fact. the embarrassment from this sign of weakness leads to a moment of confusion as to what i should do next.
as i approach the car, i see that you, the driver, are laughing, and that you, the passenger, have your arms crossed and are staring at the dashboard. the fact that you are not mocking me as i walk to the car door restores the confidence that was shaken by my uncertain dismount moments ago. i am even able to overlook your creepy resemblance to tony shaloub. the fact that you can not turn to face me on even terms has established my superiority in this small scale war of morals.
typically, in a case like this, one says something like ‘what did you say?’ or ‘are you talking to me?’. however, i do not think that i will find a repeat of your position to be enlightening, and i already am confident that you were talking to me. while you still do not acknowledge that i am standing by your car, i open the conversation by twice punching your window as hard as i can, causing the skin on my ring finger’s knuckle to split open. i notice that this must have happened on the second punch, as there is no blood on your window.
in order to impress upon you that i am not a mindless force of violence – that i can also articulate my thoughts verbally – i lay out a set of ideas by bellowing “that’s right!” in your direction. i push my bike forward, and manage a remarkable figure eight in order to make a second approach towards your car. upon my return, i see that you have opened the passenger door while you talk to the driver, probably asking her for permission to exit the vehicle. i figure that she is not listening, however, as she has driven over the curb in order to chase me along the sidewalk in front of domino’s pizza.
this is an interesting strategy; not only is it illegal to drive along the sidewalk, but one can imagine that this infraction carries ramifications that would pale in comparison to those of intentionally driving a car into a bicyclist in front of hundreds of other motorists and a few odd pedestrians. whether you lose your nerve or gain your senses is unknown, as before you can collide with me, i ride between a telephone pole and another car, stranding you behind me.
i reckon that this will be the end of it, as i leave you while i cross the intersection at boulevard. in the middle of the intersection, however, you manage to catch up with me; while i admit this impressive, i am less impressed that you are shouting at me with your windows rolled up—i know you people need that air conditioning in a hotlanta august! – which makes it impossible to hear what you are saying.
when we reach the shell station, i see that you are slowing, perhaps intending to exit your car and bring about an escalation of intensity to the confrontation. i assume that this next phase will have a more physical orientation than the previous, and, despite my demonstration of power in front of domino’s, i have a distaste for violence between men, especially when one of them is me.
as you slow, i suspect that the traffic behind you will not suffer your putting your car in park in the middle of ponce. i stop on the sidewalk, then, anticipating that you will be forced to follow the flow of the rest of the cagers down to midtown place and out to clarkston and decatur or perhaps even snellville.
now, the previously mentioned sticker on my helmet says ‘bush lied’. on the face of it, this is a simple statement; it may open up discussion, but no one can disagree with it. granted, one may not know exactly which lies to which the sticker refers. it could be about a broad, nuanced lie, such as bush’s statement that he is a ‘compassionate conservative’, even though cutting the pay and benefits for wounded soldiers and veterans is not compassionate; running up a $500,000,000,000 deficit – after starting with a surplus – is not conservative. it could be about a vague, smoky lie, such as implying that saddam hussein and osama bin laden were working together because a yemeni went to iraq in the past 10 years. or, and this is most likely, it could be about a solid, indisputable lie, such as stating that there is an imminent threat which iraq poses to the united states – a threat of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons – when the fact is none of these weapons exist.
which lie to which the sticker was calling attention is irrelevant to politics. “facts are stubborn things”, as president john adams, a federalist, taught us; they are not something that are mutable or adjustable. one can discard them or ignore them, but you can not twist them into something they are not.
the fact is that george w bush has lied to americans. he said that weapons exist; we all know that they do not exist. that’s all there is to it; there is no place between these two facts into which one can place politics. liberals and conservatives alike must accept that these two statements are facts. it follows, then, that by pointing out that a ‘conservative’ bush lied by stating something existed when it did not does not make one a ‘liberal’; any conservative can understand that he lied. they can downplay it, tell us to forget it, or explain it away, but they still have to accept that it happened. therefore, a liberal and conservative alike are able to say ‘bush lied’.
in other words, ‘bush lied’ is not a political statement. while it suggests that i, as the bearer of the sticker, feel betrayed by the president (on the other hand, all presidents except carter have lied, so is it betrayal when you get what you expect?), ‘bush lied’ in and of itself is not something that carries any ideological weight, apart, perhaps, from an ideology such as ‘lying is wrong’.
so, you can understand my surprise when i picked out the word ‘liberal’ from the angry tirade that was being spouted out of the driver side door as your car drove over the curb in front of the shell station. as proved above, ‘bush lied’ is not a liberal statement. if the sticker said something like ‘let us increase the tax burden on the rich so that we may increase spending for social programs such as the national endowment for the arts, veterans administration hospitals, and after school programs in impoverished inner cities and rural areas’ or, perhaps, ‘the gov’t should provide coverage for the 40 million working americans who do not have any health care’, or even ‘i believe that society as a whole benefits when every citizen is able to prosper; therefore our social contract should include a system by which no one is marginalized. that system could be called ‘government’.’ if that were the case, then i could see how you sussed out that i am a liberal. however, as i have not found a way to condense these statements into stickers that will fit onto a bicycle helmet, that could not have been your method for discerning my thoughts on the roles of citizens and government. perhaps you knew that i was biking to a co-op to purchase discounted cultured soy and quinoa? i don’t see how.
if i wanted to convey to you in a short, simple manner that these are the policies i would like to see implemented, i could have just put ‘liberal’ on the back of my helmet; however, this might give you some incorrect impressions, such as, that i am a proponent of gun control, when the actuality is that i support the repeal of all anti-gun laws – that includes ‘assault weapons’—or that i am a communist, when the actuality i believe it is okay to sell something, such as design services for a fortress or wine cellar, without sponsorship by the state. it might be more accurate to use a sticker that says ‘progressive’, as my beliefs in structure are closer to a totality in line with that label, considering it is so open-ended as to be interpreted to represent ideologies of an opposed polarity. however, i think it unlikely that you understand the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’; what’s worse is that you might think ‘progressive’ is an advertisement for auto insurance.
you should see now the futility of using simplistic labels such as ‘liberal’, as the beliefs that the supposed liberals might hold are not monolithic, and two people who are similarly opposed to one ideology might themselves have disagreements on others. such political shorthand might be useful when judging if one should hang up on a campaign donation solicitor, but it is not conducive to the type of discussion into which you apparently wanted to enter during rush hour on ponce.
another misconception that you may have, as you drive onto the sidewalk, apparently to block my path, so that you and your passenger can exit your automobile and deliver to me a beat down, is that a cyclist does not have greater range and maneuverability than a does a car mired in rush hour traffic. you doubtlessly learn this as you watch me make a u-turn in the gas station parking lot, and pedal against traffic to boulevard, a direction in which you find it impossible to travel. i wonder what your thoughts are as you see me stop at the top of the hill so that i may bemusedly glance back and watch you try to negotiate your car back onto the street, where you discover that your fellow motorists apparently have no wishes to allow this. before you are able to move, i am already on my way south to the co-op.
as i cross north avenue, i feel secure in the knowledge that you are going to be tied up in the mess from boulevard down to glen iris for the next 20 minutes, even though there is a creeping concern, as i struggle up the hill to freedom parkway, that you will appear from behind the kroger and pummel me at the instant that i reach the top, winded and cramped. in a moment, though, these thoughts are behind me as i turn onto the path and escape into the trees.
unfortunately, the cultured soy was not on sale.”
