Depressive Driving Disorder
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Depressive Driving Disorder
As you may recall, approximately 70 percent of people believe they are above-average drivers. (Similarly, roughly 80 percent of people believe they’re above average at math and/or statistics, which means me.) This fact raises a lot of questions, beginning with what to do with the 20 percent of the people who think they’re better than average drivers, when they clearly aren’t. Following hot on the heels of that are questions about how to interact with them, whether the better-than-average drivers should point out their errors, and if there aren’t already enough drivers who are too busy minding someone else’s business as they run a red light and T-bone a hapless commuter at the next intersection.
One of this blog’s purposes is to raise questions while pointing out helpfully that there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Right? In that spirit, we ask what’s the matter with the other 30 percent of drivers who think they’re worse than average drivers: What’s up with them? Should they actually have driving privileges? Are they too humble, or just too depressed?
As usual, the questions are hard, but the answers are simple. These people should probably be placed under home confinement—for their own good mainly, but also to prevent them from goofing around and harming others. Involuntary commitment has been all the rage in recent years, casually bandied about by people trying earnestly to solve all sorts of problems, beginning with: What’s the deal with that imbecile in front of me? Can’t he wait to look for a good parking spot until he’s off the actual road? Shouldn’t he be in a booby hatch? …and… What’s that impatient jerk doing on my bumper? If I teach him a lesson by slamming on the brakes, will it hurt? How much and for how long? Can’t we lock him up preemptively?
At any rate, once we’ve taken all those depressive driver types off the road whose self esteem is so low they think they’re below average drivers—and yet still driving!—and once we get the clowns off the road who are below-average drivers while thinking they’re driving geniuses, we will finally have 100 percent of drivers who are above average. It’s win-win all around. Honk if you agree. QED.
Good morning. It's a good day to use your turn signal and come to a complete stop at stop signs. Every single time!!!
In my opinion, one's driving habits are a much greater indicator of civic virtue than how, or whether, one votes.
It all started with The Yellow Kid, 1897... (cut and pasted from The Writers' Almanac)
"The Yellow Kid was originally published as Hogan's Alley in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. The first few comics were printed in black and white, but when the newspaper wanted a place to test its new quick-drying, bright yellow ink, the kid's nightshirt was the perfect spot, and before long he was the Yellow Kid. The Yellow Kid was such a hit that he quickly became a merchandising jackpot — his image appeared on all sorts of products, including cigarettes, matchbooks, fans, cracker tins, toys, chewing gum cards, and whiskey.
The ambitious young newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst knew that full-color comics would be key to the success of his paper, the New York Journal, since many of his readers were immigrants who first encountered English through comics. And when he realized how popular the Yellow Kid was, Hearst lured Outcault away from Pulitzer by offering him a huge salary. Pulitzer was furious, and his New York World continued to publish Yellow Kid comics drawn by someone else, but they weren't as popular. The comics section of Hearst's Journal quickly became the most popular and most profitable section of the newspaper.
The Yellow Kid was even indirectly responsible for the term "yellow journalism," which was used to describe the sensationalist reporting of the New York Journal and the New York World. Reporter Ervin Wardman was highly critical of Hearst and Pulitzer, and their willingness to print anything in their papers if they thought it would sell more copies. Wardman was the editor of a small paper, which he used to criticize what he called "the new journalism," and then "the nude journalism." Neither of these terms caught on with the general public. But in 1897, he hit on the phrase "yellow-kid journalism" to mock the importance of the Yellow Kid to these papers, and soon shortened it to "yellow journalism."
Yellow journalism reached its peak during the Spanish-American War in Cuba; when one of Hearst's reporters contacted him to complain that not much was happening in Cuba, Hearst famously sent a cable back: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." By May of 1898, Hearst had happily embraced the term "yellow journalism," declaring, "The sun in heaven is yellow — the sun which is to this earth what the Journal is to American journalism."