WOID #XV-1. Our Friend the Bus (part 1)
I once read in the Times, oh, maybe thirty years ago, about an expert whose job was to turn up in suburban living-rooms with a slide-show talk about renewable resources and air pollution and such. Then he'd ask for questions. Then there'd be ten seconds of stunned silence, and then a hand would shoot up: "You mean...we gotta take tha BUS?"
Well, yes, it's thirty-odd years later and guess what? Ya gotta take the bus, America, and I'm here to help.
I don't own a car and I don't drive, and I've been all over the world by bus, by train, by hitchhike and by making friends, and I feel a little sorry when I see you guys around the 'hood, blinking, legs spread, torso bent forward in what we call the mall-walk here, like a bunch of simians who've just fallen out of their trees, and now the savannah stretches out forever and there's no turning back, not with gas at four dollars a gallon. It won't be easy.
Not that I give much credence to that hard-wired-primal-horde stuff: "owning a car and living ten miles from nowhere is what makes us Americans." That doesn't wash, coming from people whose grandparents came over in ship-holds packed as tight a New Yorkers on the IRT.
Because that's what it's about, isn't it? Having a car and space is how you break free from your Inner Great Unwashed, a weird dialectic of capital where any kind of having is God so long as it's not not-having. Taking the bus isn't just about whether you can or can't, it's about whether you want to break with your capitalist religion. It's saying "yes" to everybody who doesn't own a car. It's saying "no" to "no." As Walter Benjamin put it (and he knew about traveling light):
"Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement... A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal." Because you've got a car and space you think that everybody wants or needs them? Give is atonement for gimme?
Because like it or not, you're going to meet all kinds of people when you take the bus, or train, or hitchhike. Some are like those folks you pay to watch at the megaplex: poor folk and black folk and people with stories, and just plain people. And some of them don't own a car, and most of them don't mind, which makes them something short of terrorists but not by much. In the following weeks I'm going to tell you about those people, and you may find out they're not so bad. Hey, I haven't been kissed on the lips by a mixed-race transvestite on the subway in about thirty-five years, but of course I was younger, then. Cuter, too.
- WOID: a journal of visual language
[to be continued]