Someone I know was taking her little daughter to hospital for the girl's chemotherapy appointment, luckily the appointment could be fitted in for later that day. Stressful or what??
Everybody trying to make a melodramatic point about killing the children knows a little kid with cancer. Every time there's a protest on a motorway, we hear about a little kid with cancer, or a father of seven who had a heart attack.
And when we get right down to it, we lost a toddler last year because for thirty years people really need to be the only person in the car while stuck in standstill traffic on the interstate. Actually, we lose children to wildfires far more often than motorway protests kill cancer patients. And it's true, we've heard politicians and advocates pretend confusion about why people protest, or complain that such protests alienate the working public, for decades.
Please understand, straightforward testimonial appeals to ignorance haven't changed much, over the years, but the audience has.
Look, Britain's an island; the chance of it burning down such that a fire cyclone starts eating the children is pretty low, but there are a few people left to tell us what it was like in London amid the flames. Upside: Doncaster won't burn if it's underwater, and when the sea rises, at least they'll still have Croydon.
Mr. King, of the AA, sounds like he could be played by any of the whatshisname character actors chuffing through roles as scheming property developers, overstuffed university presidents, or corrupt city councilmen in T&A comedies thirty-five years ago.° Gay people coming out of the closet can hear stories about how they're being stressful to little kids, or alienate the general public, pretty much any day.
Comparatively: When I was young, sometimes we tried too hard, while writing, to imitate others, but the way those writers used words was something we wanted to learn. When I was even younger, imitation was a developmental behavior essential to socialization. Somewhere in between, though, is a range I never understood, when people start becoming things they disdain. With my generation, it's one thing if, for instance, one isn't punk, anymore. But if our metalheads all too often and predictably falter and fade into Christendom, the part when punks become the chuffing stuffed shirts they used sneer at is the one that really stings.
Mark Steel has an old joke about chuffy British conservatism that goes, approximately:
Saw someone walking down the street today, long hair, bushy beard, couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman!
And the thing is that when bicyclists answered the argument about not building more bike lanes because there aren't many bicyclists on the road, opponents pretended the same sort of confusion. When people were told this is what it looks like when you have a lot of bicycles on the road, and this is why you need to build more bike lanes, local chuff said the same stuff about alienating the working public, and wondered what the fuck those activists were doing.
Once upon a time, maybe, there was a comfort in communal idiocy, but the thing about playing the chuffy role is that it never really has made sense to make a point of insistently presenting oneself as clueless and confused. The joke about the British reaction to the Sexual Revolution helps draw the distinction: Chuffing ignorance and incompetence only works as an argument among a sympathetic audience; sixty years ago, pretending confusion wasn't merely obstinate cruelty, but also a manner of codespeak by which it was easier for sympathetic people to dismiss a question instead of answer it,
e.g., brush it off instead of actually follow the argument about why a man should not wear his hair long to its inevitable conclusion. And, no, that's not just the British. And, sure, there are places and circumstances where this sort of behavior still passes muster, but part of what changed is the audience, so pretentiously ignorant chuff doesn't play nearly as well the
nth time around.
Additionally, living where I do, it's also true that I would have to be told this was the reason for the backup. Traffic is bad enough as it is, so if we add in perpetual road construction, as well as the daily collection of collisions, breakdowns, police encounters, and other routine obstruction, we don't even need it to be a game day; the only reason we would bother getting mad at a protest is because it's a change in routine, and something different to cuss out compared to any other day. But the day ends with -y; traffic sucks.
Our
antisocial neighbor↗ pretty much nails it, being "too damned old and too damned conservative" to think the people he disagrees anything other than "really stupid and much like … spoiled brats".
Seriously, women hear it from men about where misogyny comes from; Black people hear it from whites; gays heard it from Christians; there's even one about how opposing Nazis only alienates people and deters them from not being Nazis. And the British, I mean, holy shit, the chuffy old conservatives in Britain are just freaking vindictive, like the bits with the trees.
So, anyway, what are any of you going to do, go drive around just to burn some gas and show those environmentalists what-for? It's like a few weeks ago, when my Twitter feed was aglow with folks from the east coast posting pictures of extraordinary sunsets, and, yes, our burning forests and their interesting sunsets are among the bonuses we all win for our single-occupancy SUV triumph over mass transit and terrorism. If you're still at the
「What the fuck are the activists doing?」 part of the script, you're way behind schedule.
____________________
Notes:
° Okay, not John Vernon, who never would have agreed to that dumb of a line.
