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EaT MY RUBBER MoTHAFUCKA!

by Bicycle Bandit (projectcollective [at] riseup.net)
The Project
March 2006
page 11

About a year ago, I was riding down High St on my bike. It had been a standard day at work and I was eager to get home when I spotted the big yellow Hummer barreling towards me. My stomach turned – I’d seen this miserable oil-sucking bastard before and had always wanted to give him a piece of my mind. Well, here was my chance, I could yell something like “Bourgeois fascist pig!” or “Eco-Terrorist!” which at 30 mph would sound like “BOO-FACO-IIG!!!” My other option was a simple hand signal – I went with the latter.
About a year ago, I was riding down High St on my bike. It had been a standard day at work and I was eager to get home when I spotted the big yellow Hummer barreling towards me. My stomach turned – I’d seen this miserable oil-sucking bastard before and had always wanted to give him a piece of my mind. Well, here was my chance, I could yell something like “Bourgeois fascist pig!” or “Eco-Terrorist!” which at 30 mph would sound like “BOO-FACO-IIG!!!” My other option was a simple hand signal – I went with the latter.

I knew the whole thing was risky. People who drive Hummers or any large vehicle for that matter tend to have egos to match, an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and a propensity towards aggressive behavior. When it comes to confronting your average American, it’s very important to remember this is a country that names airports after cowboy actors and elects body building sons of the Gestapo to governorships. This is all to say, you never know how an asshole in an assholemobile is going to react when you point out that s/he is an asshole.

Then I recalled all the times I’d stood on a sidewalk holding a “Stop the War” sign as Two-ton Tundras roared by giving a honk in support or sometimes the finger. I reasoned, if this bastard coming towards me didn’t deserve a little constructive criticism; if the pilot of this horrendous machine wasn’t the least bit responsible for the deaths of countless of lives from Nigeria to Iraq, from Ecuador to Burma, then who was?

With my heart racing, I let go of the handle bar and raised my left fist in the air towards the vehicle in question and stuck out my thumb pointing down. As we approached each other, I could see he was a heavy set man, driving solo save for a little fluffy dog on his lap. I thought how adorable – then he leaned out his window and yelled, “Hey, FUCK YOU!” as we passed each other. At that point, I returned the sentiment via the traditional one-fingered gesture and zoomed down the hill toward home.

That was almost a year ago.

Since then, I’ve often asked myself: Did I go too far? Was there some imaginary line that I crossed between the private and public sphere that wasn’t meant to be crossed? I mean, in a country where the common conversational denominator is TV shows, movies, sports, shopping, and commercials, discussing religion and politics with someone who doesn’t agree with you is implicitly taboo.

Then again, giving the thumbs down to a Hummer isn’t exactly the height of enlightened political discourse. Such action would no doubt be given the thumbs down by the most fiery of intellectuals but perhaps that’s precisely the problem.

If most Americans consider it impolite to argue over politics in private, to publicly recuse a political adversary in a culture that disdains public space is downright heretical. The obvious question should then be, why?

While an attempt to answer such a question might be akin to opening a proverbial six-ton can of worms, there are a few common threads that can be pulled from the fray, namely - American’s deep seated fear and inability to cope with unmediated environments, a political culture dominated by middle class values which eschews direct confrontation or action, and the eradication of public spaces in an already heavily privatized conception of identity.

Take giving a Hummer the thumbs down– while not a very pragmatic way to address someone, it openly challenges the middle class obsession with safety personified by the big gas-sucking metal cocoon (a.k.a. SUV). At the same time, such a challenge asserts free speech in one of the last places where Americans of all stripes still interact – the streets. Unlike less-commodity driven societies that retain space for everyday people (parks, town plazas, etc), the most acceptable and common way for many Americans to publicly express their politics is via bumper stickers (i.e. on their cars).

This is no accident, as our physical environment has been rebuilt to accommodate the flow of cars from one compartmentalized space to another (office park, strip mall, cinemaplex, gym, and back), the ability for us to interact in true public spaces has all but vanished. The resulting physical isolation has theoretically been ameliorated by the internet, but as many of us already know, the medium has its limitations. While some might argue that chat rooms and blogs have replaced town plazas and parks, anyone who’s spent time working with large grassroots organizations knows that virtual activism doesn’t compare.

The challenge for the radical or revolutionary then is to figure out how to dismantle and destroy the physical and mental barriers that keep us from experiencing life unmediated. Only from there can a bold new culture of resistance be born.

As for the small act of giving Hummers the thumbs down (which I continue to do to this day), I’m often told that my actions don’t do any good; my reply is this: I am not doing it to convince them to change their ways, I’m doing it to shatter their fragile world of comfort and privilege, I am doing it to remind them that they are indeed the pariahs that deep down inside they suspect they are – we are watching them, and their world is not as stable as they think.
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