The Wit’s Guide to Public Transit
Or, the trolley problem
After recent Wit’s Guides to Acceptance and Free Will, I offered you, my erudite readers, a selection of more prosaic subjects for this issue. Enough of the am-I-a-butterfly-dreaming-of-myself argle-bargle wit! Let’s have some bread-and-butter, workaday life wit!
And so in last week’s Quote Vote you chose Public Transit, and I happily got to work. But as P.G. Wodehouse reminds, “unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.”
“What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a motor bus?”
— A.D. Godley
You see, the Wits on the whole don’t mind subways, metros, trolleys, trams, and streetcars. If it’s on rails, they don’t rail against it. Sure, they’ll point out the foibles of these modes of transport:
“The thing which in the subway is called congestion is highly esteemed in the night spots as intimacy.”
— Simeon Strunsky
And draw upon their experiences to make clever conclusions:
“Years ago when a man began to notice that if he stood up on the subway he was immediately replaced by two people, he figured he was getting too fat.”
— Jean Kerr
They refrain to complain about the train, but boy do they cuss the bus. Consider Shaw describing how he realized that he’d made it in life:
“I can recall the moment when I shed poverty like an infected cloak. I had a speaking engagement and as usual dashed after a bus only to see it go off. I began to walk to save money and suddenly stopped short. I realized that I did not need to save twopence. I could now afford half a crown for a taxi. I jumped into a taxi and arrived in style.”
— George Bernard Shaw
So here’s my theory: No one likes to be told what to do. When you’re riding the rails, the conductor doesn’t appear to have much power. Everyone knows where they’re going, and they’ve tacitly agreed to the route. But on a bus, the driver is an absolute dictator. They could steer us into a ditch if they wanted to! They could stop the packed 95 York Mills bus and go into Tim Hortons if they so chose, even though I was late for work! And oh, how they did!
“Before God and the bus driver we are all equal.”
— German Proverb
And that’s not even considering the legacy of Rosa Parks, the mild-mannered woman who decided against segregation not on a streetcar or a trolley but on a bus. A monumental win against racial oppression began to crumble in part because no one likes a bus driver telling them what to do.
“Can you imagine how it will be, when they hire the first Negro bus driver in the South, and the steering wheel's twenty-five feet long?”
— Dick Gregory
There are still cities in the U.S. where the public transit system is called the People Mover. As one insignificant component of the mass known as People, do you want to be Moved by a faceless bureaucracy? Or do you want to have some agency over your life?
There was a young man who said, ‘Damn!
At last I’ve found out who I am:
A creature that moves
In determinate grooves,
In fact not a bus but a tram.’
— Maurice Evan Hare
Of course, anyone who indulges in the services of the Toronto Transit Commission knows this entire theory to be a canard. Our elegant streetcars, gliding and dinging along our grand avenues, can be just as capricious as any bus.
Years ago, my wife ran a clever little contest on a website then known as Twitter. She called it #TOmotto, challenged Torontonians to come up with a slogan for their world-class-to-us-anyway city, and had Wayne Reuben, the legendary sign painter from the Honest Ed’s department store, paint the best ones.
That store and that website are long gone, but the mottos remain framed in our home. For anyone who’s ridden the Rocket, this one reminds us that even the conductor answers to a higher power:
This week’s Recommendation: The year’s best show
I’ve been using these weekly recommendations of Wit to Read and Wit to Watch to share hidden gems with my paid subscribers (only $C30/yr!), but sometimes what’s left of the monoculture gets it right:
This month’s Riposte Card: Resolve, solved!
For December, I wanted to create something that my Riposte Card subscribers (only $80/yr for 12 original artworks!) could use as a holiday card, and artist
came through in a big way! Her interactive Riposte Card is perfect for debunking New Year’s resolutions and incorporates these great resolutions from British theatre critic and diarist James Agate:1. To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.
2. To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
This is a great small gift idea! Subscribe as a Founding Member or upgrade your subscription and I’ll mail you ~10 to send out to your pen pals!
Quote Vote
“The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man’s taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.”
— Robert Benchley
Public transit was a terrific subject, so thank you for that! Now please tell me what stop to get off at next week!
That was Issue 231 of Get Wit Quick, but if you missed it, don’t worry, the next one will be along momentarily. As detailed in the docudrama Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the decline of public transit in North America was in part the result of a well-funded campaign by the automobile industry.
A friend tells me that in India, you would get on a bus where every seat is taken, and yet still more passengers would find a place to sit. The conductor willed this to happen with one word: “Adjust.” I think about that a lot.
An unsourced anecdote: A bus driver in Milan, long discouraged by passengers who ignored his constant plea, “Move to the rear of the bus, please,” resorted to psychology. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he calls out, “all those with clean underwear move to the rear. The rest of you stay up front with me.”
The dream of public transit can be found in White Like Me, Eddie Murphy’s early Saturday Night Live skit in which he goes undercover as a white person to see what he’s missing. When the only other black person gets off the New York City bus, the driver turns on the music, everyone starts dancing, and a flirtatious waitress hands out free drinks.
Weird Al Yankovic’s Another One Rides The Bus was his breakout hit for a reason.
The Singaporean poet Ng Yi-Sheng documents what his country folk read on public transit (those without e-readers, anyway), and I remain chuffed about the day my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting was spotted:
Tap your cream moccasins on the ❤️ below to avoid accusations of fare evasion.