The Cynic Express(ed) 2.07: A Dilemma of the Horns

     I was on the road this evening, wondering what to write about in this week's column, when it hit me. No, not a Honda Passport weaving a turbulent sixty piloted by a suburban soccer mom in tennis shoes who is busy calling her husband on the cellular phone and shushing her four year-old wunderkind simultaneously. Although that is how I expect to go, it was quite obviously not tonight.

     No, tonight I was hit by a blast of sound erupting from some other little box on the road. Actually, to term it a blast of sound or claim that it erupted grants too much credit to the tinny little noise issuing from the center of the steering wheel and under the hood of the little sedan. Someone, enjoying the two thousand pounds of sheer testosterone that a motor vehicle injects into all drivers, male or female, was expressing displeasure at another driver's insolent vehicular skills.

     Ask any of my passengers and they will confirm that I have never been particularly fond of my car horn. For starters, most of my cars have been of the zippy little four-cylinder variety, the kind of two-door death traps that emit a plaintive bleating when you honk. Once I commanded a macho, eight-cylinder Mustang GT five-liter Man's car (Mustang, the old slogan goes, makes a weak man strong and a strong man invincible). However, in their wisdom, Ford placed the horn on the blinker stem to the left of the steering wheel. They reserved the center of the wheel of my old '83 not for an airbag, but a neat wrought metal design that would have made a neat impression on my forehead. At any rate, even when I had a car that might have roared my displeasure, I could never hit the thing.

     Besides, I am guessing the original concept in the Model A days called for an article that would warn pedestrians and horse riders of the impending piece of iron careening at a life-defying twenty miles an hour and that a big dust cloud was coming. And so it has survived to contemporary times as a method for warning errant walkers and perhaps even other drivers that the action they have taken will not facilitate longevity.

     Personally, I am too busy at times like this avoiding the foolish machinations of the inattentive driver to remember to warn him. After all, it's easier to avoid the confrontation and collision than to make an audible point and court catastrophe by frightening an inexperienced driver or causing a coronary in the case of the infirm. And to do it as an afterthought leaves me with an aftertaste.

     Of course, this afterthought, made once the offending driver has almost sacked the defending driver, occurs probably more frequently than a sincere warning. Coupled with the "I am thinking of you, and not fondly," expression that occurs when a slow driver moves into the left lane to make a left turn in front of somebody important, these punitive beepings make little sense.

     One could claim that they serve to vent the driver's frustration and give he or she a greater sense of control over the environment, that untamed outback of the Interstate, state, and county highways of suburbia. Sure. It takes a brave middle-aged, college-educated father of two or a brave young, community college student or a brave elderly high-school drop-out grandmother to express displeasure from inside a metal cocoon that they would not with the set of lungs they were born with and the set of epithets a steady diet of action movies would provide.

     Somehow, in the small portion in the back of my mind reserved exclusively for common sense, I think they would exert better control over their environment by keeping both hands on the curved portion of their steering wheels, preferably at ten and two o'clock. Instead of concentrating on punctuating exactly how they feel in some frenzied non-Morse code, they could live and let drive foolishly, opting to pay attention to other road hazards. Like Honda Passports.