What the Honk

Did you attend any No Kings rallies on the 28th?  I did, from my car.  I always intended to attend in person, but something came up and I had to jettison the plan.  As I could now carry on with most of my usual Saturday activities, I was able to drop my daughter off at her standing Saturday gig and pick her up afterward and in all 4 directions, I passed an endless number of groups of No Kings participants standing on street corners and on highway overpasses with signs exhorting drivers to demonstrate their anti-monarchy bona fides with a honk of the horn.  I find car horns one of the most unpleasant sounds*, so whenever I have reason to use it, my technique is to lay my thumb on the panel of the steering wheel with barely enough depth to lightly depress the horn button,  engaging the solenoid of the mechanism just long enough that a brief feeble blast can be heard from the diaphragm whose vibration causes the sound, at which point I release immediately to bring the noise to an end.  In honor of the rarity of the occasion and in solidarity with the sign toting comrades on the sidewalk, I may have taken the opportunity once or twice on Saturday to express the depth of my disapproval of the state of things in the White House by throwing caution to the winds and giving a couple of full blasts, but most of the time what I gave the protesters was a wave and a fist pump or a returned peace sign. I am sure that had I attended the march and rally downtown as was the original plan, I would have been able to sustain my enthusiasm for the length of the protest.  With my attention divided by the act of driving, however, the duty to assuage my guilt about having my ass in my car seat rather than on the street with the protesters started to feel like a pointless interruption.  If we were serious about this No Kings business, why weren't we all storming the White House, dragging the scoundrels out and sending them out of town with a coat of tar and feathers?  Car toots?  Really?  Ultimately there were so many groups imploring me to honk my feelings that my capacity to engage wore thin and what I wound up giving them was the cold shoulder.

I have an acquaintance in my neighborhood who is a full fledged member of the yard sign brigade.  Her front yard is a library of colorful signs informing passersby of her sympathy or enmity to whoever is in the White House depending on the color of their party.  Along with a corrugated plastic Ukraine flag and a Coexist sign, there are signs assuring us that hate holds no home here, that in her house they believe that black lives matter, that women's lives are human rights, that science is real, that love is love and that kindness is everything.  Briefly this spring her forest of yard signs was dominated by a handmade placard urging drivers to Honk if they were against war with Iran.  It's probably a good omen for those opposing Trump and Israel's war that the sign was removed in less than a week.  I'm sure the neighbors were happy.  The war continues unabated, however.

While the sign was up, I never audibly revealed my sympathy with the sentiment of the sign, for reasons mentioned above.   My wife gets frustrated with my reticence to use the horn in any circumstance (and I am vehemently against this war to be clear).  Even when I am compelled to honk by an emerging situation (usually a green light unheeded by a vehicle in front of me) my touch on the panel of the steering wheel is so self-consciously tentative that most legitimate opportunities to honk are missed entirely.  My daughter is more sympathetic with me.  She is driven to gigs partly because when she had her permit, before a move to New York for several years threw a monkey wrench in the project, drivers did not always heed the implied "Do not honk" meaning of the "Student Driver" magnet we affixed to the bumper when she was learning the ropes.  She's always had a sensitivity to unpleasant sights, tastes, touches, smells and sounds, but honks particularly rattled her nerves.

Now that my daughter is back in the suburbs for a while and once again entertaining getting her license, she has been setting her mind to devising a more fool-proof method for discouraging other drivers from expressing themselves about her progress with a blast of the horn.  What she's come up with seems rather ingenious to me.  She wants a bumper sticker that you can't miss that reads:

HONK IF YOU'RE A FASCIST PEDOPHILE

I think if she made the bumper sticker herself and made it available to others she could make a mint with it.  It would be a rather ingenious way to discourage other types of Honking, too, especially in combination with other bumper stickers:

• Honk if you love Trump!
• Honk if you're a Republican!
• Honk if you love Jesus!
• Honk if you think anti-zionism is anti-semitism!
• Honk if you think vaccines cause autism!

If we could silence more horn-honking, what a more wonderful world this would be.

~~~~~

* In spite of the image of the city as a cacophony of angry horns, honking in New York City other than to signal immanent danger has been illegal, if rarely enforced since the 1930's.  Tickets range from $800 to $2500 for the worst offenses, but a campaign to quiet the city beginning in the 1970s with the installation of ubiquitous "Don't Honk" signs was terminated in the 2000's for lack of impact other than visual clutter of the signs.