Theodore Kirby Review Of ‘A Cool And Logical Analysis Of The Bicycle Menace’
04/11/2008
O Rourke’s piece is a witty article which sets out to attack in a pseudo-logical fashion something he purports to consider a menace, the humble bicycle. His aim, of course, isn’t really to try and get rid of all bicycle riders as he contends, but as he is writing for a car magazine he uses humour, exaggeration, false logic, mockery and loaded language to help create this amusing though wholly unfair caricature that the readers have already agreed with. The central technique which gives the passage its flavour is the endless series of charges he manages to level against a group considered harmless by the majority. The article is as ingenious and inventive as it is wholly unfair and this is where most of the fun lies.
O Rourke also has a serious reason for writing, he himself finds bicycle riders annoying and he claims to believe that they shouldn’t be allowed on public roads. Writing for an audience presumably addicted to the slothful delights of the internal combustion engine, he succeeds in ridiculing bicyclists as being eccentric and bizarre labelling them as a ‘plague’ of ‘faddists’ whilst reassuring his readers that they are, by contrast normal, well-balanced and successful consumers of all that advanced technology has to offer. For example ‘Bicycles are quiet and slight, difficult for normal motorized humans to see and hear’. O’Rourke’s central method is to write as if he believes bicycles were a real threat to mankind and that they had to be removed immediately for the good of us all. He gives a logical feel to his argument by linking his ragbag of assertions. He adorns his paragraphs with titles that he answers later in the article, giving a sense of structure. These sub-titles almost all start with ‘bicycles’ and then use an adjective that sets the tone for the rest of the paragraph, such as ‘Bicycles are childish’ ‘Bicycles are unfair’ and ‘Bicycles are unsafe’.
He has a number of techniques that he uses to convince us (in a humorous way) that all bicyclists should be locked up. He tells us that all bicycle riders are bad people, the kind that he wouldn’t like. He informs us that without the automobile America would be out of work and still a colony. He even goes so far as to tell us that they should
Theodore Kirby
04/11/2008
follow the same kind of inspections and regulations that cars undergo, including airbags and annual inspections of their owner’s eyesight. In the title he claims to be writing a ‘clear and logical analysis’ yet his style in the actual body of text is chaotic and illogical. ‘I don't like the kind of people who ride
bicycles, At least I think I don't. I don't actually know anyone who rides a bicycle’ He
claims that he is arguing logically but knows that were it a debate he would have no chance of winning were he to put forward genuine counter-arguments or do more than give a wholly partial and deeply unfair, if very amusing, view of reality, such as ‘Bicycles should be made to carry twenty-gallon tanks of gasoline’ and ‘It is impossible for an adult to sit on a bicycle without looking the fool’.
He slowly builds up his disgust of bicyclists in three levels. At the beginning he is less serious in his attack concentrating on what he contends is the unattractive nature of the sport’s participants ‘The grimy and perspiring riders of the bicycle are an offence to the nose’. Conveniently forgetting to mention the beauty and elegance of your average truck-driver - being in a vehicle where the most vigorous your life gets is leaning out of your cab in the drive-by. Having, he feels, dealt with bicyclists’ assault on our sensitive visual sense, he then goes on to attack the social and political views he claims are shared by all cyclists. Presumably in direct contrast to the right wing views he assumes are shared by his red-necked, tobacco and caffeine addicted gun-toting car-nivores, he presents cyclists as people who want ‘American foreign policy to be directed by UNICEF’. In direct contrast to the clear-sighted wisdom of those who have polluted a planet, destabilised the Middle East and created a generation of motorists too lazy and obese to walk from the car park to McDonalds, he states that ‘the very existence of the bicyclist is an offence to reason and wisdom’. He further appeals to his right-wing reader’s patriotism in his paragraph titled ‘Bicycles are un-American’; where he complains that bicycles are ‘too slow and impuissant for a country like ours.’ With typically right wing casual racism he argues that they ‘belong in Czechoslovakia’. With a fine disregard for logic and showing that his disregard for other nations is blanket he even goes so far as to say that without
Theodore Kirby
04/11/2008
America’s power and speed it would ‘still be part of England’ and ‘everybody would be out of work’.
With characteristic cheek he even claims God as an ally by referring to the Bible and religion throughout his article. In his first paragraph he quotes from the Bible ‘St Paul, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, 13:11,’ said, "When I became a man, I put away childish things". Considering the death disruption and pollution wrought by the internal combustion engine one would be forgiven for thinking that it was a gift to the world from down below as opposed to the heavens.
Much of the effectiveness of the article comes from the tone with which he presents his arguments. This is presented by using long academic words throughout such as ‘impuissant’, ‘phalanx’ and Latin such as ‘per se’. This makes him seem superior and more intelligent than all bicycle riders.
He uses some very funny terminology to describe bicyclists and keep his ongoing superiority. He says that when you’re a bicyclist you ‘go around with your head between your knees and your rump protruding in the air’ which is ‘nobody’s idea of acceptable behaviour’. He says that people that ride bicycles appear to him to be ‘organic gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime’. He finishes by saying that they should all be ‘confined’, giving us images of all bicycle riders being the kind of people who roam mental hospitals mumbling about nothing.
It is typical of the article that a man supporting petrol-guzzling machines manages to call the comparatively healthy and ecologically prudent bicyclists ‘a gaggle of huffing bicyclists spread across the road in a suicidal phalanx’. In using the word ‘huffing’ he implies that it is an unhealthy sport, as he also does when he calls them a ‘plague’ and an ‘infestation’. All this unjust commentary would normally make the article overly insulting unless we consider that he is writing for men that hold exactly the same views: that the healthy sensible thing is to pollute the atmosphere and do no exercise as opposed to not polluting it at all and doing yourself some good, as most of the world see it. He also has a continued metaphor of bicyclists being ‘an affliction’, ‘plague’, ‘infestation’ and all these words conjure up feeling of disease and illness, which he considers bicycles to be, eating away at his ideal right wing America.
Theodore Kirby
04/11/2008
In the end of his article he uses the title ‘what can be done about the bicycle threat?’ He answers by saying that through ‘natural selection’ cyclists will be wiped out because of ‘frustrated truck drivers and irate cabbies’ that will run them of the road. His final sentence says that within a decade there will be no more bicycles and claims it will be a relief, this is amusing as he talks about bicycles as if they are a race of animals who are overcrowding our earth and need to be wiped out.
The article is bizarre to the point of being almost self-derogatory. He goes so far in his revulsion of the bicyclists that one gets the impression that he is intelligent enough to be aware of the fact that he and his fellow motorists are the true menace to his country. He reaches the point of stubbornness where it becomes obvious to the reader that he has crossed the line over to the ridiculous. As opposed to his title where all seems ‘cool and logical’ the rest of the article, while properly ordered and numbered, is full of language and phrases that seem to propose sensible arguments but in fact show ridiculous overstatements and insensitive ideas. All in all it is a very amusing piece of writing. He manages to get the reader’s attention, remembering that they are motorists who agreed with him since the beginning, and then write an amusing piece, whose tone will eventually show acceptance that the bicycle is not the real threat, it is instead his beloved motorcar.