But I just have to take this one call.

“And then Jenny said, ‘Well I think that Jimmy really likes her’, and then Josh said, ‘Do you mean like-like…or just like?’.”

“Which Jimmy? Jimmy from the place or Jimmy from…”

And then came the BANG.

This from the Chicago Tribune (which, when I tried to add a link, lopped off the remainder of this post twice now. So eff-that.)

New cell-phone ban snares 85 drivers

July 14, 2005

CHICAGO -- Eighty-five people were ticketed through the initial days of a new law in Chicago that forbids motorists from talking on hand-held cell phones while driving, police said Wednesday.
Officers wrote 33 tickets on Friday, Saturday and Sunday throughout the city, police spokesman Pat Camden said. The number jumped to 52 on Tuesday.
…
Motorists caught with phones at their ears while driving face a $50 fine, which rises to $200 if the gabbing driver is involved in an accident. Talking on a headset while driving remains legal.

There is a fairly well-known phenomenon in behavioral psychology that holds when one of the other monkeys does something we don’t like, we tend to chalk it up to a failure of character or moral rectitude. However when we do exactly the same thing, we tend to excuse ourselves and rationalize it away as bad luck or bad timing, but certainly not because we are bad people.

So, for example, when the sun is shining and the cotton is high, CEOs will publish glowing annual reports lauding their own genius and cunning in the jungle of the markets. They’ll lope leonine into the shareholder meeting with the freshly slain Wildebeest clamped in their jaws, shake it a few times in triumph (and to show off how cleanly their kill technique snapped its neck), and toss it at the feet of the mob…and ROAR.

But when times are a little dicier, when the watering holes are drying up – when the prey is not so fat and slow, and the pride actually does need extraordinary leadership – that’s when you can count on a CEO to go all slack and Jake Bluesy: “Honest... I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. It wasn't my fault. I swear to GOD.”

Then you forgive ‘em, kiss ‘em, and they dump you back in the mud.

It explains why Conservative Fundamentalists are such willing, repeat-customer suckers. It explains why Fundy preachers can hector and moralize at the tops of their leathery lungs…right up until they get caught fleecing the elderly, or fucking teenaged boys, or defending domestic terrorists, and then suddenly its time for a few crocodile tears and a trip to the Blood ‘o The Lamb ‘o God shower and spa for a few days of fake “atonement”, and then they’re right back out telling us all how to live our lives.

It explains, for example, how a gay man or an African American can a Republican and not just fucking shoot themselves. See, it’s all those other millions of people – those non-Republicans -- who are just like them in every other way who are morally deficient or lazy or degenerate or whatnot. And sadly there are just enough of these kinds of self-hating traitors to fill up a stage at the RNC for a night of prime time, or to trot out on the talk shows like the gelded poodles that they are and bark out the Party Line.

Or more simply, the GOP is run by bigots. And they use the human tendency to want to feel morally superior to others (when you are, in fact, exactly like “they” are) to scrape together enough Ward Connerlys and J.C. Watts’ and Jeff Gannons to pull a thin scrim of fake diversity around their White Conservative Christopath He-Man, Woman-Haters Club. While they plunge further and further into the moral abyss, they keep their agenda away from a press corps grown so corpulent and corrupt that they just lay there wheezing and begging for more Hurricane Shark Kidnaps Camera-Friendly White Chick stories, they won’t chase Real Actual news even if it rolls right past their noses.

So while the reeking, undead corpse of the Party moulders away in private like the Portrait of Dorian Gray, they find just enough ideological Glade Plug-In beards to cover the stink.

Which has what to do with cell-phones?

Because just about everyone who has tried to murder me in the last five years on the road has been in an Urban Assault Vehicle yabbering away on the fucking phone. Gesticulating wildly (why?) and darting in and out of tiny traffic pockets. I’ve seen cars swap paint on Lake Shore Drive like NASCAR because one cell phone user neglected to check to see if the space they were swerving in to was actually available.

(And, yes, studies show that hand’s-free is just as distracting and just as dangerous as holding the phone, but it’s a start.)

My ex and I used to go round and round on this. When she was driving, she’d hop in the car, kill the radio, and out would come the phone for 40 minutes of gossip. Call it “shop talk” all you want…it was trivial chatter. Ditto the “soft schedulers” I know, who keep every single after-hours option and permutation as indeterminate as the fate of Schrodinger's fucking cat until the last possible moment -- using cell phones -- while they knee-drive hither and thither, yelling into their little silver boxes, “Are you sure? ‘Cause that’s not what I heard. Hold on; I got another call.”

That’s what it has to do with cell phones.

Your call is not morally superior to everyone else’s, and your pirouetting through traffic like Napoleon Dynamite or blasting through stop signs and stoplights as if they were merely gentle suggestions is not the result of fire, flood or an act of God.

Your imperiling my life for the sake of confirming every stupid item on your stupid grocery list with your stupid spouse is entirely the result of you being a dangerously inconsiderate ass-hat. No, you don’t just hafta take this one call: you just hafta be fined, jailed and, I think, pimp-slapped around the block and back again.

So on the one hand, as a City of Chicago resident, thank you to all the blabbering idjits for the additional revenue!

On the other hand, unless you are a nukuler weapons expert and your conversation involves the phrase, “OK, now very carefully cut the red wire,” hang up the fucking phone while you are driving.

Can you hear me now?