Scooter Dreams

I said to my wife Kathy, “I think I’m going to get a scooter.”

“Have you been watching The Wild One again,” she asked.

Oh, Kathy is a wise woman. She knows that The Wild One is my second-favorite movie of all time. The brooding Brando as Johnny Strabler, belligerently anarchic and self destructive, glowering like a gargoyle atop the structure of the film. The tang of vicarious pleasure I get when he’s asked what he’s rebelling against: “Whaddaya got?” Nietszche on a motorcycle, wearing dungarees and black leather, a profanation of complacent postwar conformism

My favorite movie of all time? Shane. Not because of Alan Ladd’s Shane. Because of Jack Palance’s Jack Wilson, a coiled knot of psychopathic evil, slowly, meticulously, pulling on those skin-tight black gloves, barely containing the glee at the prospect of another killing, slowly, oh so slowly, dismounting from his horse to signal his disdain upon first confronting Shane. The laconic challenge before the gunfight: “I’ve heard you’re a low-down Yankee liar,” Shane says. “Prove it,” Wilson hisses. What Shane proves is he’s a bit faster on the draw. Christ in buckskins dispatches the cattle-baron-loving gun-for-hire Mephistopheles, redeeming the land for the homesteading elect.

“No, not a motorcycle,” I told Kathy; “a scooter. I’m thinking a Piaggio Fly 150. Midnight blue.”

“Why?”

“Why midnight blue?”

She made an exasperated noise. “Noooo, why a scooter?”

“It gets 75 miles to a gallon of gas. Think of the money we’ll save. And, it’s sleek and elegant, like me, and with 1.9% financing it’s affordable.”

“Do you know you’ll have to get a special license? And that means you’ll have to study a manual and take a test and then have your riding evaluated. You might even be asked to take a safety course. And what about insurance? And a helmet? And accessories? And the fact that it’s not a year-round vehicle?”

“But,” I protested, “gas is almost four bucks a gallon, and, besides, it’s sleek and elegant, like me.”

“That last part’s debatable. But tell me, how exactly are you saving money?”

Though she’s never read Blaise Pascal, Kathy knows what he knew: “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.” She certainly made me aware of what I knew not of. And recent research suggests why: reason is fragile because it is personal, but more resolute when it is social. We use reason to justify ourselves to ourselves and others. We reason, but it is motivated, bent toward confirming what we already believe or want to believe. But used in the presence of others, with others equally motivated, reason widens our range of perspectives, pulls us beyond ourselves to a kind of self-overcoming—like a bubble balancing inner and outer pressure to preserve its membranous integrity.

* * * * *

Another bubble, the one in a spirit level, when kept within the small boxed area of a small, liquid-filled glass tube, establishes a confirmatory horizontal plane by noting any unparallel direction. It maintains constancy, plumbness and evenness of position; in effect, it resists any destabilization. There are people whose internal spirit levels immunize them from the dialogic expansiveness of reason, who draw an impervious protective circle around themselves and their inbent beliefs, who will not venture from the hermetic mountain keep of their confirmatory bias.
Once, in my introductory mass media course, a class discussion on the visual grammar of camera angle, lighting, and music turned to the scene in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society where Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard, now Dr. James Wilson in House) descends the staircase, on his way to his father’s den and the gun he will use to commit suicide. And that discussion turned to the movie’s conclusion which, to a person, the students acclaimed as uplifting, satisfyingly inspiring. I intervened.

“Wait a minute. You’re forgetting a few things. First, Robin William’s character, John Keating, has been blackballed. He’ll never teach again. And remember, he says earlier in the movie that teaching is his life? So basically, his life is over. And what about his role in Neil Perry’s suicide? Doesn’t he encourage Neil to pursue acting, in defiance of Neil’s father saying he would be a doctor? Doesn’t the movie fudge his responsibility for Neil’s death? See, the ending is illusory, it’s Hollywoody. Boys standing on their desks, the “Captain, my Captain” thing. It’s manufactured to make you feel good, make you feel everything’s noble and affirmative, by making you forget that Keating has suffered an irreversible personal tragedy and may well be morally culpable for the death of one of his students.”

Murmurs churned among the students, murmurs that swelled into a chorus of animated protest. “Geez, Dr. DeNuccio, there you go doing that English teacher thing again,” said one student, and the others voiced their assent. “Why do you have to analyze everything and take the interest out of it,” said another; “you’re as bad as that teacher who has the boys diagramming poetry,” and the others, again, but more vociferously, voiced their assent. I’d swear, though surely my ears deceived me, I’d swear I heard someone whisper, “Get a rope.” Chatting with one of the students in that class at the end of the year, I was told that on his residence hall my effort to broaden their critical perspective was still a topic of discussion, and still dismissed. The movie had conjured in them what Wendell Barry calls “a feelable thought,” from which they would not be dislodged.

* * * * *

In a recent study entitled “`Macho Men’ and Preventative Health Care,” Kristen Springer and Dawne Mouzon of Rutgers University have found that men who cling to stereotypical notions of masculine behavior die earlier than men who observe a more moderate masculine role. Macho men, cabined by show-no-weakness thinking, do not seek out preventative health care, and they are overly susceptible to risky, guy-code behavior.

A man on a midnight blue Piaggio scooter can hardly qualify as macho. Think of Tom Hanks in Larry Crowne. Such a man is therefore likely to live longer. I could have used that argument with Kathy, but she would have said, “Jerry, you never have been and never will be a macho man.” She’d mean that as a compliment.