Cones, Calvinism and the Constitution

There is no probably no better index of how far the American people have fallen from the ideals of the Founders than the traffic-controlling orange barrel, which some have suggested ought to be named the Ohio State Spring Flower (but hey!… no shame, O.K.? The Massachusetts State Bird is a rude hand gesture.)

The traffic-control cones appear—by the hundreds—for perhaps half a mile before highway construction sites. They are placed in neat lines, gradually narrowing the available space to however many lanes are open past the construction site. The idea is that drivers will use the marked space to merge smoothly with the rest of the cars sharing the highway with them.

Of course, nothing of the sort actually happens.

Instead, we see a parade of jerks who see the available space as an opportunity to move a place or two ahead, and who squeeze past you, swerving in front of you in the last remaining half-inch and then jamming on the brakes. It is annoying and dangerous, a form of the old teenage game, “Chicken.” And it’s the result of poor anthropology on the part of the Ohio Department of Transportation.

The premise of the orange barrel line is irresistible: just show people a reasonable approach to life, and they’ll embrace it forthwith. Such an idea flatters us that we are logical folk, able to see and adopt a course of action based on reason rather than emotion.

The Founders would have dismissed such a notion with howls of derisive laughter. They may have been vague in their thinking about God, but they were very clear about human beings—they recognized that we are power-hungry rascals who will almost always choose a course of action based on pure selfishness. And so, they designed a system of government which separates, and limits, power. It’s too bad they didn’t anticipate the automobile.

Let me tell you how I think they would have solved the problem of merging four lanes of traffic into two. They would have erected, just before the construction site, a large wall of reinforced concrete, such as would protect the workers and definitely win any contest with the average vehicle.

They would have made this wall very visible, and perhaps put a sign or two up to warn of its presence, but they would certainly not have bothered to try to manipulate people into being reasonable by setting out nicely-narrowed lines of orange barrels.

Instead, they would simply have let nature take its course. A few yahoos would, of course, try at first to take advantage of more cautious drivers by zipping around them. But it wouldn’t work as well without the assumption of reasonableness inherent in the little cones and barrels. Such drivers would quickly find themselves facing the wall, and probably for quite some time as more prudent folk whizzed past them in the two remaining lanes. In short, you don’t try to make people be reasonable with little plastic cones; you force them to make reasonable choices by making unreasonableness so painful that even the intellectually-challenged decide to avoid it eventually.

We have just been through an extraordinary period in our national political life. Our President and our House of Representatives, both operating on the level of testosterone-empowered teenagers, have been playing a kind of “Political Chicken,” and both cars are, as of this writing, pretty heavily damaged. There were orange barrels a-plenty, but both parties assumed that they could outmaneuver the other, and we now have parts of the body politic strewn all over the highway, to say nothing of the smashed-up orange barrels flying hither and yon and any number of highway workers maimed in various ways.

There is another Construction Zone a-coming, and, this time, I hope the guys will notice the concrete wall placed just ahead by the Founders.

To whatever extent President Clinton’s situation is the result of a thirst for revenge for the Watergate debacle, it is as nothing compared with what will face future Republican presidents. The impeachment process, intended for the likes of high treason, has been trivialized, and if we are not to dissolve into a parliamentary form of government, someone needs to take note the abyss ahead.



This entry first appeared in the Berea, Ohio, News-Sun on January 21, 1999