The Passive Aggressive Post-Honk: A Talisman of the Fecklessness of Our Time

Let’s talk about honking.

As a native New Yorker, I confess to a self-contradictory take on the subject. On the one hand, the noise pollution generated from incessant honking (beyond the filth of the subway, the insane cost of living, and the overall crowdedness of the place) is the number one quality of life detractor in the city. Hands down. It is an inescapable super din that never lets you rest for a moment, since it can come at any hour from any quarter, and for any duration. As a now-tourist in my erstwhile home town, it is the primary thing that keeps me from thinking that I could ever return.

However, on the other hand, as a driver raised and weaned on the byways of the city, I find my right to self-expression through unrestrained and ad libitum honking to be a sacrosanct core value of the culture that suckled me. Honking when someone is moving too slowly, honking when someone cuts you off, honking when someone tarries too long at a newly resumed green, and honking even when you are certain that you are just making a bad situation worse, such as a temporary traffic jam, and yet your silence on the matter would yet yield some sort of New Yorkerish-Euripidean shame if you let it slide, particularly when the logger jam is clearly caused by someone from out of town - this is your God-given right, nay, obligation as a Native New Yorker.

Honking separates us from them, the New Yorkers from the invaders, the bridge and tunnel people, and the lumpen clueless who have been contaminating our city with their purity for well nigh 3 decades now. It is part of our life blood, perhaps the last vestige of pride for original New Yorkers to claim our homeland in the face of ever increasing passivity and niceness. Blech.

I have come to accept the moral relativism of my dualistic conceit and no longer fight it. If I’m on the receiving end of the honking, it sucks. If I’m honking myself, then it is a time-honored birthright. I make no attempt to reconcile the two. My capacity for consistent philosophical tenets is simply not great enough when drawn into the dog eat dog of city life. I am not proud, but I am not sorry either.

Years ago, when I lived in the wilds of Durango Colorado, I became convinced that I needed to own a pickup truck. Since I frequently needed to procure wood for my stove (the one source of heat in my cabin), I felt it a justified purchase and not simply a proto-hipster poseur move (as were my cowboy boots), and I poked around the local classifieds for something that would fit my needs without advertising inflated T levels or risking to offend the natives with my cultural carpetbaggery. I found an old Toyota pickup that struck just the right balance between foreign and domestic, and when I went for a test drive, the young mountain man selling it to me informed me there was no horn, “but who uses that anyway?”

Though 2000 miles away from my the honking Mecca of my birth, I visibly bristled and something in me stiffened at the thought of being aurally castrated, even out in the mountains where he was almost certainly correct that people were too polite to honk, to say nothing of honk gratuitously. I respectfully took the defective vehicle for a spin, graciously praised the handling and torque, and then went and bought a Jeep.

Self-respect in tact, I have, in turns, exported my honking culture to the tranquil plains of Ohio, the placid back roads of Big Sur, and, where it is most deserved, in the perpetually stoned, erratic, yet oddly exit lane queue-obedient culture of Los Angeles. As I have aged, I can’t help but notice that my cacophonous diaspora hasn’t influenced the driving anywhere I’ve been, and as I have tempered it somewhat, I also can’t help but notice that other asshole New Yorkers have loudly exported themselves in my wake and are making the rest of the country the raucous living hell hole that once only New York was. I can’t say I’m happy about this, but I can’t say I don’t understand - or even share some responsibility for honking my part, either.

But in recent years, a wholly new phenomenon has arisen. I wasn’t sure if it was really a thing, but in recent days, I have to confess that the thing really is a thing, and that thing is something I have dubbed "the passive-aggressive honk,” or, more succinctly, “The Millennial Honk.”

This is the honk that comes after any ostensible danger has actually passed and the driver is driving off, free and clear, and then honks on the way out when it is too late for the honk to do any good. Now I am not a reckless driver nor distracted pedestrian, but I am certainly a situationally appropriate traveler and obey the laws of the street when they are helpful but not when they are not.

Just last night, on my evening walk, I was jay walking a full 40 feet away from a vehicle who screeched to a halt when she saw me enter the crosswalk against the light. I waved her on for a full 15 seconds as I kept walking, while she sat frozen in abject fear, until I was crossing right in front of her.

I shrugged and caught a glimpse of her eyes peeled wide open with sweat forming around her brow at the forced improvisation, and it was clear that she would wait out the entire passage rather than risk killing me with the backdraft of her 5mph urban crawl. 10 seconds later once I was safely on the curb, she drove off and then let out an insipid, petulant “honk,” which was remarkable only for its utter lack of effectiveness at averting danger or pre-communicating displeasure while there was still time to do something about it.

Two days ago, I was making a left turn on a two way street, which was tight, but still left plenty of room for an accelerating scooter to pass through the light without needing to slow down. Once I was safely out of the way and the scooter was behind me, “Honk!!” came the scooter with a flaccid sense of futility that seems to be the hallmark of our rapidly coming of age bubble-boy generation.

As I meditated on this post honk (ergo propter honk?), I got to thinking about my own honky upbringing and the virility that it implied both in a protective and expressive sense. There was meaning in those old New York honks. Sometimes there was real danger. Sometimes people were slowing your roll against your will. Sometimes people posed a risk to themselves and the wider culture by their meandering obliviousness, and sometimes it was just to make it damn clear you meant business even at the risk of a physical confrontation (as happened once to me after honking at a guy who was yapping on the phone and missing every green for 4 blocks in the West Village. He got out of the car, fuming, and informed me that he was an officer of the law and was on the phone, and the look on my face, which mocked, “then you should fucking arrest yourself,” got him back in his car without me needing to utter a word.). But the Millennial honk removes any such risk of human interaction, and yet at the same time guarantees total ineffectiveness in averting danger. It is the perfect metaphor for our time that it is at once completely annoying and that nothing will ever actually be accomplished by it.

I promised myself I would never become a crusty old person and bemoan the excesses and brazenness of youth. I don’t *want* to belong only to my generation, especially since most of you are way crustier than I am. And yet, here I am. Maybe it was the vaccine mix I got as a kid or the particular flavor of brainwashing my schooling scarred me with that makes today’s fecklessness so much more intolerable than my own. Or maybe the fact that I would kill for some actual excess and brazenness amongst the young instead of the eternal indolence of the perpetually wired. Most tragically of all, within a decade or two, we may have an entire generation that will never have driven their own cars, nor known the thrill of honking at someone who is just tying to parallel park. One hesitates to imagine such a lack of barbary amongst the young, but we seem to be coming closer and closer every day. . .