Thread by @annia

True story: One of my oldest friends joined the NYPD. I've known him since I was a baby. We went to daycare together. He taught me my first bad word, asshole, a formative moment. He was like a big brother.

His anti-bike hysteria is a big part of why we're not friends any more.

https://twitter.com/WallStPoker/status/1268372875125325826

The last time I called him, maybe two years ago, he launched into an unhinged, Giuliani-style rant against bicycles. Not for the first time. It was like one of those uncomfortable scenes in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle is losing it & everyone else is kind of edging away.

This is someone who started out as a decent guy—kinda f**ked up, like all of us, but not a hater. He entered the Police Academy the same year I entered grad school in journalism. We used to joke about this. Over the years, as the job slowly destroyed him, it stopped being funny.

He joined the NYPD because he thought, naively, that he would be able to make some kind of difference in the world. He was 100% sincere about this. He was a very earnest, kindhearted guy.

Over the next 20 years, I watched the NYPD strip all that away & grind him to a pulp.

The hysterical hatred of bicycles is part of a larger fear & loathing of people, &, I suspect, of vulnerability in any form. Part of it has to do with death. He became obsessed with this idea that if pedestrians or bicyclists get killed /it's their own fault./

"They were stupid," he would rage (we've had this conversation many times). They didn't look at the light. They just sailed out into the intersection. &c.

This grew into a larger conviction that people in "the city" are all asking for it, all blithely unaware of their own risk.

This, in turn, blossomed into a kind of hatred—of people in "the city." (He lives in Queens, now, one of the whiter parts, & drives his car into work.)

They're careless. They're stupid. They don't look both ways, just sail out into the street. Who do they think they are? &c.

There's a fear of mortality here that's so obvious it's embarrassing. Not just his own, but also that of others. The people he's supposed to be taking care of. Serving & protecting.

I'm guessing there's also feelings of powerlessness: he took the job to save lives. But he can't.

If this failure is his fault, he feels bad. (Never mind that it's an unrealistic standard.)

But if it's /their own/ fault, he's off the hook.

He also clings to this fantasy that someone in a car can do no wrong. The car is never at fault. It's magical thinking par excellence.

On some level, I think it's because he wants to identify with power & strength (cars). Not vulnerability, mortality, risk (bicyclists & pedestrians).

He told me once that vehicle traffic was "the lifeblood of the city"—which in some ways is true. But then it got weird.

It's true in that trucks bring all our groceries, goods, & so on into the city from somewhere else.

But there's also a lot of vehicle traffic in NYC that's unnecessary—people commuting to work because they don't want to mix with hoi polloi on the subway, &c. Or ride a bike.

Anyway, that conversation, like so many others, deteriorated into him ranting about how people should learn to just get out of the way of cars.

It makes me sad to even think about him, tbh. Like I said, he was a good person. It's ugly to watch a job chew up a person's soul.

I always tell people you shouldn't necessarily assume all cops are power-hungry psychopaths—that they might just be normal people who made bad life choices.

I've been thinking about him a lot lately. I haven't called him. Every time I do, it just ends badly, with him ranting.

There's an essay in here about good people who are made to do bad things, & how sometime they become the worst people. The most brutal. Because their guilt forces them to blame & hate the victims, lest they have to hate themselves. (Time to reread Bruno Bettelheim, I guess?)

Anyway. A friend of mine who works at a restaurant is telling me they're all terrified: the NYPD is beating up bicyclists & stealing their bikes.

His restaurant is in my old friend's precinct. I can't help but wonder if they'll cross paths. And if it'll be bad. It f**king sucks.

A few years ago, I would've called my old friend & asked him to look out for the folks at my other friend's restaurant.

He used to love doing stuff like that—little favors, greasing the city's metaphorical wheels. He used to work for a restaurant himself.

He used to love this city.

Anyway. I probably won't call him. Every time I do, we get into some weird, one-sided argument with him ranting about bicycles, pedestrians, or just people in general (or once it was libraries), & how stupid they are, & how they deserve what they get.

Anyway.

This started with why do cops hate bicycles & ended up with Bruno Bettelheim on concentration camp guards. So I guess that's where I'm at right now.

I don't really have anything else to say. Except thank you, as always, for reading.