An Alternative to Capital Punishment


So what's to be done about violent crime on the streets of America? What is cheaper and more persuasive than an army of cops, capital punishment or a life behind bars?

"Traffic School."

One day, even remotely similar in disagreeableness to the day I spent at traffic school would probably suffice to keep even the most prison-hardened criminal, the most self-indulgent adolescent, the most xenophobic terrorist out of trouble for the rest of his life. I am now convinced that genius does, occasionally, find its way into government. Somebody in Sacramento, Albany or Tallahassee has devised the most unforgettably humiliating and painful way to keep our eyes soberly on the road and our foot off the accelerator. All I can say, is that if you ever do get some sort of "moving violation," pay the fine, pay the higher insurance premiums, put up with your wife's (or husband's) complaints, give up your license, sell the car, but for God's sake, do not even think about going to "traffic school." It is not worth it. You'd be better off putting all your pain-killers, sedatives and a bit of Draino in a cup and getting it over with right away. The Draino would be infinitely less painful than the so-called "Painless Traffic School" which put me through eight hours of pedagogical horror, leaving emotional and intellectual scars from which no balm, therapy, pills or time will ever completely assuage.

I might have guessed something was fishy when the "traffic school" was located in a corner room downstairs at the local Sheraton hotel; probably just down the hall from where the itinerant Philippine (usually) sleight-of-hand healers perform their "miraculous", bloodless, chicken-parts "surgeries" on the local hypochondriacs every few months.

We crammed into the uninspiring, windowless mini-conference room with beige, pin-cushion walls covered with pictures of 1956 Ford Fairlanes, 1965 Mustangs, 1970 Corvettes, a few Model "A's" and other semi-antique and muscle cars from Detroit's halcyon years, the venue of the day for about a hundred of us auto-miscreants. Among those pictures were a few snippets of things remotely related to automotive/driving safety -- two articles by Herb Caen, some facts from the State DMV, the legal limit for blood alcohol content, a couple jokes from "The Far Side" and so forth. We were invited to "study" these things on the walls and "learn something," while.....

...while we each paid seventy-five dollars cash. $7,500. I wondered who got all that money anyway. When was the last time you made a "cash-only" transaction? A used car, a drug deal, a garage sale, getting across the border to Mexico? Whatever it was, wherever it was, we are talking "under-the-table;" I mean, cash-only deals are "caveat emptor", no returns, no guarantees and what the law and the government doesn't know won't hurt them. I mean, this guy, this "teacher" would not even accept credit cards, much less personal checks. That should have been another clue that my day at the "Painless" Traffic school was not going to be so painless.

During the first hour of "class" we sat and watched an illegal (I seriously doubt that this "traffic school" teacher had permission from Dan Aykroyd or John Belushi to show their movie) video-movie of two comedians out-witting an entire state police force and half the national guard in another boring Hollywood car-chase. Meanwhile, two at a time we walked to the front of the room to pay our seventy-five dollars cash and sign in when our names were called out. Apparently it would have been too efficient to simply pass the list around. I was absorbed in Anna Karenina when the "teacher" walked over to my table and said, "Close that book while I am teaching." I looked up and for a moment I was tempted to make some sort of wise-crack but then I slowly closed the book and said, "I'm sorry, I didn't notice that you were teaching."

So after roll call and payola (what else would you call it?) we watched a few minutes of Dead Calm, the part where the kid flies through the windshield. No, don't get excited; this was not intended to be an introduction to an interesting discussion about children's safety harnesses, the hazards of driving in the rain, poor vision, hydroplaning etc. No, this was only so that the teacher could tell us that in his opinion, according to his understanding of the "laws of physics", it would have been impossible for the baby to go through the windshield if it had been standing in the back of the car!

Then the "teacher" told us that the most important thing we should carry in our car was an extra fan belt. No mention was ever made of the usefulness of flares or warning reflectors, flashlights, tools, tire-gauge (the importance of proper air pressure) or anything else. He showed a brief Chrysler Corporation video about automotive maintenance and wherewith scratched off another item on the list the DMV requires its "traffic school" instructors to cover in class.

He did tell us not to try to recite the alphabet backwards if we are stopped for drunk driving. Simply tell the officer that it is impossible. He told us that there are "lots" of bars now in San Francisco which will pay for your motel room if you are too drunk to drive home; if not that they will, at least, pay for a designated driver to drink soda pop all evening while his buddies get soused. And then he told us that the beer companies spend more money and "care more" that anybody else about the hazards of drinking and driving. Of course they do; just like the tobacco companies probably contribute more to cancer research than anybody else right? And it was only ten-thirty.

Sometime early on the teacher, whose physique did not suggest abstinence, carried on a long, long monologue about food and the importance of lunch. The hotel had provided a menu and listed a buffet for about fifteen dollars and he thought that that was a pretty good deal but told us all about the great buffet at some other place in Berkeley where he usually "teaches." But nobody wanted to join him for lunch at the buffet so he left the room for a few minutes and returned and said he had gotten them to lower the price to twelve dollars and still there were no takers and he went on again for some length about lunch and food and various eateries and then he said lunch was so important that forty-five minutes was not enough time and if nobody objected he was going to extend the lunch break by fifteen minutes which meant that we would not get out of there until four fifteen instead of four sharp. Now, of course, as I sit here in the sanctuary of my study and write this I sound a bit cocky but in fact, during those first couple hours there in "traffic school", I still did not really know the extent of the trauma that lay ahead, and if the question had been more like....Well now, there you are with your hands tied and I have this whip and I am going to hit you once a minute for the rest of the day so do you want to stay an extra fifteen minutes? ...... the answer might have been different.

We watched several more stupid videos (some were simply snippets taken from the evening news) and which, if one stretched one's imagination, bore some relation to traffic safety... but after each one the teacher would say, "Well that covers maintenance", or signs, or hazards or whatever there was on the DMV list he had up by his desk. I think the John Belushi movie was supposed to have taught us about defensive driving or evasive maneuvers or something.

To support his claim as the next "Olivier" the teacher showed us a segment of some recent local TV news report about poorly placed highway signs in the Oakland-Berkeley area. O.K. good point. Every driver in the world has been frustrated at one time or another by unimaginative or out-dated sign-posting. But what about it? How do we avoid these things? How can we learn to anticipate such lane-changes and freeway entrances? What advise is there to give the neophyte driver about being caught in the left lane when his exit suddenly is three lanes over? But no. Do not think that this was a lead into an interesting discussion about signs and how to be a good driver. No. This was a way to show off the academy award -winning talents of the "teacher" as he played all ten or fifteen minutes of the un-used takes of the TV film crew as they shot and re-shot this vaudevillian, this traffic-school movie-extra Olivier pointing out some freeway sign recently obscured by the leaves of a Sycamore tree.

There was a brief discussion about "Stop" signs and someone had, in fact, gotten a ticket for going through one. Naturally there was a bit of interest in exactly what constitutes a "complete" (legal) stop. The teacher said, and this was his recommendation, and I am not joking or exaggerating, that you can be sure that you have stopped sufficiently at a "stop" sign when the inertia of the car is stopped so that after you are thrown forward you are then thrown back against the back of the seat; then, and only then, do you know you have executed a complete stop. I promise you there was no talk about simply driving smoothly and patiently, much less legally. My father always said, "Drive in such a way as to make your passenger feel absolutely comfortable." I wonder how my father would have liked being jerked back and forth at every "stop" sign.

At some point that morning the "teacher" told us that besides being a professional actor he is also a comedian. With that he passed around a wallet-size card which said IDIOT on it and in small print it said to turn the card over and on the other side it said IDIOT again and it said to turn the card over. I guess the card was intended for me because I still can't figure out what the point was. Anyway, I was at the very front of the room in the corner and so I was the last one to get this card. When the "teacher" finished telling us about his roll as an "extra" in a recent Hollywood film and how he actually sat next to Dan Glover in a San Francisco police car I said, "Excuse me, here is your I.D. card," and tossed it on his desk.

Finally it was time for lunch.

The afternoon was better only because we were on the downhill side; only three hours left.

That afternoon we watched a video put out by the Arizona Highway Patrol about "flash floods." I guess the assumption was that we would all end up in Arizona someday and so rather than show us a video about driving in the rain and snow, conditions we all might encounter as Californians, it would be a good thing to recognize a "flash flood" when we see one.

At first I was not going to write anything about this farce of a school, this unconscionable rip-off, this embarrassment, this cruel and unusual punishment because I had come to the conclusion, from several years of personal experience in traumatic brain injury, that the instructor had probably been shot (and brain-damaged) in Viet Nam or was suffering from premature dementia and that therefore mentally challenged as he was, I should be generous in my assessment of the whole thing. But when I got home and told my wife and some friends about several aspects of the class, they laughed and said that that was exactly the way it was at their "traffic schools". I realized that perhaps all traffic schools are taught by these cretins, these charlatans who think that just because they have a captive audience for eight hours, armed with a few videos and some Road and Track pictures tacked to the walls and an unwarranted authority that they are teachers. What they do resembles teaching about as much as croquet resembles golf.

I think the idea of "traffic school" is wonderful. And why not? I am a teacher myself and I believe all things can be learned and/or improved with good education. The last hour of the "class" was spent going around the room, each person telling what he or she had "learned" that day. And just about everyone except myself, was courteous enough to pretend to have learned something. So, with this simple little ploy the teacher could claim, to skeptics and the DMV Inspectors, that he had, in fact, done his job. But I was not alone in taking issue with this mockery of education. A young girl said she was embarrassed because she had come expecting a real school. An elderly woman said that what she learned that day was that apparently there are no requirements or prerequisites for being a traffic school teacher and that the DMV apparently manages the curriculum about as well as the Columbian army controls the export of cocaine.

The point is that there is so much that needs to be taught; and it could and should be taught and then tested. Why shouldn't we have to pass a reasonably challenging examination for the privilege of having a penalty wiped off our record? I mean, basically, I did nothing but pay seventy-five dollars to have a clean record. To me this smacks of corruption, clear and simple. People with bad driving records should have to pay higher insurance premiums. The insurance companies deserve to expect that at these traffic schools their clients are indeed learning to be better drivers; otherwise their rates should go up for their offenses. As a matter of fact, the occasional inspectors of these "traffic schools" should not be agents from the DMV but rather from the Insurance companies.

Well, back to my original thesis; leave the "traffic schools" as they are and you can be sure that during the most common driving offense -- speeding -- for example, most of us will, after a few minutes at seventy-five or eighty, remember "traffic school" and practically slam on the brakes with the hot, blood-rushing, stomach-cramping, nightmarish, horrible thought of having to spend another day at the mercy of a certified hang-belly, idiot, movie-extra "traffic school teacher" watching mindless videos, listening to stupid jokes and bullied to feign scholarly respect. Measure for measure, perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds after all.