Cartoon visions of mammals in urban hell

Every year or two, "Happiness" goes viral online. What is missing in these parables?

For 12 years I was a commuter in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area.

During that time, I did everything I could to stay out of a car in Beltway land. For me, being stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic was a vision of hell and, to be blunt, talk radio didn’t help.

Keep that “vision of hell” concept in mind, since it’s crucial in this post.

I decided to commute by MARC train from the edge of Baltimore to Union Station, right next to the U.S. Capitol. Of course, I did spend some time in the D.C. Metro system.

The Big Idea: Day after day, I deliberately chose to be surrounded by people in trains as opposed to stop-and-go life alone in a car. I did spent some time as a subway “straphanger,” but I chose commuting schedules that allowed me to sit on a train reading periodicals or talking to a few fellow riders who, over the years with shared schedules, became commuter friends.

What is a “straphanger”? Merriam-Webster tells us:

straphanger — noun

strap·​hang·​er … a standing passenger in a subway, streetcar, bus, or train who clings for support to one of the short straps or similar devices placed along the aisle

After leaving D.C., I moved back to the mountains of East Tennessee but, for five years, I spent roughly two months a year teaching (in two-week seminar formats) in New York City. I learned to love New York neighborhoods, especially in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, while I dreaded the crush of Midtown.

Yes, these years required me to learn the New York Subway system, which made the DC system look like McSubway Lite. There were some weird days in that world, but what I remember the most — to choose one image — were Sunday mornings riding the subway to church, with a few New Yorkers making similar journeys.

What does this personal discussion of mass transit have to do with the famous “Happiness” video by UK animator-illustrator Steve Cutts, which was released in 2017, but keeps going viral over and over online. It’s popularity in social media is rather ironic, methinks. But hold that thought.

For some reason, Cutts and many other talented modern artists view mass-transit as the cutting edge of modern hell. It’s all about the crowds of mammals being jammed, by necessity, into metal sardine cans on wheels.

Watch that video and I think you will see what I am talking about.

There are brief images of automobiles in traffic, as a small detail in the urban hellscape, but when the automobile truly arrives it is used as a tempting vision (a delusion, of course) of freedom for smiling individuals.

That isn’t my memory of rush hour in DC. One time, returning from a DC airport, I hit stop-and-go traffic on the Northeast corner of the DC Beltway at (wait for it) 1 a.m. No, it wasn’t because of middle-of-the-night construction. Traffic is traffic.

But here is what I want Rational Sheep readers to do: Watch the “Happiness” video and note the key elements of human existence that it includes and what it omits.