This BBC story rehashed the ancient trope that Frenchmen, and Parisians in particular, are rude, standoffish, and generally unpleasant to deal with. All I have to say is that this reporter obviously hasn’t spent any time in Boston, where we put a whole new gloss on the experience.
Journalist Joan Acocella, who usually writes for The New Yorker, has written this article in the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine, in which she offers her own theories and explanations for the behavior of people in New York City. New Yorkers, she says, often get a bum rap from people from other parts of the United States for being rude or brusque. What they’re really about, she says, is a sense of shared survival that is necessary for living in such an overwhelming place, and a sort of forced intimacy that comes from that “we’re all in this boat together” sensibility. New Yorkers usually have no problem telling you exactly what they think, but that’s because they’re trying to be helpful, not angry. And if sometimes it comes across a little too bluntly, well, you’d be crabby too if you had to live there.
My take on this is that anyone who has ever called a New Yorker “rude” has obviously never been to Boston. New Yorkers do not even scratch the surface of rudeness compared to the way people treat each other here. Even people who are PAID to be nice to you, like salespeople in department stores or, even worse, small independent businesspeople are far more likely to tell you to go fuck yourself here than they are in New York. I can’t tell you how many times I have been made aware by some retail clerk or cashier or person standing in line that I am interrupting their day with my stupid and worthless insistence on being helped. And we won’t even begin to talk about the driving.
If New Yorkers are united by a sense of being in it together, we here are segregated into thousands of tiny cells of privacy that are squished together like soap bubbles, yielding as little as possible even as we are crammed tighter and tighter, so that when the bubbles inevitably pop we are unwillingly thrust into some new bubble not entirely to our liking. The prevailing attitude here is “hooray for me and to hell with you”, and people will stop at NOTHING to prevail in even the pettiest encounter. Which is not to say that you don’t run into this sort of thing with New Yorkers. I think it’s a behavior common to people in general, but taken to a whole new level by Massholes.
Though I have lived most of my life in New England, I lived for nearly eight years in Chicago during the 1980s while attending college and grad school, and Chicagoans are several orders of magnitude nicer than people in Boston or New York. There’s still enough general assholery to go around, but the level of congeniality is high. So high that at first I, the dyed-in-the-wool New Englander, found it off-putting to deal with so many nice people every day. Eventually I got used to the difference. People in Chicago are just as rushed and hustling as New Yorkers, but they deal with the pressure without feeling like they need to be in your face. My wife and I also lived in Bloomington, Indiana for about 18 months while I started my doctorate, and we had to adjust once again to the slow-and-easy style of that area. Coming back to uptight-and-tight-lipped New England was a culture shock.
When we finally settled in the Boston area about a dozen years ago, my wife, who grew up in Newton, had no trouble reverting to her in-born Masshole self. She is particularly in her element when driving — honking if the car in front of her doesn’t react to the green light within seven nanoseconds of it changing, swearing a blue streak all the time, slamming the gas pedal so she can cut people off at the slightest sign of an open space on the road. It took me quite a while to learn the ropes of driving on 128 or I93. Even now, I am still intimidated when I have to drive on the surface roads of Boston itself. But I have also taken on the necessary public persona of willful disregard one needs to interact with ones fellow Bay Staters.
So, I just read this post by one of the contributors at Mental Floss, where she did a little quick figuring to address the question of how likely it is that anyone from a given state in the U.S. will be from that state’s largest city. In other words, if you’re from New York, how likely is it that you’re from New York City?
In the case of New York and NYC, it’s actually almost a 50-50 proposition that a New Yorker is also a New Yorker, if you follow me. But she looked at a bunch of cities and has posted the results for your interest.
Somehow, she left Boston off the list. Tragic oversight, obviously. So here I am to fill in the gaps for you.
The City of Boston’s estimated population as of 2005 is roughly 559,000 people (and you thought Boston was A LOT bigger, didn’t you?). The population of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was 6,437,193 in 2006. you can do your own math, but the answer is that only 8.68% of the people who live in Massachusetts are residents of Boston.
Which seems to fly in the face of reason, right? Well, that’s because most of us who “live in Boston” actually live in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, our grandparents having had the good sense to flee the city decades ago in favor of such charming burbs as Everett, Randolph, and the like.
According to that Wikipedia link, these days the reach of the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area extends to about 30% of the total area of the state and has a population of 4,411,835. That’s 68.53% of the total population of Massachusetts, meaning 2 out of every 3 people in Massachusetts are “from Boston” in the larger sense. If you fold in some of the satellite cities that are also considered part of the total statistical area such as Manchester NH, Providence RI and Worcester MA, the overall population is 7,427,336, or 115% of the population of Massachusetts.
That’s a lot of Massholes.
I suppose that really isn’t a startling revelation to people who live in the five other New England states, but here in Ye Olde Bay Colony itself, I think we tend to reserve the term for offensive drivers.
But, according to this Boston Globe article about a sharp increase in police calls to resolve disputes on the bike path in Arlington, it’s apparent that a motorized vehicle is not necessary. Any wheeled conveyance will suffice.
From personal experience as a pedestrian and as someone who has actually ridden a bicycle on the path (Don’t get too excited, I haven’t ridden my bike in about 10 years), I agree with the person at the end of the story who takes the rollerblading crowd to task. They slalom back and forth along the path and create an extra-wide target when they have their arms waving about at their sides. The walkers, bicyclists, skateboarders and other users of the path all pretty much stay in their limited space, but not the rollerbladers.
My other big peeve from my experience trying to ride a bike was always with the lunch-hour walkers who see fit to walk four, five, even six abreast down the path, forming a human wall that no one can get past and who seem totally oblivious to bike riders shouting “On your left!” at the top of their lungs because they’re deeply engrossed in office gossip. That was VERY common out on the Lexington-Bedford portion of the path, which was my usual route in those days.
Comments:
My favorite of late is heading through Newton some mornings around 7;00 AM and encountering a bike riding brigade, in full regalia, riding 4 abreast to carry on a conversation and never, never moving to let a vehicle pass. I guess they thought we should all be pleased with the speed they were keeping up as an obvious trial run to the Pan mass or some other bike race.
I dared to beep after 1 mile and was given a lovely gesture.
Posted by jo [URL] on 07/02/07
I don’t know if it was the heat or the humidity or holiday hangovers or what, but it seemed like I had a significant Asshole Encounter every single day last week. At home, at work, online, even in the parking lot of the supermarket, there was no let up from it. The jerk meter was up to 11 and I never knew where the next one might materialize.
It finally reached the point where I had to ask myself if *I* was the asshole. You know how sometimes you just don’t recognize your own unpleasantness until you just can’t escape the reality of it any more? I sat in my den last night, watching the torrents of the “This American Life” TV series I’d downloaded, and one of the episodes was about people behaving extremely badly at a hot dog stand in Chicago, and that’s when the moment struck me.
(more after the jump)
Read more
Last week’s “Masshole” post at Universal Hub drew a lot of visitors (here as well as there, and probably at the original poster’s blog, too), so Adam revisited the concept yesterday with a post called “Ask Dr. Masshole”.
(The picture above comes from an earlier post at UH where a local blogger snapped a pair of photos of Massholes parking at the Atrium Mall in Chestnut Hill, a prime gathering spot of spoiled rich SUV-driving bitches if there ever was one).
While the blogger in yesterday’s UH post engaged in a little smackdown in the truest Boston tradition, there are other methods of retribution: the Urban Asshole Notification Card not only lets you provide a written reminder to Those People about their parking, but about a whole range of anti-social behavior. Or, if you’re not quite up to that level of revenge but still need to get it out of your system somehow, you can take a picture and submit it to YouParkLikeAnAsshole.com, who are more than glad to share your grief with the entire world.
(Frankly, I think you could save a lot of time by just mailing one of those cards to every resident in Massachusetts pre-emptively, because eventually we’ll all be guilty of at least ONE of those offenses.)
The author of this blog, a fellow named Robert Rittman, has a few things to say about the five kinds of Massholes he encounters on his daily commute. (via Universal Hub)
I can think of a few other types he didn’t include:
I’m sure there are other examples.
Oh, and I also really liked his post called “101 Ways To Tell If You’re From Massachusetts”. I think I need to start reading this guy’s blog.
Comments:
101 Ways…? Too funny. I may not be from Massachusetts, but apparently close enough for a lot of it to have rubbed off.
Posted by Tony [URL] on 04/26/07
Hah, funny.
Drivers in Melbourne seem to be overwhelmingly polite; much more so than those in other Aus cities. Partly I think it’s because traffic tends to go slower here, because it’s more congested. The concept of a “lane” is somewhat fluid, but that’s probably influenced by having to deal with trams. The other thing of note is the Melbourne u-turn, which can occur anywhere, at any time.
That said, I still got an air horn for my bike.
Posted by flerdle [URL] on 04/26/07
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Via Universal Hub, here’s a link to a webpage from local ABC affiliate WCVB that compares Boston highway traffic before and after the Big Dig. In the picture on the left you can see that most of the major routes into and out of the city were plagued with monumental delays. On the right, the picture shows that traffic problems have not been totally eliminated — indeed, the web article does a good job of pointing out a few places that the changes from the Big Dig have made things worse — but that several traditional bottlenecks have been significantly ameliorated, and that the overall impact is positive.
(As long as you don’t consider collapsing roof panels, inadequate drainage and ventilation, and potentially catastrophic leaks a problem, that is)
Meanwhile, trying to drive around on the actual streets of central Boston has not improved one iota, and has, in fact, probably gotten worse as a result of the Big Dig’s continual process of re-routing the already twisty, narrow and confusing streets of “downtown”. We got very lost a couple of weeks ago looking for Locke-Ober. It’s one of Boston’s traditional old-fashioned restaurants, tucked away on a little alley in between Tremont and Washington Streets, and not even my handy-dandy GPS could navigate us through the labrythine streets. Ain’t no tunnel in the world ever going to fix all that.
Comments:
YOU ATE AT MY CULINARY HERO’S PLACE AND DIDN”T BLG ABOUT IT!!!!! *CAPS INTENDED*
Please tell me everything, cause I haven’t been. I swear I saw a woman walking off the commuter rail at South Station one day when I still worked at Fleet, I swore it was her but I was to shy to even say anything. I know, ridiculous…I’m a Lydia stalker.
Posted by jo [URL] on 02/28/07
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