Tunnel Vision - what people read while traveling on public transit - Brief Article - Column

National Review, July 3, 2000 by Richard Brookhiser

'The people ride in a hole in the ground." But what do they read when they ride?

Murray Kempton once wrote that the New York newspaper columnist has one shot at capturing the heart and attention of the outer-borough kid riding the subway who's moved to Manhattan and questioning the world for the first time-so the columnist has to make it good. It was a thrush's aria, lovely and sentimental, like much that Kempton wrote, but it isn't true anymore. People don't read English-language newspapers in the subways, except the sports sections of tabloids.

They read Bibles, often in Spanish, and Korans; also evangelical tracts, usually clever (election-season picture of a donkey and an elephant: "TOO CLOSE TOCALL!" Inside: "God has voted for you, Satan has voted against you! You break the tie!"). Drugstore-rack paperbacks are always read by women (women are the guardians of literacy; who will guard quality?). Teenagers read Jane Eyre, because they have to. College-age Asians read ringbound manuals of computing/chartered accountancy/the-careers-that-will-make-them-rich. You do see foreign- language newspapers. I once sat next to a Japanese man reading a paper in Portuguese, and puzzled, until I remembered that thousands of Japanese went to Brazil early in this century as sugar-cane cutters. Here was a descendant. A pale, thin youth once read the Daily Worker at my side, then ostentatiously left it behind on the seat. (Party discipline, to educate the masses?) Another time, I found a leaflet on my chosen spot that I thought to be the product of his left-wing cousins, railing against Israeli Gestapo tactics. On closer reading, it turned out to be the work of ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom the state of Israel is a humanist impertinence.

Easiest to read, however, because they spare me the rudeness of peering over people's shoulders, or the difficulty of reading upside down, are the ads running just under the subway cars' ceilings. They speak to the soul of man underground.

The souls of underground men and women have aching feet. Podiatrists think so, because they are heavy advertisers. Many subway riders work two jobs; they also tend to carry a lot of over-weight. Corns and bunions are the enemy.

Skin is another concern. DOES YOUR FACE LOOK LIKE A PIZZA? No, nobody asks that, but that's the fear they address. The most ambitious private subway advertiser is Dr. -, the "board-certified dermatologist." As he has grown more prosperous, his ads have become busier and more colorful, and he has taken to reproducing his own face. Not handsome: He resembles former congressman Stephen Solarz. But his cheeks are smooth and shiny as a toilet bowl. With a potion or a peel, yours could be too.

Occasionally you see an ad for a trashy book, and another grievance for authors to nourish against publishers. Why isn't my history of the War of 1812 being pushed on the Lexington Avenue line?

But since this is New York, the lost hope of socialism in one city, the subway ads push lots of exhortation and social services. Are you being beaten? Call this hotline. Are you pregnant? Call these abortionists. Do you need a green card?-asked in numerous languages, including Creole, the French Ebonics. Nou pale krayol, one helpful ad boasted. Vou better; ignorance would put you on the level of John Rocker. Then there are Julio and Marisol, hero and heroine of the cartoon AIDS- education campaign. They are a His panic couple who have gone through worries about AIDS (SIDA in the almost-mirror Spanish-language versions) for a couple of years now. Friends sicken and end up in hospital beds. A tarty former bad-girl-friend of Julio's was struck down. Will they find happiness? Will they use condoms?

Two problems with Julio and Marisol leap out at the reader, besides SIDA. One is the tactful omissions: no maricons in this strip; no black faces, Hispanic or otherwise, either. We wouldn't want the Rev. Al protesting stereotyping on the L train. The other problem is also an omission: good drawing. This is a silver, if not quite a golden, age of cartooning. The no-longer-alternative press churns cartoonists out; the craft is very conscious of its techniques, and worshipful of great predecessors, like Jack Cole. Despite all that, Julio and Marisol move, with mannequin stiffness, through frames as imaginative as mug shots. If a child drew figures as rigid as these, he would be subjected to a battery of psychological tests, ending with anatomically correct dolls.

But in all this dreary uplift, there is an oasis: a feature called Poetry in Motion: snippets of verse, no longer than 20 lines, with the poet's name and dates. Though they have yet to run Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," the whole idea, like Pound's poem itself, is urban haiku: the apparition, in the riffling deck of perception, of a queen, or a joker.

Now the bad news. The global economy has found even the subway, and whole cars are being bought by single advertisers, whose style is printed television: endless repetition of almost the same thing. Capering, snuggling black teenagers wear painted-on pirate's hats or cloaks, while from around the torn corners leers a bearded old rogue, logo for spiced rum: THE CAPTAIN WAS HERE. Here, and everywhere.