Taxi truths and the president's reality

I can imagine the president as a taxi driver. "I'm not from around here," he'd chuckle and explain, just before turning the wrong way on I-76. "I'm just out here for a couple of months, to make some cash to take home to my family. And then I'll be out of this city. It's so much prettier in Texas."

And he'd put on some Texas song, one about brave men and pretty horses, but he'd start talking anyway. It's something about those long hours behind the wheel -- they loosen people's tongues.

*

The truth is that I can imagine a lot of people as taxi drivers, because I've been spending a lot of time in musty Lincoln Town Cars. I just finished teaching an SAT prep course in the far northeast, and the company paid for a car service to take me back and forth across the city. It's not the best time of year for taxi drivers. They long for it to get cold so that you'll finally balk at standing on the corner, blowing on your fingers, watching for the bus.

"But I don't want to drive on the snow either," clarified a driver who's living in North Philly and saving cash to take home to Puerto Rico. "Or on the highway when it's raining like this."

As it is, the summer is a struggle to make more than the $90 a day it takes to pay for the car rental. Meanwhile, there are clients who don't pay, or who puke or give birth on seats. A nice girl with a company voucher offers them peace of mind. So they talk.

"Commodities," he said. This was a gruff-looking guy, but he lit up when I told him I was a college student. He'd had a girlfriend once who was going to college, and who gave him books to read. Now he was attempting to boil down my international relations major into one tidy word.

"My cousin who works in government said it to me, and it cleared up something in my head. Wars are fought over commodities."

"You're right," I said.

"It's true," he insisted, arguing with me despite my assent. "What is the war in Iraq about? What are all those civil wars about? Everybody wants the same things, and then we go to war."

Two days earlier, I'd had a driver who wanted to explain the whole of existence.

"If the Big Bang is this big explosion, then the planets would be all rough-edged, irregular. But they're all perfectly round! Can you think about that and tell me that God doesn't have a plan for us?"

"Nope," I gulped, choking on cigarette smoke.

"The thing is, we're just not living right. Can you tell me why there are people in this country who don't have food to eat? Is that right?"

"No, it isn't," I said.

"Whoever thought of money, way back -- money is the problem. We used to barter and trade and things were all right, but now we got money."

*

These men and the one woman who took me past the Nabisco factory and through the Puerto Rican Day parade, all the while telling me the way they thought the world should be -- they all seemed to want one thing. To hear that they were right. Whatever version of reality they lived in, they wanted me to affirm it.

"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world," Albert Einstein wrote. "He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it." But my drivers couldn't go it alone in their self-invented worlds. They seemed to need my help.

*

I pulled President Bush into all of this because a lot of people have been saying that he's divorced from reality. "The president's living in a dream world," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote. But the president is different from my drivers because he's behind the wheel of a whole country, instead of behind the wheel of a Town Car that has the window stuck open.

Riding in those cars, I agreed to a few things I wouldn't sign my name to or publish in the paper. I did it because I wanted a happy and awake driver who would get me where I was going alive and on time. The thing is, once I got out of the taxi, I was back in the "world of experience," and I could say whatever I wanted. Or I could retreat into my own "picture of the world."

And so I have. The guy you know as president is really a pleasant guy as far as drivers go. He misses life on the ranch, and he's playing a tape of Home on the Range and singing along.

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word. ...

He's a good singer.

Danielle Nagelberg is a junior International Relations major from Philadelphia. Schuylkill Punch appears on Tuesdays.

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