A magnificant bottleneck

It is hot outside. It is a Saturday. Locals want to go to the beach. Tourists are as thick as fleas. Put it all together and we have an enormous bottleneck on I-95.

All I wanted to do was go 4 exits north. That’s only about 4 miles. Within an eighth of a mile of getting onto I-95, traffic came to an absolute standstill. And then I turned on the radio to see if I could find any road reports. Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t going very far and it’s a good thing that I could get off at the next exit and still easily get where I was going. Traffic was backed up all the way from the New Hampshire toll booths. I’m not exactly sure how many miles up the road that is, but at least 8 miles (I’ve never actually measured it). It only took me 19 minutes to go one exit. Usually takes 2 minutes.

I’ve been caught in toll booth traffic before, but it is seldom this bad. I was envisioning a bunch of tourists driving through the EZ PASS lanes and snarling things up...as well as a stream of people handing over crisp $20 bills to the toll booth people for a $1 toll. And, of course, my absolute favorite, out of staters who think that if they stop in their lane with their directional signal on, those polite Massachusetts drivers will slow down and let them merge. Oh hahaha. No, Massachusetts drivers are rarely polite and rarely let anyone merge. You have to force us to let you merge by threatening to hit us. That usually works. We seem to understand that a lot better than directional signals. Fun on the roads today.

Fortunately there was interesting stuff on the radio. Weekend America was on WBUR (public radio) and I happened to tune in during the segment called Hidden Messages, about the CIA’s role in domestic propaganda during the Cold War. The host interviewed the author of Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (Frances Stonor Saunders). They talked about how the CIA purchased the movie rights to Animal Farm, then changed the ending to turn the pigs into commies, leaving their capitalism relatively untouched. Interesting. The author of the book says that Orwell’s widow knowingly sold the movie rights to the CIA after they promised her they would introduce her to Clark Gable. Everyone has a price. I didn’t get to hear the entire program, but apparently there’s some interesting info on how the CIA used Gloria Steinem, too. As well as Jackson Pollock, among a long list of others. I’ll have to go listen to that segment of the program again when the audio is posted. Think maybe I’ll buy the book, too.