Bells and whistles…
25th August 2010By Anthony Peacock
There is a badge of honour out there – particularly prevalent in motorsport – that is worth more to some people than a mayoral chain or even an Iron Cross. That is the whistle. A whistle in the wrong hands is more dangerous than a chimpanzee with an Uzi.
The sort of people who abuse whistles tend to be the sort of people who take pride in wearing high-visibility jackets. They have often been bullied at school so are probably more deserving of sympathy than abuse, but that’s often hard to muster towards these die-hard disciples of health and safety.
Unfortunately, we’re talking about a certain sort of marshal here. The sort doing it for all the wrong reasons: as an exercise in wielding power rather than the desire to put something back into the sport they love. These people want revenge for their mediocre existences as tax collectors or traffic wardens. And especially they want revenge for that time when the big boys stole their cup cake in 1974.
It’s hard to say which country is worse for this, but there’s an awful lot of over-zealous whistle blowing in Rallye Deutschland and Rally Great Britain in particular (although there are other equally guilty parties). So keen was one of the enforcers in Germany last week that she was checking passes coming out of a restricted area in the service park as well as going into it: a somewhat futile task given that it would have been impossible to be there in the first place without one.
But while it’s hard to identify the worst event for bells and whistles, it’s easy to see the best: step forward Rally Sweden and Rally Jordan. Both of the service areas in these countries have been designated whistle-free zones, and it makes the whole atmosphere a thousand times more civilised. Take out the whistle and you take out the aggression. Remove the fluorescent jacket and you lose the ego. In a nutshell, it’s exactly what Nietzsche described as the ‘will to power’ theory back in 1883. And it’s highly unlikely that he ever went to a rally in his life. Not that sort of rally anyway.
You see, it’s irritating because we’re already constantly bombarded with unnecessary noise from people who mistakenly think that what they have to say is more important than what you are doing on a daily basis.
Take airports. Dubai recently became a silent airport’, with the PA system put out to pasture. The result is a vastly more relaxed ambience, devoid of the inane babble about departures to Baku, unattended baggage, and passenger Schmidt immediately to gate 59 that characterises most airports.
These announcements and whistle-blowers are ultimately responsible for eroding human intelligence. Just as McDonalds have taken to writing ‘contents may be hot’ on coffee cups, marshals are effectively saying ‘rally cars may run you over’ with their whistles. Well no way.
By increasing enforcement you decrease individual thought and responsibility (that’s one of Nietzsche’s ideas too). Every time a whistle blows, a brain cell somewhere dies. And sadly there are several people out there who simply can’t afford that loss.
