DC Area Drivers!

There's something about the movie "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation" that makes me believe that the people running Hollywood studios truly despise the moviegoing public. So I won't even go into trying to review the film. Let's just say it was an insult to Asians, blacks, women, and rocks. How does one insult rocks? Well, if there was a Rock Anti-Defamation League around back in the '90s that movie would have been stopped in its tracks.

On the plus side, I've learned that the D.C. area has the nation's worst drivers. Why is this a good thing, you ask? Well at first I thought I was being too fragile after dealing with years of calmer, less numerous Maine drivers. But no--D.C. area drivers are violently stupid and devoid of any humanity. Just this morning I was driving in the middle lane behind a minivan (minivans are the Hitlers of road vehicles. Yes, if you drive a minivan, you suck.) on Rte. 50 heading west. A school bus is in the right lane, slightly ahead of the minivan. Clearly, Minivan needed to take a right off of the road and was faced with the possibility of missing their exit. A smarter person might have slowed down significantly, which might have irritated me briefly, and then gotten into the right lane behind the bus. But no! Not this renegade, nope Mister (or Ms.) Midlife Crisis decides to zip ahead of the bus, and shoot across the bus driver's bow and off the exit, perhaps missing a collision by about two feet. Bravo, Minivan, Bravo.

Yet, this is just the kind of driving that has become the norm here. Why are DC drivers so horrible?

1) Diplomats. Fact--lots of foreign diplomats are heavy drinkers. Fact--hard drinking foreign diplomats love driving drunk, because back in Tashkent or Bratislava that's what they were allowed to do. Fact--knowing you have diplomatic immunity from traffic laws makes you less likely to drive with caution. Fact--young kids have very little natural resistance to a ton of steel and glass hurtling at them while Boris decides to go joyriding.

2) Transient population. With a high percentage of drivers being new to the area, there's a lot more lost drivers out their trying to read GPS or scan for street signs rather than watching for traffic.

3) Road patters designed by cretins.

4) Soulless Automatons Cruising Around. It's a known fact that government contractors, federal employees, and lawyers are dead on the inside. With death wishes, they drive with much more careless abandon.

5) The Confederate States of America. Virginia designed its roads to change names every few miles (see, Lee Jackson Highway, Fairfax Blvd., Arlington Blvd., Lee Highway, all being one road) to confuse the invading Yankees. Well, the Yankees won anyway and the roads are still confusing. So now we have a bunch of confused Yankees wandering the roads for eternity.