COLUMN: "Mechanized Death: Riding the Blue Line to Hell"

From Zelig Kurland's "Bacon for Breakfast," Spring '92 Cyclists know that if they collide with something, they will suffer along with it. Joggers, in a state of spandex-induced euphoria, know that with their momentum they can knock the shit out of anybody. However, I've learned about more pressing transportation hazards from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Despite what the folks at the DP say, you really can learn things by reading it. · On October 11, I read that 72 year-old Virginia Baker, who was exiting a Blue Line train at Girard Avenue. As Baker stepped onto the platform, the trains doors closed, trapping an arm and a foot. The conductor -- responsible for seeing that all doorways are clear -- accelerated out of the station. Mrs. Baker, after being dragged 50 feet, was stopped abruptely by a safety gate and thrown to a catwalk below. So it goes. SEPTA did twice as well in 1980, dragging a 38 year-old man 100 feet. SEPTA's record -- set in 1983 with a 14 year-old girl -- is 114 feet. Perhaps hash marks should be painted on station platforms to make future record-keeping easier. · You don't have to ride SEPTA to have fun with engineering defects. In a recent Time interview, General Motors chief Robert Stempel was questioned about a recall of 1.5 million GM cars. "It was a customer-satisfaction campaign, which is not a recall," remarked Stempel. "But you were criticized," the interviewer noted, "because it came after there had been some 300 incidents and one death." "Three hundred of 1.5 million," Robert cleverly pointed out. "How many magazines do you print on a run? Every page is perfect in every magazine?" To my knowledge, no one has been killed by a defective issue of Time. There would have to be a defect in every magazine to be comparable with a design defect in 1.5 million cars anyway. They pay this moron $1.6 million. · On Novemeber 23, I noticed an article in the Inky entitled "2 fired in death on El." I assumed that the conductor and motorman of the train that killed Virginia Baker had been fired. I was wrong. I discovered that Howard Brunner, age 54, had become ill and fallen between the tracks at Girard Avenue -- SEPTA's "1991 Station of Death." According to the article, "Only the fifth car of the first train showed any evidence of contact with human tissue." That train was the first of four that ran over Brunner before service on the Blue Line was halted. A man at the station noticed Brunner's body after the second train had run over it. He notified a SEPTA cashier and SEPTA police before trying to wave off the oncoming third train. The train pulled into the station. When the man notified the train's motorman of Brunner's body, he was reportedly told, "I got to keep this train moving." · Whenever I tell people -- both male and female -- about these incidents, they find them immensely funny. Those who really get excited dramatize their vision of a 72-year-old being crushed to death by gleefully clapping their hands and yelling, "Smack!" I remember a night four years ago, when my parents came to pick me up at driving school. As I met them in the hallway, we suddenly heard laughter and enthusiastic applause through the door of a nearby classroom. The instructor calmly told my parents, "Must've been an accident. They love those." A 72 year-old woman being crushed to death is funny. A Plymouth minivan full of babies sailing off a cliff is immensely amusing. Imagine that. What allows us to laugh in the face of death is the cartoonish excess and absurdity of these events. There's a Monty Python skit where they hunt for mosquitoes with a bazooka. It's that kind of comic excess. If you saw a videotape of Howard Brunner's death, you wouldn't find it funny. If you heard about it from this column, you might -- because I made it sound that way. If you saw Itchy get run over by four trains on "The Simpsons," you'd definitely laugh. When we separate the circumstances of the event -- comic excess -- from its true meaning -- the gruesome death of a human being -- it can be funny. It could also, perhaps, be a denial. A denial that any one of us could die for no reason at any given time. Death. The only thing more emotionally devasting than rape. There is no question that finding humor in rape is a denial of how likely it is that it will happen to you, someone you know, or someone you love. When it does, you'll never find it funny again. Trust me. Zelig Kurland is a sophomore English major from Charleston, West Virginia. "Bacon for Breakfast" appears alternate Tuesdays.