Dalton RobertsToday I propose ways to make a lot of money for the public treasury while at the same time controlling pests. The prophet Hezekiah said, "Any society that allows idiots to toot at will shall be plagued by accidents, aggravation and shall eventually disappear off the face of the earth."
I have a specific reference to people who are given horns at the same time they are given cars. Cars are to drive safely and sanely. Horns are to blow and are perfectly safe instruments in the hands of intelligent people.
Unfortunately, there is a percentage of our population who ride them like The Lone Ranger rode Silver. They blow them so long and so loud that they completely lose their own sense of hearing and do not hear any of their thoughtless blasts.
Now you could ask 100 people what to do about this problem. Some would propose the death penalty because there are people who think everybody should be killed but themselves. I am not one of those. I think a few people should be spared.
Part of my plan is prevention. Anybody caught needlessly tooting at their cousin crossing the street in front of them or at a car that moves a little slower than they wish should be required to go to tooting class. Whenever they start any activity that they love -- like talking to a friend on the passenger side or listening to Willie Nelson singing "Stardust," a blast of horns will be loosed on them. It will continue for 30 seconds unabated or until tears appear in their eyes.
If you have been invited to a dinner where Gov. Bill Haslam and Curtis Adams are to be the featured speakers but have some very poor directions and are driving very slowly in the right lane trying to see the street names, a one-minute-long recording of a freight train whistle will engulf you. This is to punish you up front for all those times that you have done this dastardly deed to others. The main object of this class is to increase your sensitivity to the pain of other drivers.
You will even be broken from little friendly toots of recognition of friends because every one within hearing range of a toot thinks it may be an old boyfriend or girlfriend or Uncle Earl or Aunt Martha and is completely distracted from the business of driving his or her automobile. Toots are one of the most dangerous practices.
There is an automatic human reflex among people with low IQs to flash their IQ when irritated. I recognized this in one of my songs when I said:
"You look good in a rearview mirror
Holding up one finger
Flashing your IQ."
Speaking of new laws, we must begin charging people for horns if their IQs are below normal or if they are impulse driven. If you're waiting to pull onto an extremely busy highway and someone behind you leans on his horn, urging you to endanger your life and the lives of others, and you motion him to go around you and he jitterbugs around you, leaving rubber all the way to the highway, then continues laying down rubber on the highway itself, he should be fined $100 for every inch of rubber he lays down and slapped repeatedly across the face with angel hair pasta.