Rabinowitzism

Bike share critic and begriming opponent Dorothy Rabinowitz was interviewed by New York magazine. Some of the choice quotes on CitiBike are below, but two of these quotes are made up. Can you spot them?

• “The pods have landed, only they've landed with the racks, and they're coming with allies called bicyclists. The activating force behind all of the fury was the racks, instruments of aesthetic torture.”
• "I realized this is the stuff of your darkest aesthetic dreams. There is nothing human about the racks. Not even when people get on the bikes.”
• "This whole program is like something dreamed up in a North Korea re-education camp, designed by terrorists and carried out by the jackbooted bike reich to destroy New York."
• “I have a strong feeling that about a year from now many politicians are going to be spending a lot of time distancing themselves from the bike-share program,"
• "I'm talking about the much less recognized world of entitled, middle-class and upper-middle-class riders in the city who think they are serving a noble cause. It's basically their very identity that they are special people, that they're helping the environment, and nobody has ever instilled any notion in them of the necessity of following a traffic rule.”
• “Unless I was having too much wine after dinner, I actually saw somebody on a bike stop at a red light. Once. That may have happened. If it happens more than once, I will submit myself to psychiatric examination on the grounds I'm having a delusion."
• "We survived 9/11, but I'm not sure we'll survive this."
• "there is this religious zealotry attached to the riding of bicycles in this city that tells you everything.”

To her credit, if you're going to be wrong, be quotably wrong.

Also, I looked in numerous dictionaries for a definition of "totalitarian" that was close to "utopian scheming" and I couldn't find any. There are some ideas out there about totalitarian utopias like in "Walden Two" but if you take the word utopia out of it, it's just the idea of a government that has total control over all entities. 

"There's this kind of basic illiteracy in the reading population, they don't know the meanings of words,” she said.

I suppose few know the secret meanings of words that exist only in Rabinowitz's head. 

Comments

[Smedley Burkhart]

By unmasking the rabid squirrel irrationality of the opposition, this silly little woman has done more to advance urban cycling in the US than anything since the U-lock.

[JJJJJ]

Send her the article showing that almost all cyclists stop at lights. She promised to go to the looney bin.

[Early Man]

She may not have spoken openly about the jack booted bike reich and 9/11 but you know she was thinking it. Hopefully she will be behind the firing of a Wall Street Journal bike commuter so we can get a look at her deposition of what she really thinks about cyclists. Note to all WSJ employees who may be fired for cause--get on a bike, stat!

[Ivan]

Dorothy Rabinowitz is the new Humpty Dumpty.

[Michael H.]

Wait a minute. She let out the secret that we cyclists really do come from Mars? No!!!!

[Smedley Burkhart]

Jackbooted Bike Reich: good name for a band.