That Animal Called Man
The curious case of the Vigilante Cyclist.
There’s something about Lycra that doesn’t scream Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver.
In that classic, the vigilante Travis Bickle dons the washed-olive army fatigues of the Vietnam tours which broke his brain. Bickle works the nightshift, ripping his yellow cab around the crime-soaked Gomorrah of 1970s New York. Hidden in his sleeve is a spring-loaded Smith & Wesson. “One day,” he says, “A real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.”
We don’t do guns in Great Britain. Our vigilantes aren’t quite Travis Bickle material.
Since 2019, Mikey van Erp, 50, has prowled London roads and filmed thousands of bad drivers breaking the law. Armed with a Go-Pro camera, Mikey uploads the footage to his 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. He also sends the footage to the police.
Eighty percent of those featured in Mikey’s videos get convicted, and many, including celebrities such as Guy Ritchey and Frank Lampard, lose their driving licence. Mikey says he’s inspired by his father’s death at the hands of a drunk driver.
Recently, Cycling Mikey went viral.
In the video, Mikey creeps up to a car and films its driver scrolling through his phone. The driver winds down his window. Mikey, in his sinister papers-please drone, tells the driver that he’s breaking the law. With a volley of Cockney-twanged expletives, the driver goes ballistic on good citizen Mikey. He calls him a c-word about forty times and accuses Mikey of occupying a lowly position within the sexual marketplace. Most gravely, the driver suspects Mikey of the most depraved of sins: that he supports Chelsea Football Club. Mikey says he’s saving lives.
That skirmish divided public opinion. Technically, the driver had broken the law. But he was stuck in traffic behind a London Bus with a line of cars stretched along the road. No fair-minded person would disagree that last year’s 111 cycling deaths are one-hundred-and-eleven too many. But fair-minded people can discern the difference between sitting in traffic and checking one’s email and speeding two tonnes of steel and glass along a road whilst zombie-scrolling through Tik Tok.
Mikey’s exploits have earned the affections of one of Britain’s most listened-to radio hosts.
Like Mikey, Jeremy Vine is one of an army of ‘cammers’ who strap cameras to their bicycle helmets. Jeremy’s Twitter feed pulsates with videos of irate drivers seemingly eager to splatter Jeremy over the road.
Jeremy Vine gets a fat salary for his BBC Radio 2 gig. I suppose when one is paid to gab above the heads of millions, one absorbs a sense of omnipotence. Drain half an hour listening to Jeremy Vine, and you alight upon a celestial realm in which everything reflects Jeremy’s fears and desires.
In June last year, Jeremy caught a dose of Covid. Whilst the other 67 million people with whom Jeremy kindly shares this island was eager to get back to normal, Jeremy suggested we resurrect those ruinous Covid policies, at least until his nose stops running.
According to Jeremy, vigilante cyclists like Mikey are making the world a safer place. Reader, as you’ll expect, I’m just a fraction more suspicious of what Swift termed ‘that animal called man.’
Whilst not driving or stuck in traffic, I scrolled through Cycling Mikey’s YouTube channel. To my eye, there’s little evidence in the way of saving lives. Most videos follow the same script. Mikey accosts a driver peering at their phone whilst they’re marooned in traffic. At worst, offenders commit what Mikey calls the ‘WhatsApp Gap.’ That is, they’re a little slow to drowse forward once the long line shifts a metre or two. Perhaps that’s mildly annoying but it’s hardly murderous.
Tellingly, Mikey entitles some videos with vengeful jibes. In one video entitled ‘Eyeroll,’ Mikey creeps up to a debonaire young lady stuck in traffic. Startled at the heavy-breathing figure peering into her Audi, she flings her phone and rolls her eyes. Her car is not moving.
“Oh dear,” says a triumphant Mikey. “That’s a costly mistake.” He saunters off, his glee audible. He even chirps a little tsk-tsk—the defunct mating call of self-satisfied prigs who’ve for a fleeting moment elevated their lowly standing on the social totem pole. The driver lost her licence for six months.
When not bullying drivers for their technical infractions, Mikey revels in his hero status.
The comment section heaves with moans of vicarious, sexual pleasure from those who love to say I told you so. When a rare dissenter suggests Mikey is peeping behind the letter of the law to molest its spirit, he wades in.
Essentially, he says, if a driver fiddles with their phone whilst stationary, they probably do so when driving at speed. He’s just saving lives.
This argument seems fair but flounders at the first application of scrutiny. If we catch a teenager shoplifting a can of Coke, we cannot assume that teenager has or plans to rob a bank at the point of a sawn-off shotgun. In Great Britain, we presume innocence, not guilt. There’s no such thing as pre-crime. At least for now.
I’m sympathetic to those commenters who praise Mikey for his work. Beyond reproach are the motivations of those who’ve lost loved ones to a distracted driver. Incidentally, studies show using one’s phone behind the wheel can be as dangerous as glugging a bottle of Mad Dog and haring around the streets. But nuance matters. Glancing through your email whilst stuck in traffic isn’t the same as blasting around residential streets whilst glued to Twitter.
According to Mikey’s maniacal logic, cheekily testing a grape at the supermarket is the same as taking hostages at gunpoint in the fruit and vegetable aisle.
Of course, pettifoggers, hair-splitters, and power-trippers are nothing new. As long as power and status are unequally shared—that is, forever—forever will such dismal behaviour exist.
These are prime days for the petty-minded. As the pandemic revealed, seemingly normal people devolve into tyrants when an authority figure in a lab coat permits them to do so.
Social media provides a platform and an audience for the modern scold to indulge in cultural road rage. They can besmirch restaurants by leaving a bad review. They can abuse, deplore, and lash out. They know nobody will say anything as long as they dip-dye their anger in a vat of compassion.
The modern scold hides behind #BeKind and lawn signs reading ‘In this house, we believe…’ They know the prevailing cultural default, which I’ll call the New Authenticity, long ago dislodged the Old Irony.
By New Authenticity, I mean the culture which demands we accept everyone is who they say they are, and they’re motivated always by wholly pure reasons. By Old Irony, I mean that ironic, healthily cynical culture which observed that humans are often not who they say they are. (Our highly civilised desire to put a man on the moon was made possible only by our primitive desire to drop fire on men.)
The Old Irony died around 2010 when its vanguard Generation X drifted toward the bleachy confines of post-youth.
Although well-meaning, New Authenticity is inherently flawed. True authenticity is organic. And any attempt to contrive and conjure authenticity will only dilute and corrupt.
Another problem is of definition. Who can judge whether one is being one’s authentic self? If authenticity is the highest ideal, then questioning another’s authenticity is the highest of crimes. Rather than invite unwanted scrutiny, subscribers to this prevailing culture render themselves mute when someone’s actions do not match their words. The result is folly.
Perhaps I’m just a misanthrope. In my personal dictionary, misanthropy means a tendency to see human nature as it is, and not how it ought to be.
Mercifully, the British courts aren’t yet too saturated with the one-footed waltz of our augmented reality.
Last October, Mikey appeared in court. In the video concerned, Mikey jumps into the middle of the road. A kerfuffle with a driver ensues. The driver got charged with dangerous driving and assault.
The details are thin. But I can only assume the judge watched the video and felt Mikey had flopped himself on the bonnet of the car. An American bystander probably swayed the judge’s opinion. In the video, she says she’d seen Mikey ‘do that twice already this morning.’ This mystery lady hasn’t forgotten her clear-eyed Generation X youth.
The judge let the driver escape with a fine for making an illegal turn. The serious charges were thrown out.
Americans might butcher our beautiful English language, they might call football ‘soccer,’ and they might whoop and holler for no discernible reason. But for good reason, Mikey hasn’t inspired a stateside copycat. There’s something about American gun culture which says: mind your own business.
He's more tattle tale than vigilante.
"...There’s something about American gun culture which says: mind your own business."
High quality punch line for the essay. The whole American notion of 'liberty' might be summed up, 'live and let live' MYOB. But it becomes the sin of complacency when we let others use politics to get control of us behind our backs.