Joe Bennett: Big Brotheresque road signs want to render us ruly

Is there anything authorities love more than a sign - or rather signage? Photo / NZME

OPINION

Up ahead, beside the road, where there had not been one before, stood a sign. It was one of those big temporary signs that needs to be towed to its site and plugged into a power source to beep out its message. This one stood just before a roundabout. “Safer Roads”, it declared. Then, five seconds later, “For All”.

Is there anything authorities love more than a sign - or rather signage? Signage sets the authoritative heart leaping: signs informing, signs warning, signs admonishing, signs cajoling; signage that is always there, day and night, barking its orders to one and all. For signage is Big Brotheresque and all authorities lean towards Big Brotheresque, however they may pretend otherwise.

There is a governess in a Saki short story whose every sentence begins with Don’t. She’s the guardian spirit of the signs that issue commandments: No Cycling, No Littering. Stop. Dogs Must Be On a Leash.

Implicit behind these signs, behind the no’s and the don’ts and the musts, is a desire to keep you and me in line, to render us ruly. And implicit behind that are two things: an assumption of superiority - they know best; they know what’s good for us - and a fear of our unruliness. To them, the mob is just that, a mob. Behind every “Keep off the grass” sign is a terror of revolution. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

A type of sign that has proliferated in recent years is the sign warning of danger. Caution: Hot Surfaces. Danger: High Voltage (reinforced by a picture of a stick man being fried electrically). Extreme Caution: Cyclists Merging. Ostensibly, such signs are concerned with our welfare. Actually they too are a means of subjection. For if they can instil caution, instil nervousness, instil a sense of a threatening world that is hard to navigate without help from the authorities who know the dangers, they have gone some way to keeping control, maintaining authority.

At Queenstown Airport once I was confronted by “Caution: Female Cleaning Male Lavatory”. Call me reckless, but I went in. A woman was swabbing the floor. “Good morning,” I said, then fell over. Did I slip on the wet floor? I did not. I tripped over the sign warning me that I might slip on the wet floor.

Clearly there needed to be a sign warning of the presence of the warning sign, and a further sign warning of the presence of the sign warning of the etc, until there was a line of signs that circled the globe itself and brought us back eventually to where we started out, bereft of independent judgment, relying on authority to save us. All of which is encapsulated in the unbeatable “Caution: This Sign Has Sharp Edges”.

And signs have a third delightful quality: they shift responsibility, innoculate the signwriter. “Don’t come running to us when you run over the cyclist. We warned you. We put up a sign. We did our bit. You lot just can’t be trusted with anything, not even a cup of coffee. (‘Caution: contents may be hot’).”

So in the light of all this, what was I to make of “Safer Roads... For All”? There was no apparent reason for it to be there, no roadworks, no alteration to the road layout. All was as it had been pre-sign.

It didn’t seem to be a commandment. There was nothing in it that told me to do or to refrain from doing. Nor yet was it a warning of any danger. All it did was to express a vague arcadian wish, like a papal prayer for world peace. And just like a papal prayer, it was devoid of any plans for bringing it about. Had the authorities gone soft?

Of course not. They never go soft. What surely happened was that they noted they had a sign in the yard that could be programmed to say anything at all but that was saying nothing. And their overlord hearts recoiled from the wasted opportunity to hector you and me, and they ordered it up and running beside the road, although there was nothing that needed to be said. Even a sign declaring the anodyne vacuity of “Safer Roads For All” was better than no sign. Yes, that had to be it.

And musing thus, I all but drove into a bus.