Beyoncé, Coldplay, Pearl Jam and Ed Sheeran played in Central Park last weekend, as part of the Global Citizen Festival, an event designed to raise awareness about inequality and poverty. Tickets were free, and given out on a lottery basis, in a draw concert-goers could only enter after signing a petition or lobbying politicians on a variety of issues.
I didn’t have a ticket. Friends did, however, and after making our way to the park, we stopped at Tavern on the Green to have a drink while they waited for the queue, which stretched a quarter of a mile along the park’s perimeter, to go down. After an hour, the line showed no signs of diminishing and we ordered another drink. Another hour, and thousands of people were still waiting patiently from West 70th Street to Columbus Circle.
Like littering and bad parking, queue-jumping is one of those behaviours that triggers levels of rage disproportionate to the injury caused, striking most of us as a small but enraging symbol of all that’s wrong with this world: entitlement, selfishness, and the ethos of every-man-for-himself.
On the other hand, life is short. Emboldened by four pints of beer, one of our party texted someone he knew slightly in the queue, offering her $50 to push in next to her. She agreed. He then set about persuading the others to join him. This was, he suggested, a victimless crime; the girl made some money, and they melded into the queue in small enough numbers to make no material difference to the others in line.
“I can’t do it,” said Friend A.
“But she doesn’t mind!” said the queue-jumper.
“It’s not about her, it’s about the people behind her.”
He looked blank.
“Everyone understands the concept of queueing,” said Friend B.
“Except at an Italian ski resort,” said Friend A.
“Right.”
Economists who have studied queue-jumping have found it only works when the jumper can present a good moral reason for pushing in; but even then it’s a hard sell. If you’ve ever waited at airport security while someone in a wheelchair is pushed to the front, you will know what I mean: the amazing internal struggle on a dozen faces in the queue, as they try to look pious while flipping out at the extra three-minute wait.
Eventually, our friend got up to push in, alone, and a postmortem ensued. If the concertgoers had paid $150 for a ticket, they said, they might have acted more cynically. But cutting the line at an event designed, at some level, to highlight geopolitical line-cutting? In the worst possible way, a bit rich.
Trees a crowd
It’s apple-picking season in the US, when city-dwellers traipse en masse to farms not far from New York to pick apples and pretend to enjoy themselves. Maybe there’s an orchard, somewhere, where this activity is fun. Massachusetts, maybe, or way up in the Catskills. But not 45 minutes from Manhattan, in the midst of a lot of barging New Yorkers.
In some orchards, cars are permitted to drive between the trees, turning a hillside into a multi-lane highway, but with toddlers throwing apples at the cars. It’s less rural idyll than an agrarian Straw Dogs, an atmosphere the orchards might think about formalising. Issue each guest with a pitchfork and a bonnet, and let the games begin.
Whoa Noah!
On US TV this week the only spectacle more excruciating than Lena Dunham’s fan-girl interview with Hillary Clinton was Trevor Noah’s segment about it on the revamped Daily Show. Noah, a week into his tenure as Jon Stewart’s replacement, played a clip in which Dunham laughed hysterically at something Clinton had said. “I haven’t seen Lena Dunham that excited since HBO made its office clothing optional,” said a smirking Noah.
That’s a lousy joke from a guy who, the night before, was every bit as sycophantic towards his own guest, the comedian Kevin Hart, a man whose gym-toned body he also lavishly praised.
Noah has form for making fat-girl jokes. If he was on any other show, one would look to the Daily Show to come after him.
