Wit & Attitude Quote by Russell Baker

With one slash of the pen, Russell Baker turns the highway into a morality play where everyone loses. “Only two varieties” is the tell: not a survey of drivers but a journalist’s trapdoor, the kind of absolutism that signals satire. He’s not arguing that cautious people are literally cowards or that fast people are literally fools; he’s mocking how driving reduces otherwise reasonable adults into caricatures, then dares us to notice our own reflection in the windshield.

The line works because it weaponizes a familiar binary that already governs road life. In traffic, we constantly classify strangers at 60 miles an hour: the slow driver is timid, the aggressive one is reckless. Baker collapses those petty judgments into a brutal, tidy taxonomy. The joke lands with a sting: he’s indicting the social theater of the car, where anonymity and speed turn etiquette into a contact sport and self-image into a fragile thing that must be defended with a lane change.

Context matters. Baker came up in a mid-century America that built identity around the automobile: freedom, status, masculinity, modernity. That mythology is exactly what he punctures. By framing both “varieties” as failures of courage and intelligence, he treats the car not as liberation but as a machine that invites bad decisions and worse posturing.

The subtext is classic Baker: Americans don’t just drive; they perform. Behind the wheel, we’re either afraid to assert ourselves or absurdly confident we can beat physics.