What hip-hop pioneer Melle Mel declared in 1982 is twice as true today: The city is like a jungle sometimes, and, hothouse flowers that we are now, so accustomed to filtering and fast-forwarding and fine-tuning our lives to our exact specifications, we find it nearly impossible to endure the disruptions, impositions and general chaos of our shared lives in the metropolis. In fact, we’re so close to the edge, we might just hijack a plane! Or maybe build a robot out of a three-wheeled scooter, an old meat-smoker, rubber gym mats and some plywood, then terrorize those who fail to live up to our standards for public comportment like R2-D2 doing his best Charles Bronson impression.
In Atlanta, bar owner Rufus Terrill has done just that, and now his 300-pound “Bum Bot” is a celebrity of sorts, showing up on CNN and The Colbert Report and capturing the imagination of every armchair Travis Bickle who has ever fantasized about sweeping human garbage from the city’s streets and restoring order, hygiene and human-free park benches to our dirty, noisy and economically heterogeneous urban hells.
When every emaciated crack wraith passed out in a Dumpster is potentially packing a weaponized spork from KFC, however, you can’t be too careful—and essentially the Bum Bot is the git-’er-done version of the sleek robotic exoskeleton Robert Downey Jr. sports in the upcoming superhero flick Iron Man, a vision of technological menace designed to intimidate and subdue through sheer visual firepower, along with more lethal weapons.
Equipped with flashing red lights, a spotlight, a loudspeaker, a video camera and a rotating water cannon, the squat Bum Bot patrols the neighborhood streets like an old-fashioned beat cop, with Terrill choreographing its actions by remote control from a safe distance down the block. The target of his robot-enhanced urban beautification efforts? Undesirables who hang out near a local homeless shelter and child-care center. “I tell them they are trespassing, it’s private property, and they have to leave,” he explained to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They throw bottles and cans at it. That’s when I shoot the water cannon. They just scatter like roaches.”
Terrill describes the people he targets as vagrants, drug dealers, vandals, prostitutes and other denizens of the underclass who break into cars, defecate in public and otherwise undermine the ambiance that sophisticated urbanites have come to expect from neighborhoods where bars such as Terrill’s—which offers Jell-O shots for a dollar and $10 buckets of Budweiser—are located. Typically, however, the wretches Terrill encounters while on Bum Bot patrol aren’t breaking into cars or turning tricks when he rousts them—they’re just sitting around, destitute and smelly, dragging down property values one urine-scented alleyway at a time.
Threatening to soak them with his water cannon, transmitting images of them back to his bar for the amusement of his patrons there, Terrill seems at least as interested in humiliating and demoralizing his quarry as he does in stopping crime. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but why focus only on those who are already leading humiliating and demoralizing lives? Where is the Bum Bot for the untidy dog owner who fails to pick up after her well-fed pug that produces more excrement in a single walk down the block than a dozen malnourished winos can in a week?
Where is the Bum Bot for the grunting hedge-fund manager who practically drowns the elliptical machine with his sweat and doesn’t clean up after himself? Where is the Bum Bot for jokers who program their cell phones with deliberately irritating ringtones, or the broad-minded citizens of the world who bond with taqueria workers by mispronouncing Spanish words as they obnoxiously micro-manage their lunch orders? Where is the Bum Bot for drunken sports-bar patrons who paint the streets with their vomit after downing one too many $10 buckets of Bud?
Rufus Terrill is reportedly contemplating a run for mayor, but if he were really smart, he’d simply concentrate on manufacturing more Bum Bots. Or at least enlisting the services of Iron Man, who in his new movie wastes much of his time battling Middle Eastern terrorists when, like Terrill’s jerry-rigged civic hygienist, he could be meting out justice to the enemies we truly dream of vanquishing—anyone who does something annoying while sharing space with us in the urban jungle.