Some necessary backstory.

I have long been a caustic critic of American culture (such as it is, which is to say…not much that is commendable). Those who have read my frequent blogs might be quick to ascribe such gripes and protestations to the grumbles and colicky irritations of a disillusioned old man. And in fact, they are just that, but they are not unreasoned nor are they capricious in nature, and it’s merely a coincidence of time and space that I now qualify for the dodgy appellation, ‘old’.

The fact is, purely and simply, that America has degenerated over the past 30 or 40 years from a formerly homogenous (more or less) and orderly society into a radically diverse and polarised one that is full to the brim with outspoken, highly contentious and disunited, politically partisan, heterogeneous conflicts that are charged to their limit with an awkward admixture of the traditional essence of (what is called) ‘American Individualism’ and intolerance for dissent from the liberal, progressive leftist paradigm.

As a student of East Asian culture, civilization and history, I am presently plunging into and through a collection of fellow Sinophile and author Peter Hessler’s works on China. Hessler is the husband of Chinese-American author and journalist Leslie T. Chang. Chang wrote a noteworthy book back in 1999 about the Chinese immigrant experience as focused through the lives of four Chinese women who fled from the Communists, settled in the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) and eventually emigrated to establish new lives in America. Her book, Beyond the Narrow Gate, is an excellent and noteworthy contribution to the still largely unexplored story of Asian-Americans in our country (the so-called ‘Model Minority’) from the 1950s onwards.

Hessler, who began his career as a newspaper clipping-cutting, low-grade journalist while teaching (English) in China with the Peace Corps, met Chang while both were in China and they eventually married. Between the two of them, they comprised a formidable team and both have written memorable works about the new China that is dynamically emerging from many centuries of ancient traditions and customs.

My point in mentioning them is that one cannot read about or study Chinese history and culture without immediately sensing that primary difference between native Americans and the Chinese that culturally sets our two nations apart as effectively as night from day. I refer to China’s ancient emphasis on the overall collective good of its peoples as opposed to America’s traditional emphasis on ‘rugged individualism’ (to a great extent an outgrowth of the Old West’s frontier mentality). In China, individual rights are deemphasised and submerged in the overall welfare of all its peoples, whereas in America, collectivism and aggregate overall welfare (the ‘greater good’) takes second place to our ferocious tenacity to the concept of individual rights and privileges (think of it as ‘me-firstism’, if that helps to more properly delineate the concept).

As self-appointed adjudicators of moral rectitude in the world, Americans are ever quick to point the righteous middle digit of indignation at China for its perceived human-rights transgressions, cavalier treatment of national minorities and demographic outlier (non-Han Chinese, and there are many) cultures that today comprise Greater China.

Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this is that of China’s treatment of its Uighur People (from the Xinjiang Region in North-eastern China) , with another example consisting of its persecution of the Falun Gong religious minority (a cult of neo-Christians in which its leader styles himself as the 2nd son of God, after Jesus). But there are many such examples of China’s suppression of individual rights in the name of social hegemony and domestic harmony. Hessler mentions this repeatedly in his writings, as one might imagine, and is therefore easy to be highly critical of China in this regard.The Chinese themselves tend to shrug off these accusations.

Americans by contrast, ever vigilant in their search for underdogs to rally around, and championing ‘human rights’ above all else, blithely disregard any greater need for maintaining comprehensive social order. A direct consequence of this is our present downward spiraling disintegration as a nation. As the impassioned ‘diversity and inclusion’ mantra pervades our society with the grim determination of a viral bioagent, it progressively (no pun intended, but it is apt!) destroys any possibilities for reestablishing collective, overall domestic harmony in today’s ‘diversified-to-death’ America. Frankly, a great number of us ‘older and wiser’ heads are losing patience with this manifestation of youthful idealism and wild-eyed optimism.

But to continue my prefatory remarks, China is, for the most part a highly homogeneous society (and has, over the centuries, certainly absorbed many other lesser cultures, willingly or unwillingly, and effectively subsumed them into ‘greater China’). The same is true (perhaps even more so) for the Japanese, who owe much of their own homogeneity to their centuries of geophysical isolation from the Asian mainland, of course). America, by contrast, began as an experiment in establishing a society in which personal freedom was institutionalized as the most basic of rights, welcoming all peoples, all cultures and all religious creeds to its shores in the belief that in America, no individual or set of personal beliefs should be persecuted for what they hold to be their value system. Of course, the somewhat more subtle core of that attitude was that everyone was welcome to come to America as long as they wished to become assimilated (or at least acculturated!) as quickly as possible. It goes without saying that in its earliest iteration, America was founded by white people of European origin. As the nation grew in the late 1800s, the so-called ‘melting pot’ concept gained new popularity (the idea that no matter the background, no matter the belief or origin of people, all were welcome to become Americans). That there was a great deal of hypocrisy hidden in all that altruism, however, is hard to ignore, as example after example of racial discrimination began to occur.

Then, as the British institution of black slavery established a new foothold on American soil, the first seeds of our eventual self-destruction took root. That was the real beginning of America’s vaunted ‘diversity’ (albeit a perverse type of diversity) and it was augmented by America’s conquest of Spanish land belonging to Mexico, with its resulting economic polarity and divisive issues of disparate wealth ratios, exacerbated by later influxes of Hispanic peoples from south of the American border.

Before long, predominantly white America was on its way to becoming the continual battleground of opposing, competing and ethnically diverse interest groups that it is today, each claiming that it is deserving of special entitlements and privileges. The example of George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm parable, with its ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others!’, (intended back when the book was written to parody Soviet style Communism) today ironically characterises race relations in modern America! Were Orwell still alive, doubtless he’d be spinning in his grave!

As the American Republic continued to expand westwards under the precepts of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, the underlying personal strengths that helped it grow and become settled (America’s spirit of ‘rugged individualism’ and self-reliance) were looked upon as vitally important and highly commendable character traits. Eventually, in unholy alliance with the spirit of America’s ‘Yankee capitalism’, the two traits merged into one essential element that became the core essence of what many regard as true ‘Americanism’ today. Over decades and decades, even religion ultimately took a back seat to capitalistic materialism’s obsession with maximizing profit over all other considerations and the short-term over long-term gains.

I grant that the foregoing is all hugely simplified and condensed, but it is a nonetheless important backdrop to better illustrate and understand what I am about to say.

The main point of my arguments here

A year of so ago I started noticing all the cars on city streets that had darkly shaded windows. It started innocently enough, with most cars having only the back window and perhaps the rear side windows opaqued with dark film. This was well after, as a matter of curiosity, it became popular among teenagers and what I call ‘arrested-juvenile adults’ (i.e. those who have never progressed beyond the early years of intellectual and emotional development) to recline the seatbacks of their cars to the point where you could barely tell if someone was behind the wheel (if viewed from behind).

That seemed strange enough to me, because one of the most important safe-driving techniques I was taught in school (yes, they actually taught safe driving, back in the prehistoric, post WW2 era of education) was to gauge the traffic ahead of you by watching it through the windows of the car immediately in front of you and adjusting your driving accordingly Finally, however, I realised that this faddish teenage affectation was precipitated by youthful adulation of youth-gang ‘bad-boy’ culture, gangsta-rap idols and the popular image of rebellious hip-hop hero icons we’ve heard far too much about in America’s pop-culture/celebrity demi-mond. The idea was that you could slouch down in the seat and make yourself less easy for someone to shoot at you (from another car), but it quickly became simply parochial ‘cool’ (like wearing baggy pants that threaten to fall down at any second…also a product of gang and prison idolization…and wearing flat-brimmed baseball caps with the visor to the rear, like cholo ladrones).

Soon thereafter almost completely opaqued (blacked-out) rear windows became even more popular, again prompted by both a dip-sh*t concept of ‘cool’ and the idea that someone behind you can’t shoot you if they can’t see you.

It wasn’t long before the same treatment was applied to the bilateral rear side-windows of cars affected by youths and immature (socially arrested) adults, but lo and behold! This fad soon also infected older generations, who thought it was both cool and neat to help shade their cars in hot weather (much in the same manner as adults, even those often in their 50s and older, who today wear reversed ballcaps not because they admire youthful rebelliousness but because it seems to them to be a universal, socially acceptable fashion).

And naturally, as this trend grew in popularity, after-market auto accessory companies began to slavishly cater to this trendy fad, offering hundreds of different ways and means of opaquing auto windows of adolescent perps.

Here in California, it wasn’t long before some righteous Dudley-Doright politician in the California legislature thought (doubtless urged on by the California Highway Patrol) “There outta be a law governing this sort of thing” and eventually a regulatory law was added to the California Civil Code, stating that it was legal to opaque rear and rear/side windows but unlawful to treat the front side windows and the automobile’s front windscreen with any kind of shading whatsoever (barring an 8% UV reducing narrow strip across the very top of the windshield).

Why was this, you may well ask? Simply because police want to see who is driving a car (or in it as a passenger) when they stop it and approach it, for their own safety.

Unfortunately, as the progressive hell-hounds of the liberal left have continued to accuse the police of discriminative profiling and targeting of ‘people of color’ on roads and streets, with the resulting ‘Black Lives Matter’ social protest movement and ‘defund the police’ efforts endorsing that misbegotten bit of asinine stupidity, statistics soon revealed previously unheard-of increases in the numbers of police and law enforcement officers being shot during what were often just routine traffic stops.

Clearly, if you can’t see whether or not a car’s occupant is armed or has a weapon at hand, you stand a FAR greater chance of being killed outright than you would if you could see into that vehicle and take precautions.

The scumbags, gang-bangers and ex-felons out there (who often have guns they are prohibited by law from possessing) all know this all too well and just about every day now we read another story or hear on broadcast media news about officers either killed or seriously wounded in the course of pulling over a car for some infraction of traffic laws.

The argument, folks, for those who haven’t yet grasped what I’m trying to illustrate here, is that there are some might damn good reasons why these laws pertaining to window shading exist. Plainly and simply, and aside from the fact that they are completely logical, with rational intent, extremely dark window shading poses a mortal hazard to those who are trying to keep our society from coming part at the seams as it devolves into total social anarchy.

OK. That’s the principal argument against permitting (or not enforcing) high-opacity window-shading violations. Meanwhile, the good old principle of ‘you aren’t the boss of me’ American individualism (from Matt Groening’s cartoon series named The Simpsons) continues to raise its ugly, illiterate and socially obtuse nature in several socially adverse ways.

One is the fact that given the way the laws are written, while it’s not illegal to manufacture and/or sell opaque window shading to individuals, it is illegal to drive a car on the roads that has them installed. The same frustrating confusion exists with regard to high-performance “off-road only” auto parts (such as exhaust systems, performance enhancing products, etc., etc.) in that it’s not illegal to manufacture and sell these items but it IS to drive a car on the street thus equipped.

The result of this ethically equivocal policy is that just about half of all the cars on the road at any given time are illegal in one way or another and there aren’t enough LEOs in the entire world to effectively police this growing problem. It thus becomes simply another of the plethora of totally useless laws we have on the books that are essentially ‘conventionally unenforceable’. Laws that can, however, be arbitrarily enforced at the whim or discretion of a traffic officer when he makes a traffic stop, which actually increases his leverage potential to make an arrest or issue a citation…if he isn’t shot first, by some scummy little bag of faecal effluent who’s been recently (perhaps prematurely) released from jail by the progressive left’s goody-good legal cadre minions.

As for the manufacturers of these products (including the opaque-film makers and installers), they adamantly eschew any responsibility for the result of their profiteering, claiming it isn’t their fault that their products are being misused. It’s any old, familiar song, quite popular in America, folks. Not only that, but according to articles and interviews appearing in the San Diego Tribune and the San Jose Mercury, many California dealers openly state for the record that they encourage clients to have all their windows shaded in this manner, telling them to “If you are stopped for a violation…go ahead and pay the fix-it ticket, remove the shading and then reapply it!” Or words to that effect. It’s an effective way of generating lots of sales, while they shrug off any responsibility for encouraging lawlessness. Thus, this sort of irresponsible ‘scoff-law’ attitude by commercial businesses further exacerbate the problem.

Interestingly, this same “Not my problem” attitude is manifest in most television advertising for the automobile industry, which…have you ever noticed?...typically shows a car company’s latest new model being driven recklessly fast and furiously through scenes of spectacular natural scenic beauty. Back in the old days when marketing first embraced these carefully contrived ‘do as I say, not as I do’ deceptions, small print usually appeared at the bottom of the TV screen saying something like “Closed course, professional driver! Do not attempt this yourself!” As if that makes it hunky-dory to encourage kids with this clever (not!) message that it’s OK to be irresponsibly unsafe and drive recklessly. Believe me, that small print message is completely lost on the kids and mature adults shouldn’t need it! There are no laws mandating absolute truth in advertising, of course, as we all know and psychologically complex lying is considered perfectly normal in all corporate advertising, these days. After all, who’s thinking critically anymore? Not the kids who wants those steroid-boosted automobiles almost as much as they want to get into your daughter’s knickers!

Part of the problem with all these considerations is that the average dip-sh*t in America today simply either doesn’t think critically anymore at all or he simply doesn’t care. He (or she) is happy to continue consuming material consumer products uncritically, getting fat on unhealthy junk food and abnegating any personal responsibility whatsoever for these important concerns. If it feels good, ‘Just do it!’ as the Nike Company puts it! Yeah, and say adios America, too, at the same time!

Complicating the window-shading problem further are those who are now permitted by this same set of laws governing window shading to obtain a medical exemption from the window shading statutes, on the basis that they have a medical problem such as skin cancer that makes it ‘medically hazardous’ to be exposed to sunlight.

Now if that isn’t the biggest HOOT and a half I’ve ever heard! It’s the same spirit of selfish, ego-centric ‘individualistic’ self-regard that prompts so many people to coerce their doctor into issuing them a medical authorization for a DMV ‘disability permit’ (or license) that allows them to park in special blue-marked disabled spaces, regardless of whether or not their feigned ‘disability’ is real. [Then we also have that special kind of social scum-sucker who obtains a bogus permit, using it for the same purpose illegitimately, too.

In Summary

To return to the metaphorical allusion to conditions in China (in which individual rights are secondary to the good of the masses…i.e. ‘the State’…), this sort of abnegation of responsibility that embracing opaquely shaded windows despite highly reasoned safety concerns could never possibly happen in the Communist People’s Republic Of China. If you did act in China like we act here, you’d probably just disappear from your impoverished, State-provided inner-city dwelling overnight and not be seen again by anyone who knows you. *POOF!* Just like that.

Is that a 'police state?'  Well, perhaps but the strict enforcement of laws instituted for public safety reasons auger convincingly for the greater good of the people as a whole and are therefore not subject to the self-centered, egotistical whims of either individuals or consumer goods sellers.

While that is an extreme analogue to apply here, the essence of it rings true and it is for this reason that China shall continue to expand into the world’s most powerful economic nation-state, in a future (but not too far into it) world characterised by Chinese world-wide social and economic hegemony! China additionally benefits from a strong central leader, unlike America (which presently suffers from a weak and semi-senescent one).

It helps to reflect on the fact (often overlooked) that in America, leaders are elected by the people (not by a central party that maintains absolute control of the country), and when the masses of people exercise their collective stupidity in the voting polls, the end result is highly predictable (we get idiots such as BOTH Trump and Biden, neither of whom had or have the stability, wisdom and competence to lead the most powerful nation in the world forward in an increasingly uncertain world). It quickly reduces, under that set of considerations, to a matter of the best of two alternate choices: flawed authoritarianism or deficit democracy.

On that note, and given that our much vaunted ‘Great American Experiment’ in creating a free society is ultimately doomed to fail, to fall flat on his geocentric face and become merely another forgotten effort (to allow humanity to exercise its collective wisdom to live peacefully and harmoniously in the dust-bin of history), I witness all these continuing examples of selfishness (e.g. the opaque car window matter) that so characterise narcissistic modern America with a mixture of sadness, tinged with disgust and disdain (and perhaps also some relief that in another 10-15 years, it will no longer matter a silent mouse-fart to me, LoL).

Think about all this next time you see a car zoom by with entirely opaqued-out windows…and also when you later watch the evening news story about another senseless murder of a policeman who is, after all, just trying his best to protect you and your loved ones from becoming merely another violent crime victim-statistic in the grim tally of day-to-day life in ‘progressively enlightened’ America…

Oh yes, and GOOD LUCK with that, bunkie! You'll need it...

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POSTSCRIPT

I should mention here that opaqued windows additionally exert a well-defined (and highly detrimental, if seldom understood) psychological effect that is, I am convinced, absolutely overlooked and unrealised by the average, dumbed-down consumer.

Over past decades increasing criticism has been levied by psychologists and safety experts at automobile manufacturers for their subtle marketing attempts to make us forget that a car is not merely a mechanical tool operated by a (potentially faulty) human being but an autonomous, discrete, self-contained life-force unto itself, with a figurative life of its own. This is anthropomophism at its most manipulative worst and perhaps the best example of this may be seen in those popular Japanese children's toys known as 'Transformers', which cleverly become robots when unfolded from their toy automobile shapes!

The idea being communicated is that when you are in an automobile, you are somehow detached from the normal emotional responsibilities incumbent upon a rational, thinking human being, living among other human beings and with all the obligations, obligations and constraints we must all abide by in any orderly society.

To illustrate my point here, carefully observe all those late-model cars slashing recklessly through ocean surf, through pristine mountain meadows, snowscapes and roaring down highways, as shown in car advertisements. Note that the windows always seem to be so opaque that you can't discern the presence of a driver behind that car's wheel. The overall effect conveys the impression that the car itself is the living, free force...not the driver operating it. This is called transference.

The even more subtle inference conveyed is that once you are in that vehicle, you are somehow freed from any constraints applicable to people, closed off from the world, and a free spirit, disengaged and isolated from all the cares, woes and burdens of real life. That is a highly dangerous allusion, since any misuse of the car (i.e. an accident) under that assumption symbolically implies that it is no longer a person's fault but that of the car!

The application of opaqued window shading to ALL windows of a car takes that illusion exponentially further and completes the process of emotional and rational disconnect between the driver of a car and any responsbility he should have for the rights and entitlements of others he shares a road with. This is especially true regarding awareness of and respect for bicyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists.

Trust me, folks. That 'effect' is no coincidence. It is a coldly deliberate, callously manipulative application of solid psychological research and theory by automobile manufacturers and dealers! And tragically, it is damnably effective...especially on that group I referred when I began this article, that I call the 'forever-juvenile' crowd.

What we need most, of course, is not mind-massaging marketing psychology but a campaign to put the 'human' back in automobiles...to remind us that the car is merely a tool and that, like guns, it has no mind of its own and may be used either to benefit our lives or destroy them.