CRUISING WITH THE ENEMY: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE TYRANNY OF THE CAR…a retro-blog flashback (2000)

I live in a quiet Land Park home in Sacramento (CA) with my wife and two Huskies. This last weekend, after washing four family vehicles, changing the oil in my motorcycle and making some adjustments to the old Porsche 914-6 that I dearly love, I sat down to read a book. Rare enough, I know, in this fast-food, sound-bite, Disneyesque version of social reality that we all live in today, but I had determined to set time aside for a good read on this particular afternoon. As I wiped the oil off my hands and put a wrench back in the tool box, a particularly loud, expensive, late-model car came careening down the street, driven far too fast by a very young woman. Glancing at her in irritation as she zoomed by with complete disdain for the small children at play a few houses down from us, I gazed absently at the vehicles in my own mini motor pool just before entering the cool house to sit down with a new book I had recently purchased.

The book in question was architecture and urban planning critic Jane Holtz Kay's contemporary exploration of how the automobile, that singular innovation of the 20th century, came to dominate the lives of Americans everywhere. In her 418 page examination of today's car obsessed culture (Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back, Crown Publishers, NY, 1997) Kay skillfully documents the deceitful process whereby virtually every aspect of our economy, our professional lives, family affairs and recreative pursuits has been sinuously molded around the technology of the internal combustion engined vehicle.

Before I had read more than a few chapters of Kay's book, I found myself engaged in a painful process of confronting truths about my life and cultural obligations which I have managed to successfully evade for 51 years. Her point about automobiles is salient enough: the former four-wheeled sex object that promised to liberate us and promote individual American freedoms has now become an insufferably demanding and oppressive technological dominatrix, which threatens to subjugate us all.

I am a former Berkeleyite, raised and schooled in a city that has been occasionally referred to as the epicenter of enlightened radical western American social consciousness (note: that was before Berkeley recently became the notorious haven of the leftist liberal ultra-extremist progressives, a polar switch in political sentiments of about 180 degrees). I know well enough how the car culture has spawned and established an environmental blight, among its many effects, that enmeshes us all in its web of environmental and economic enslavement, and I was forced to uncomfortably confront this fact, as I read further, well aware that mine was a household of two people, two dogs and 5 vehicles (not including the motorcycle).

While Ms. Kay's book goes into fascinating detail about how the American obsession with paving the world in asphalt inexorably resulted in the gradual elimination of far saner, utilitarian mass transportation systems, it does not, unfortunately, delve into the psyche of the individual car owner, such as myself--the consumer without whose blind psychological subjugation to those wonderful shiny four wheeled sex symbols none of our present urban predicament would have been possible. Nor does it explore the wicked and deceitful propaganda (marketing) establishment that the automotive industry employs to sell the public into a lifestyle enslavement that holds us all in deep, unrelenting financial and emotional thrall.

Nevertheless, I read onwards until I had finished the entire book in a single sitting. Greatly moved by what I had read, by now cerebrally agitated and vaguely unsettled by my reflections and personal conclusions, I finally put the book down. It was late at night and my wife had gone to bed. Out of habit, I momentarily switched on the TV.

As the set snapped to life, the screen filled with an advertisement for a popular sport utility vehicle. The blood red machine was roaring furiously through beautiful mountain scenery, spewing clouds of dust in its wake and cleaving mountain streams in clouds of spray as the mindless background jingle intoned "I love what you do for me!" (as in that nausiating McDonald's slogan "I'm loving' it!"). Pausing for a second to reflect on the implied message implicit in this--that careening through the scenic outdoors in an overpowered, all-wheel drive vehicle is major excitement--I quickly extinguished the tube and went to bed, frowning to myself until sleep came.

Tomorrow I shall get up and drive to work--across town through the ever-increasing urban sprawl that is greater Sacramento--battling others on the traffic crowded freeway, watching otherwise normal individuals commit act after act of impersonal, reckless aggression in their haste to simultaneously occupy the same patch of road, and mull over Ms. Kay's observations set against the uncomfortable backdrop of my own automotive codependency.

My wife thinks I am insane to keep 5 automobiles--but then, coming from Hong Kong where economy of scale is grossly disproportionate to that of America, I have always dismissed her sagacious observations as culturally irrelevant. Perhaps it is not really so much a subtle distortion of my sanity, but rather a reluctance on my part to assume mature responsibility: responsibility for synchronising my intellectual awareness of truth with my actions and behavior as a coopted and willing victim of the automobile mind-set.

We shall see; addiction of this sort is very hard to treat and besides, I really love that old Porsche.

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[Note: This is a recovered fragment of some blog observations I produced around 20 years ago and also before I began commuting to my office by bicycle (a daily practice that helped keep me sane and healthy at the same time). Not surprisingly, my feelings and attitudes about America pathological obsession with automobiles have, if anything, simply become more hardened and more calcified since then.

Not a day goes by today that I do not earnestly dream of familiar places like Zermatt (Switzerland) and Hallstatt (in the Austrian Salkammergut) where automobiles are prohibited by public legislation and where one can walk about and focus totally on nature’s scenic beauty, completely unmindful of the noise, stink and disruptive cacophony of automobile traffic. Sigh!]