Books, vehicular homicides and general dipshittery

I am a self-confessed bibliophile, someone for whom books are among the greatest treasures on earth.

There is something indescribable about the physical mass of a book in one’s hands. If I said holding a book is somewhat like stroking a lover’s body you’d obviously laugh, but for me there is a striking parallel between the two acts. Aside from that perhaps poorly chosen analogue, I am never unaware of the fact that what I hold in my hands has a value that greatly transcends the mere tactile pleasure afforded by either form of indulgence.

That is to say, a certain part of my imagination is lit up by my awareness that either undertaking can create an intense sensation of pleasure that far exceeds most other experiences I regard as personally meaningful and valuable. In the case of books, it is far harder for me to explain than attempting to describe the delights of exploring the peaks and valleys of a lover’s body.

Books have always been a source of illumination and insight of the highest order for me and in ways that are utterly different from those gained by staring at a computer’s pixel display. I suppose this is partly due to the fact that the adverse effects of eyestrain are far more pronounced in the latter case, by my personal reckoning, while eyestrain effects induced by reading printed words on a page are, comparably, far less pronounced. At any rate, I’ll spare you all the tedium of going on and on about my penchant for books at this juncture and cut (more or less) right to the subject of this discourse.

It is my good fortune to be residentially sited in relative proximity to a local public library. This particular branch of the Sacramento Public Library system is actually quite a wonderful benefit of living where I do, since in addition to the library building, it is surrounded by a rather nice park setting, complete with a children’s playground, picnic kiosk, tables and lots of beautiful trees of all varieties that have over the past 20 years grown from mere saplings into big, fully matured oaks, maples and pines. There are even a few noble redwoods interspersed among them all and the local squirrels consider it, doubtless, something of a paradise in which to thrive.

The library, aside from its principal function as a valuable community resource, has an active ‘library guild’ in which a number of the older, retired members of this neighborhood take an active part. One of the activities supported by this guild is a monthly book sale, which serves are a convenient method of thinning out the library’s volumes at the same time it helps produce a certain small income for the Sacramento Library System.

Held every first Tuesday of each month, the library guild volunteers bring out boxes of books that have either been donated my local citizens or selected as surplus to the library’s need and make them available to the public for purchase at a modest cost. To my mind most cleverly, the books are arrayed on long tables by the volunteers and offered at a flat rate of $5 per standard grocery store paper sack-full. It is often amazing (to me at least) how many books one can squeeze into such a bag and I usually end up with several bags full each time I visit these sales.

Of course, I already have a home filled to the brim and overflowing with books of all kinds and every description imaginable (I hesitate to use the term ‘pathological’ here, but it’s probably apt!), collections of books on selected subject areas such as ‘Aviation’, ‘Polynesian Culture’, ‘History’, ‘The Old West Frontier’, ‘General Reference’ and…well, I’m sure you get the picture here. For a hard-core bibliophile like me, there’s no limit to the breadth and depth of one’s fascination with books on just about any subject.

It should be stated in all fairness that in my home, aside from the eternally problematic subject of money management and finances (which afflicts all marriages equally), disagreement over books is a major source of marital disharmony. By my reckoning, I can never have too many books but by wifie’s reckoning, any more than it takes to fill a single bookcase is already too many. That, of course, is a battle that no one can ever win in my house, hence there exists a sort of ‘Mexican standoff’ at home: I insist on getting more books and wifie insists that she’ll permit no more bookcases under our roof. Wherein lies a major problem.

Accordingly, a room formerly regarded as our dining room now contains rows of books laid out on the floor in rows (in addition to overflowing book cases), an arrangement that creates incredible frustration for me, since it’s all that much harder to find exactly the book I am searching for unless it is conveniently displayed on a bookshelf. Hence the standoff I mentioned. Wifie’s draconian policy of ‘No more bookcases’ effectively creates an impediment of the first order that serves to stymie my obsessive book hoarding proclivities. Sigh!

But all this is merely backstory, since the subject I began this with concerns a particular book I stumbled across last week at the library’s monthly book sale, titled ‘The Motorist’s Companion’.

It is an older, hardcover book, published in 1936, just before Europe erupted in the full throes of the Second World War, and came fitted with a standard library standard, clear Mylar book cover over its dust jacket (thus, nicely preserved despite years of service in the library), and written by an author identified as John Prioleau (French?...although it was originally published in Great Britain and he seems to be very British in his sentiments).

My eye was drawn immediately to it amidst all the other books since I am a product of California’s ‘car culture’, having been born at a time when America rediscovered its fascination with automobiles upon the end of that war (late 40s). As an adolescent I was therefore exposed to the full force of California car culture that was flourishing while I was in high school and I began my personal association with both automobiles and motorcycles while a sophomore (with a used 1940 Chevrolet Master Deluxe Coupe, obtained for a mere $50, and a 1962 Honda C-110 Supercub ‘tiddler’ with 50ccs of roaring power, bought new for $275).

That was the beginning of a life filled with a great variety of both cars & motorcycles that continues to this day (well into my 7th decade of life) and as a consequence of being both addicted to the internally combusted engine and a being a lifelong amateur philosopher, the subject of personal (or even public) motor transportation has always provoked a strong opinion from me on most subjects bearing on the matter of transportation in modern America.

So it was that when I ran into John Prioleau’s 1936 book I immediately looked forward to gaining some unique insights into ‘automobile culture’ of the 1930s, as contrasted with our modern outlook on the subject and as a few chapters quickly revealed, I was not to be disappointed.

Let me say at the onset here that although I was literally born into and raised in the midst of entrenched California car culture, with age and maturity has come a deep-seated conviction that what was originally a hugely liberating source of pleasure and convenience (the ‘car’) has now become something of a technological plague whose effects both aesthetic and environmental pose a severe threat to health and the quality of our lives. That is to say, the automobile has now become America’s public enemy no. 1 in more ways than we imagine.

Unfortunately, thanks to the American (& now international) automobile industry, we ‘consumers’ have been socialized through decades of hard-core marketing and advertising to regard the personal motor vehicle as an absolutely vital adjunct of our lives. Indeed, our whole economy and way of life has been shaped around the car industry in a manner not much different from the way illegal drug suppliers have made themselves vital subsidiaries to substance abusers. We, in effect, have become ‘addicted’ to our personal motor vehicles and all of the intricate urban and suburban infrastructure throughout the whole country has been conceived, planned & engineered around the concept of enabling us to perpetuate this lifestyle affliction (for that is what it actually is: an affliction).

What formerly existed as a pleasant indulgence (a means of getting away from the confines of the city and ‘recreating’ in more rurally relaxing environs on weekends) on the part of car owners decades ago has today become an onerous burden, due to exponential growth in numbers of car owners and motorists over the years, that is long past overdue for some sort of social & economic reality check. Anyone who doubts the sagacity of that assessment need only look at present day China, where automobiles have grown into an environmental threat on an order of magnitude that even transcends our own car culture dilemma (a culture that literally began the entire process, back shortly after the turn of the former century with Henry Ford and his industrial confreres).

And yet, grossly complicating this serious state of affairs (that virtually everyone benignly ignores in our fiercely automobile-consuming culture) are other dynamics, such as the danger posed by the basic ‘equality’ principle that underlies the foundations of American liberties. Say what?!

By this, I mean the presumption on the part of virtually all Americans that being American presupposes that we are all somehow ‘equal’ to each other (when in fact the only ‘equality’ conferred upon individuals by the US Constitution is that of theoretical ‘equal in the eyes of the law’). In fact, true egalitarian ‘equality’ in America is a pure figment of the uneducated and less-astute individual’s imagination. We are all no more ‘equal’ to each other that we are of the same blood type. [Anyone doubting this should read (among other works) Geoffrey Gorer’s excellent (1966) book, ‘The Danger of Equality’, Bryan Caplan’s fascinating (2018) ‘The Case Against Education’, and Amy Chua’s and Jed Rubenfeld’s singular (2014) ‘The Triple Package’, just to name several that bear on this assertion.]

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of how this economic ‘equality’ is flagrantly misinterpreted on a regular, daily basis is found in examining automobiles and their drivers on our streets. In our consumer economy, whereas many decades ago you could quickly determine the ‘class’ standing of any particular citizen by the type of car he/she drove, in our modern economy all that has now gone by the boards. In 1928-38, for example, anyone driving an expensive automobile was clearly and unmistakably a person of substance, most often well educated, from good family in the upper-class, and possessed of either wealth (through family) or a higher-paying occupation (physician, lawyer, etc.); by the same standard criteria anyone driving a ratty, decrepit old wreck was clearly and unmistakably from a lower class, poorer and probably uneducated (or poorly educated at best).

Today, automobiles are marketed in such a way as to make even the most costly and/or expensive machines available to just about anyone, regardless of credit, assets or wherewithal. Thus, we have the sleeziest pimp driving around in a costly Mercedes or Porsche and uneducated idiots barely able to shit properly in a toilet piloting huge (and expensive) pickups or SUVs. The driver may not be able to afford actual purchase of the vehicle he drives, but he can usually manage a lease, thus maintaining the appearance of wherewithal and substance. He has, in the teeny-tiny reflective recesses of his pea-sized brain, achieved ‘Democratic equity’ with the brightest and most refined members of society.

And given the effects of our vaunted ‘car culture’, even the most ignorant among us aspires to the theoretical ‘high-status’ that driving an expensive car around superficially confers. Hence all the juvenile, arrested adolescents on our streets with expensive, hopped-up cars whose social awareness and maturity are limited to the ‘Fast & Furious’ action movies they watch.

In our part of the city, this state of affairs has led to a singular phenomenon involving youthful drivers who wait until nightfall to come out onto the streets and treat the city’s roads as a sort of personal racetrack environment that exists solely for their personal enjoyment. You hear it all night long: highly modified (we used to say ‘souped-up’, but that’s archaic terminology today) street vehicles that are driven to unacceptable extremes around the neighborhood and surrounding urban streets. Poorly muffled, driven at high RPMs and usually under the influence of either drugs or alcohol, the scream of their engines is pretty obvious to anyone listening, and it is also annoying as hell.

As a person who values peace, quiet and serenity (yeah, maybe I’m an old fart, but my aesthetic priorities are NOT misplaced), this sort of adolescent behavior is highly disturbing, since it implies a total lack of concern for the safety of others who might be affected (as in the daily instances of urban ‘hit-and-run’ incidents, crashes due to excessive high speed on residential streets, etc., etc.). And yes, we had this sort of antisocial phenomenon back when I was in high school, but not to the extreme extent that it exists today! Back then, there still existed a modicum of ‘respect’ for the law which tended to act somewhat as a constraint against too much of that sort of antisocial behavior becoming as common as it is today.

In recent years, the problem has become far more complicated in that law enforcement personnel are typically stretched so thin in terms of manpower available to patrol urban streets that there is virtually nothing at all to deter an adolescent from getting into his far-too-powerful car after getting high (on whatever) and driving unlawfully and illegally (a situation that all too often ends in fatal ‘hit-and-run’ fatalities or fatal loss-of-control crashes).

A neighbor of mine happens to be a Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy and I have had occasion to discuss this problem with him casually several times in the past. His candid response is that law enforcement officers are virtually unable to do anything about situations like this in a preventive sense (again mainly due to manpower resources), since they have far more dire problems to concern themselves with (read: homicides, domestic violence calls, drive-by-shootings, murders, etc.). Reckless, drunk kids in hopped-up cars are necessarily at the bottom of their list of priorities.

As motorcyclists (both he, with a Harley-Davidson, and myself, with several high-powered Japanese sportsbikes) we are both aware of the fact that a great number of these youthful offenders who thrive after dark are on powerful Japanese motorcycles, often racing around the streets (and on the nearby interstate highway) at high RPMs and speeds of 60-100 mph or more. He told me frankly that it is virtually impossible for law enforcement to actually chase and pull-over these bikers, since it’s not only hazardous for any other traffic that they may be around, it is also impossible to maneuver well enough to even approach them before they’ve disappeared completely from the figurative radar.

Scary enough to think about the ramifications of that status-quo as they may affect the average citizen who innocently gets in the way of these youthful maniacs in their high-powered cars and motorcycles, but there it is. The actual fact of the matter, for which there are presently no effective solutions available, is that there are NO practical, deterring constraints in place against anyone who decides that this sort of behavior is cool or fulfilling.

Again, this sort of youthful transgression is neither new nor substantially different than it has been in previous decades. What’s new is that, due to burgeoning demographics and sheer force of numbers…plus the permissiveness of our modern left-leaning progressive society…there are now no longer any deterrents (either practical or otherwise) worth considering that will help curb this sort of extreme antisocial behavior. And that sobering truth is just plain frightening!

My read-through of John Prioleau’s wonderfully ‘old-fashioned’ observations on automobiles and the ‘art’ of driving provided many interesting comparisons with modern road-behavior, obviously enough, but what emerges strongly is that despite the 83 years that have elapsed since the book was written in 1936 and today, his basic observations and admonishments have changed little, if to any extent!

Almost all of his suggestions for proper vehicle maintenance, operation and driving practices are as cogent and timely now as they were back then. I actually wasn’t too surprised to find this to be the case, since the core of his observations centers around good old common sense and reasoning.

Naturally, back in those days there were far less automobiles on the roadways and that in itself prompted a different (more conservative) attitude towards the responsibilities incumbent upon drivers, but his basic insights nevertheless remain as cogent and salient as ever.

One of the chief problems we face today is the unbridled commercialism that drives the motoring market, the soul-less, obsessive focus on profit bottom-lines rather than on any precepts of ‘enlightened capitalistic’ philosophy. Back in the day, commercial organisations (such as automobile manufacturers) by necessity fostered and shouldered a certain sense of social responsibility for their products’ applications that extended to a certain extent to the impact of their commercial involvements. Today, the only vestige of active social conscience and/or responsibility discernible stems from the ever-present threat of law suits and legal action. There is no longer any active effort by commercial companies & corporations to assume or maintain a proactive social conscience over the direct consequences of their cynical marketing campaigns.

Thus we typically see the typical American television advertisement for a Dodge (substitute marque of choice) pickup literally smashing through pristine wilderness while the voice-over exhorts the mantra ‘Ram tough’, underscoring a vehicle’s macho capabilities, or showing them driving recklessly on roadways way past the limits of sanity (while at the bottom of the TV screen the usual hypocritical disclaimer appears in small print almost too tiny to read: “Do not try this yourself: professional driver on closed course!” It is effectively the classic example of the preacher telling his congregation: “Do as I say, don’t do as I do!”

On a somewhat lighter note, I was amused to find that the author (Mr. Prioleau) named his personal automobile ‘Theodore’ and regards it almost as if it had a sort of spiritual anima of its own. This sort of personalizing and regarding inanimate objects as somehow being objects worthy of affectionate regard is very old-fashioned. Today, I’d venture to say that with the exception of a few oddballs (like me) and probably a greater percentage of women, hardly anyone ‘names’ their personal vehicles any more. It would seem to me that this sort of anthropomorphism is more of a feminine rather than masculine characteristic, since women tend to be more nurturing in their outlooks and regards than are men.

There are, I suppose, more than a few of us male types who by habit name our cars, motorcycles and other propulsive toys (aircraft, ships, etc.), but speaking for myself, I’ve always named my personal motorized vehicles. I presently have, for example, two Hyundais (one is named ‘Fang’, the other ‘Moby’), a Chevy Silverado pickup (‘Princess’, previously named by the wife of the fellow I bought it from, I hasten to state) and two motorcycles (a 2000 Kawasaki ZX900E-1 Ninja named ‘Fugu’ and a 1983 Yamaha XJ900RK Seca named ‘Scarlett’). My wife’s Toyota Camry is named ‘Blanca’ (it’s white), naturally. Before this I also had several other motorcycles, one of which was a black Yamaha XJ750 Seca named ‘Beast’ and a red Yamaha XJ550R Seca named ‘Beauty’). And naturally all my many other vehicles were similarly named, for it seemed to me that they all had distinctive personalities and their names almost suggested themselves.

There’s a distinctly Zen-like aspect to all this that also draws strongly upon ancient Japanese Shinto precepts, or perhaps animism such characterised the ancient Hawaiian culture.

It presupposes, aside from a strong element of anthropomorphic, personalized involvement, a somewhat more concerned & involved level of interaction with these mechanical objects than most other people manifest and it’s certainly true enough that I take concerted pains to fully maintain all my machines with great care. Even the military planes I used to fly all had names, including a Lockheed F-104B Starfighter named ‘Howling Howland’ and a Convair F-106A Delta Dart named ‘Heathcliff’).

OK, so I’m a sentimental old cuss; I admit it, but if that’s the worst of my foibles, I’d say society is further ahead of the curve than it might otherwise be! There are far worse states of mind to be in than maudlin sentimentality, I reckon.

But returning to the subject of Prioleau’s 1936 observations on the ‘art’ of owning and driving an automobile, his book is divided into three sections. The first is titled ‘The car’. The second is listed as ‘The Road’ and the third is simply stated as ‘The Driver’. As one might imagine, The first and last parts of this book are the most relevant to us, since they deal with basic automobile concerns (and even back then in 1936, they were hardly any different than they are today, believe it or not) such as ‘purchasing’, ‘maintaining’ and ‘costs’ in the first part and ‘how to drive’, ‘being a safe driver’ and such topics in the latter.

It should hardly be surprising to hear that one of his primary exhortations is ‘never drive faster than it is safe to do so’…something that is almost lionized as a basic speed law in our modern world of driving…and another dealing with ‘Sharing the road with other drivers who do not maintain proper respect for the hazards of motoring’ (read: ‘watch out for mindless dipshits’).

The second part of his book (‘The Road’) deals mainly with travel on roads & byways then in use in both the UK and on the continent (Europe) and as such it is merely interesting for a comparison with the same roads and road travel as they exist today.

Inappropriate speeding should probably be flagged as the number 1 commentary Prioleau addresses in this book and it is hardly any different today, of course. As we all know, adolescent and/or immature personalities are chiefly to blame for the problems we experience today concerning excessive speeding and inappropriate road behavior. It was no different back then, but whereas Prioleau is referencing automobiles that typically had 16 to 25 horsepower engines, today excessively high-performance engines and road set-ups on personal vehicles have changed the game considerably.

That said, believe it or not, it was just as easy to kill yourself driving one of those old vehicles going 25 miles per hour back then as it is today driving a late model ‘muscle-car’ going 120 on a city street. In aviation, to use a useful analogue, “A Piper Cub can just barely (go fast enough to) kill you!”, but ‘barely’ is quite enough to accomplish that deed quite handily! [A Mach-2.5 fighter jet can only kill you exponentially faster….]

One further theme that runs through Prioleau’s wonderful book is that of ‘inexperienced’ drivers, and the lesson should be (but isn’t often) as obvious that most drivers on the road (today) are rather poor ones at best, either blacking a sense of natural mind-motor coordination skills or not properly focused on the challenge of piloting a potentially 4000 pound killing machine through areas filled with hazards, people, bicycles, what have-you.

Interestingly, in addition to today’s ‘distracted driver’ problems (caused by inattention to the task at hand caused mainly by inappropriate use of smartphones while driving), the auto industry has further complicated this problem by a clever ruse: that of making cars ‘smarter’ to help compensate for driver deficits. In theory that all sounds well and good, but only if one assumes that all (or most) drivers are actually voluntarily interested in driving safely and appropriately (most are not). Making cars ‘smarter’ also provides a subtle cash-cow for manufacturers since…hello!...someone has to pay for all that high-tech stuff, and who is that? The automobile owner, of course.

Thus, the modern trend of car prices soaring clear up to the stratosphere! When the cost of a ‘fully loaded’ Chevrolet standard-sized pickup truck verges on a cool $50K, you’d think some likely lad would get a clue that paying half-a-hundred-thou is an obscenity! And with the truly excusive so-called ‘status cars’ now routinely selling for WAY more than that, isn’t it about time someone stood up and protested this clever profit-generating tactic that is thinly disguised as a ‘customer safety benefit’?

In fact actual road experience has shown that making cars smarter DOESN’T improve road safety to any appreciable extent, since the more the car ‘thinks’ by itself, the more drivers tend to disengage themselves from the driving experience and sit back to indulge in greater excesses of ‘distraction’. That is, naturally enough, human nature at work, and if you believe (as do I, being a committed disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer’s unique philosophic school of pessimism) that most people are mindless dipshits 90% of the time, so all these techy improvements in auto safety generate is additional profits for the car industry. Meanwhile the DOT is benignly compliant with this unhappy status quo and so the process perpetuates itself ad infinitum.

There is also the extremely adverse and unhealthy ‘Hollywood’ mentality we must contend with in our modern life, something that didn’t exist to any great extent back in 1936, and that is an attitude of sensationalistic exploitation on the part of an entertainment industry (and make no mistake…it IS an industry, just as single-mindedly focused and dedicated to making money from your weakness and susceptibilities as any other, less ‘entertaining’ industry) that grinds out visual media capitalizing intended to capitalize upon our worst weaknesses (e.g. the need for ‘speed’ and cheap thrills). The archetypal action film series ‘Fast & Furious’ (et al) dredge this category for all it’s worth, exhorting adolescent tendencies and reckless, juvenile behavior from those among us who are intellectually vapid and/or just ignorant (you all know who you are)

Sex, speed, mindless action: all these ‘Hollywood’ dynamics appeal directly to the ‘arrested adolescent’ among us (and there are a great many, to be sure). Unfortunately, these youthful jerks who are fixated on this kind of crap can’t wait to latch onto a ‘muscle-car’ so they too can conduct ‘sideshows’ and carry out all manner of other dumb tricks that can jeopardise the safety & wellbeing of more proprietary, level-headed individuals, and don’t think for a second that Hollywood has any second-sight regrets over incidents that viewing their films may well have engendered or brought into being (like school shooting incidents and other forms of extreme violence we cope with today, they will straight-up deny that any of their violent computer games or blood & guts action movies have ANYTHING whatsoever to do with all that).

As I said, despite the fact that violence and mayhem to some degree did exist back when Prioleau wrote his genteel book ‘The Motorists’ Companion’, they WERE indeed ‘kinder and gentler’ times compared to the gratuitous savagery that passes today for the entertainment media’s fictitious pseudo-realities being socialized into kids’ heads.

The result of all this has been to change me over time from being a ‘motor-enthusiast’ (who at one time even raced sportscars in SCCA regional racing competition) and car/motorcycle buff into someone who still appreciates the technology that has enabled these machines to exist, but who has retained enough sense to understand that not everyone has the ability to use them sanely, wisely and/or suitably in today’s increasingly dense social setting. I rarely use my ‘fun machines’ (i.e. my high-performance Japanese sportsbikes…how about 0-60 in only 2.4 seconds?) for anything other than an occasional, leisurely rural outing as far away from traffic, other vehicles and people as possible, Instead, I am usually content to maintain these machines, work on them and admire/appreciate their mechanical beauty appropriately…bereft of any urges to use them recklessly and/or unsafely.

I further qualify that statement by stating that pure speed and extreme performance for the sake of amusement do nothing for me whatsoever, but I base that on having previously ‘been there and done that’, since I have flown at speeds in excess of twice the speed of sound and as high as 60K+ feet altitude (that’s about as ‘extreme’ as anyone should care to get, as I see it). These days, I far more appreciate the aesthetics of nature and the benefits of a far slower pace that permits stopping to smell the flowers and more adequately admire what most would call ‘God’s natural works’ (since I’m an atheist, I can’t quite say that in all truthfulness, but I’m sure you understand the sentiment behind it).

Is it age & maturity, or perhaps the growing awareness that death and the end of our personal life experience as well looms ahead that encourages this? Is it impossible for the young, still embarked upon a seeming life of unbridled opportunity and thrillingly new sensations, to see things the same carefully measured way? Perhaps, but I’ve all my entire life recognised the fact that we are all the same species under the skin and that as the world grows denser and denser in terms of its population, we all need to be more and more mindful of the need to be considerate of our fellows and their needs. If that means slowing down and driving more carefully, so be it, and John Prioleau wasn’t as prescient as he might otherwise seem…he was just a bit more mature than many others of his own generation, back in a time when elders were generally more deserving of respect than they are today, in his expression of the aesthetics of ‘proper’ use of automobiles.

I’ll end this with the observation, next time some absolute idiot is about to suddenly and unexpectedly erase your life on today’s hostile roads and mean streets thanks to his reckless (and perhaps substance-influenced) disregard for others’ safety, that someone should probably have wrapped his umbilical cord firmly around his neck at birth to save us from all this needless tragedy.

And if that expressed sentiment makes me a ‘cranky old geezer’, I’ll bear the appellation gracefully without complaint.

Be safe!