long the way, on my treks by bike, I find in
general that North Americans are good people.
Honest, hard-working, always ready to help.
But put even a retired school teacher or
grandmother behind the wheel of a car, and
instantly, before your very eyes, they will be
transformed into mean-spirited, blood-lusting
hell-hounds, more than willing to run their own
children off the street.
Yet because we can evidently only perceive this
deep division of North America’s psyche by stepping
resolutely out of our vehicles, I fear we loyal citizens
of Car Culture will be unable to see the state into
which we have driven ourselves. That is:—until
the world’s gas tank hits empty.
Addiction to oil? The analogy is a poor one. The
addict always has a certain awareness that what
he or she is doing is wrong, This awareness leads to guilt.
To get behind the wheel of a car, however, is to
turn the key on a very much more powerful illusion;
it is a kind of all-self-enveloping worldview, one which
can only be sustained as long as there is a complete and
total denial of its false and contradictory nature. And
worldviews, unlike the highs of drugs, do not wear off.
Consider how the philosophy of fascism blinded the
Germans and Italians—two of the very greatest
and most creative of European cultures—into
seeing themselves as essentially heroic protagonists
acting out a Reinzi-like drama of Good vs. Evil.
In a similar way, from inside the car, we are blinded
by the comforting sense of mechanical power, a power
which gives us the idea that all is peace, order, and
tranquility. From outside the car, however, in truth,
at least in my view, all is in reality fragmentation,
disorder, and destruction.
As the final scene of this tragic opera rapidly
closes in on us, so the illusions generated by Car Culture
will come to an end, whether we like it or not. To my mind,
the urgent question is: will this happen in a calm,
rational and creative way, as well it should if only
our ways of thinking about energy might reach the
same level of sophistication of our information technology?
Or will we instead, like the National Socialists
before us, drive our illusion straight into the inferno
we call “the pleasures of the open road?”
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