The line between America's automobile obsession and its descent into fascistic individualism is getting easier and easier to draw.
DAN SHEEHANMAY 21, 2024
America loves a car. Whether it’s the family taking a road trip down route 66, the blue-collar worker throwing lumber into his pickup, or the glamorous movie star letting her hair down in a convertible, the iconography of the American dream has always been inexorably linked to automobile ownership. For Americans, the car has offered the promise of a life lived on your own terms. All you need is a full tank of gas, a turn of the ignition, and a highway. In concept, it’s a romantic. In execution, it’s this.
While not actually invented in America, the once prohibitively expensive mode of transportation found itself revolutionized by our country’s industrial age. Henry Ford invented the assembly line, reduced the cost of cars by half, and the rest is history. And now over a hundred years later, the entirety of American infrastructure is built with cars in mind. Whole cities’ public transit systems have been long since gutted and replaced with highway after endless highway. As Joni (and also Adam) said, they’ve paved paradise to put up a parking lot and in the decades since that song was released, they’ve paved the parking lot to put up a multi-level parking structure. The car, with the help of money changing hands between lobbyists, politicians, and the auto industry, has become the apex predator of American infrastructure rather than simply the thing that lets you get where you’re going.
Now this isn’t the only time in which we’ve allowed our quality of life to be degraded for a product. American capitalism functions as such that if a thing has endless earnings potential, our country will happily contort itself into whatever shape is necessary to facilitate maximum profit for shareholders (see: cigarettes, firearms, Taylor Swift). But there is something special about the way in which cars in particular have dug their hooks into us. What sets the car apart from other profit driven American obsessions is that the car is no longer a simple consumer choice. The car is not just a thing you own, it’s a part of who you are. In short: we’ve let cars drive us insane. And it’s getting worse.
Don’t believe me? Go take a little drive on your busiest highway at 5:30. Try cutting off a guy in a white pickup. If you survive the experience, we can discuss why conservatives think that making cities more walkable is a conspiracy to trap them in a labyrinth. Hell, consider the decades long playful rivalry between Ford and Chevy owners that seems to only exist because adult men born before 1970 were incapable of maintaining a social life that wasn’t at least partially truck based.
The ultimate test to prove what cars have done to the American psyche only requires that you walk out your front door. Take a photo with your phone. Now highlight in red the places in which it would be fully legal for a car to strike and kill you. Now highlight in yellow the places in which a car could strike and kill you and you would have to make a legal case that it was not your fault. Now highlight in green places where you believe you are safe from cars. Now remember how normal this feels.
Now this isn’t to say that cars don’t exist in other places. I am told that they do by sources I would trust with my life. But only America boasts this particular unholy collision of runaway individualism, automotive lobbyist influence, and a preoccupation with size that would make Freud weep. (RIP buddy, you would have loved the Dodge Ram). In America, infringing on a person’s right to hit you with a car is worse than hitting them with a car and if you say otherwise someone will try to hit you with a car.
The more toxic aspects of driving are not new. Road rage and traffic jams have existed for as long as cars themselves. And in fact, for a period in the early 2010s, American road accident deaths were in decline! It was only in the late 2010s that the number began to rise again. Right around when things started getting…not great! I’m not necessarily saying that America’s rough decade has led to an increase in motor vehicle fatalities. But we spend much of our time operating a machine that weighs thousands of pounds and moves at great speeds. Small changes in the cars or the people behind the wheel can have massive consequences. With the government asleep at the legislative wheel, failing for years now to do anything that might upset America’s top earners, companies have felt free to do things like increasing the size of their cars, the brightness of their headlights, and the shoddiness of their cars’ construction. Those dips in quality matter and government inaction on them has had visible consequences.
I’m not qualified to tell you what’s going on in Russia but it seems to be improving?
In addition to the increase in mechanical issues with cars, their popularity has found itself in a post-pandemic slump. Over the initial Covid-19 lockdowns, many urban areas reclaimed portions of their streets for outdoor dining in hopes of keeping restaurants afloat during a difficult time. With more room to move around, reduced noise levels, and a boost in overall safety, many Americans found that they liked this sudden prioritization of pedestrians over drivers. This, coupled with the fact that the automotive and oil industries are major contributors to climate change, has set American car culture up for a long-overdue reckoning.
Major cities across the country have implemented everything from safer bike lanes to revitalized public transit programs. A recent study showed that only 68% of 19-year-olds have their driver’s license, down a shocking 22% from a survey taken in 1980. A subreddit simply called “Fuck Cars” has over 440,000 subscribers (A drop in the bucket when it comes to the country’s population, but a cohort of casual anti-car evangelists larger than the population of St. Louis shouldn’t be ignored). For the first time since their invention, popular opinion seems as though it may turn against our obsession with the car.
But this is America in 2024, where any suggestion of improvement is immediately doused in hot bile by those that take such suggestions as declarations of war. While one would think “it’s nice to have more space outside” would be a benign opinion to hold, it’s become yet another lightning rod for our ongoing culture war. For the opposition, cars are no longer just a way of getting from A to B, or even the freedom machines of American lore, but metallic avatars of their own American exceptionalism. The car is the point.
Gone are the days of cheeky bumper stickers that say things like “HOW’S MY DRIVING? 1-800-EAT-SHIT”. These drivers are in your face. They buy the biggest cars they can and drive them as aggressively as possible. They specially augment their exhaust to belch more coal into the air than is necessary.
Simply put, they’re assholes. And companies are marketing directly to them.
Enter: Big American Cars. I give this new class of metallic hulk the proper noun treatment not because America has never produced big cars before, but because their bigness and American-ness have never been more important to this subset of consumers. A Big American Car is not simply a car, it is a signifier of one’s political beliefs. Sure, all products are signifiers in some way, either by displaying your socioeconomic standing or aesthetic preference, but Big American Cars might as well come with a voting guide. They’ve become synonymous with a pattern of behavior that their drivers view as a form of patriotism, but anyone who’s driven alongside them will be able to more appropriately identify as a sort of automotive gluttony. It’s a declaration of sovereignty from empathy, a reminder to any who may cross their path that they do so at their own peril.
The prime example is the Ford F-150.
If you showed this to a catholic in the 1400s and told them it was the devil they would believe you.
The Ford F-150 is an eldritch nightmare you can lease. It is an unholy creature born of a country that has lost itself, doomed to endlessly mimic false memories that it believes are from its glory days. It gargles the world’s blood and pisses black clouds of death. It is too tall to see anyone who may be in its way, which doesn’t matter because it would never slow down anyway. It sports a pristine truck bed that threatens to haul something somewhere, someday. Its size would only befit some sort of Bunyanesque carpenter but the man who half-falls out of its driver seat sells insurance. It is the physical manifestation of the American delusion that we are superior and the crushing American truth that we might just be evil. The air around it warps and crisps as though reality itself wishes to reject this abomination. If future paleontologists are so unlucky as to unearth one, they will think it was a species that hunted our own to extinction and, on some level, they will be right. A recent study showed that the majority of those who drive one use it mostly to get groceries.
Cars like the Ford F-150 are functionally Gundams for their owners, allowing them to play the great American video game that is highway driving with the biggest and most expensive possible skin. The Yin to the F-150’s Yang is the Tesla Cybertruck, a coward’s idea of progress hawked by a man with less vision than the predictive text models he keeps inserting into his fanboys’ brains. These are not cars, they are statements. They are designed to be seen more than they are to be driven and you can tell because the people who drive them talk about them so frequently, you’d think they were being paid (rather than having shelled out most of their life savings for the privilege).
If it sounds like I’m trying to draw a line between vocal defenders of car culture and fascism, it’s because I am. The Big American Car has become a standard bearer for state power and the status quo. The only goal of something as big as a Ford F-150 can be to intimidate. It’s a vanity object created for the sole purpose of indulging the delusions of those who are eager to align themselves with power. It is a promise of freedom for members of a political alignment that had to stop calling everyone “cucks” because they realized their entire ideology revolved around watching more powerful men enjoy the things they themselves desire.
And of course, any disruption to the delusion is met with great hostility. The Big American Car is good. It’s an American creation for American men. How dare you say that you could line six children up in front of it and the driver would have no hope of seeing them? How dare you insinuate that the twin suns it calls headlights might not be safe for highways?
Just look at any video in which a pedestrian or biker is nearly struck by a car. The replies below will be filled with people discussing with absolute glee how much the person deserved to be hit. In fact, there is nearly nothing we will root for in a battle against a car.
A pedestrian? No way, crosswalks are basically just suggestions at this point.
A biker? Had it coming! Those guys think they’re so much better than us!
A child? Oh, the humanity! Where were the parents when their child needed them to stop the driver of a three-thousand-pound mass of screaming metal from texting?
Even dogs, the seemingly sole exception to Americans’ ever-shrinking empathy, garner no sympathy. That’s why you need a leash! How irresponsible of you!
There is never a moment in which these people entertain the idea that other people have the right to survive jaywalking. There is no amount of blood they will not justify for the machine that represents their freedom. Because when boiled down, that’s what the car is to them: the dream of having complete and total access to the world at all times, at any cost. These drivers’ obsession doesn’t come from any genuine love for driving, but from a desperate need for that dream. The only change that dream could possibly sustain is a restoration of its idealized past. With such a restoration being impossible, they are left barreling headlong towards its future in hopes that they can survive the collision. If they can’t, they may be forced to reckon with the fear that lurks beneath all their bluster: that if the car’s promise of freedom is a lie, other core tenets of the American dream might be as well.
The car isn’t going anywhere. The dirt’s been paved, the highways expanded. We will not, in this lifetime at least, be free of the automotive prison our great-grandfathers built for us. But it doesn’t mean we have to allow things to get worse. We don’t have to accept a further erosion in the quality of our cars or a continued swelling of their size.
We can care about the quality of the places we live and the safety of the people who live there. We can advocate for a better use of our space that refuses to put cars before the people who drive them. We can show a little humanity behind the wheel and bare our teeth in front of it. We can stop buying the fucking pickups.
And to you, the car guy, I can only wish you luck. Yours is a thin, permeable fantasy. The monstrosity you park in your driveway might feel like power, but someday you will realize that it is not. In one horrible moment, you will realize that if you cannot live in the absence of something, if you continually offer it more of your land, safety, and money like blood at an altar; you are not free.
And when that moment comes you will look at the thing that cost you 47,000 dollars and you will see the devil.
Wow, welcome back to Brain Worms. I think I disassociated a little bit writing this one. Turns out it only takes about seven years in Los Angeles to put the anti-automotive devil in you.
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The comments are equally crazy:
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The author appears to be a furry:
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