The Car

&
The American
Just a guy! - Kanook
July – 2008

Albeit there are some 877 million vehicles cruising the highways and
byways across the world, I believe it can safely said that American holds the
claim as the first nation to fall in love with the car. Although it is generally
accepted that Karl Benz is the inventor of the modern automobile, where he
built a four-stroke gasoline engine in Mannheim, Germany in 1885 and was
granted a patent on January 29th of the following year under Benz & Cie,
which was founded in 1883. He rolled out his first production vehicles in
1888, some 120 years ago. We love our cars! But, how I go on – you’re
really not interested in its history but what we’re going to do with some these
clean guzzlers of our precious petrol today – where it might have been okay
some 30 years ago to burn a gallon leaving a red light, with some 20 stop
lights between you and work that would be $85 worth of fuel. Hard to handle
today!
It is said that our love affair with the car really got its start after WWII, in
1948 William Faulkner said, “The American male really loves nothing but his
automobile”, and observation that retains its force some 50 years later.
Consider, when I entered into the automobile world there were some 62.5
million auto’s roaming around America, today there are over 200 million,
about 220% more gas eaters.
Today there are some 304.5 mil of us in the USA, or .65% car per
individual in 1960 our ownership equaled .34% car per individual. Quite a
gain wouldn’t you agree? I repeat, we’re crazy about cars!
Our cars were not always thought as enemies of our environment, looking
back to 1900 in New York City, over 2.5 million pounds of horse pucky and
urine were deposited on the streets in one year, in that same year over
15,000 dead horses had to be removed, the auto eliminated that debris.
Americans have always chased personal freedom and mobility, along with
seeking the higher ideal of individualism and masculine force. The
emergence of the automobile which traveled much faster than the horse and
buggy, promised to create for us a path to a better life. It was our vehicle of
personal democracy – placing individuals in their place in our social life,
granting more and more of us a diverse range of choices, where to travel,
work and live, and to seek personal pleasure and our nightly drag races if we
so desired. We spent 1,000’s of dollars on toys for our cars, whether it was
for steel belted slicks, or adding another tail pipe or a cutout pipe. South of
the border we traveled to spend our hard earned cash on a “tuck and roll”
job, jazzing up the interior while spending additional bucks on metallic paint
jobs and vinyl roofs and other gadgets.
In other words, “the automobile has been the handiest tool ever devised
for the pursuit of that unholy, unwholesome, all-American trinity of sex,
speed and status!” It had replaced the caveman’s club. Amen!
Highway 66 was a national TV show, a show that glamorized a life on the
road, where men of all ages could rhapsodize about their individual freedom;
sadly those days have slipped behind us all where now we realize that 200
million plus cars have stripped us of some of our personal freedom. Consider
this, in 1911 a “horse & buggy” could rip across LA at 11 mph, today a car
makes the rush hour trip averaging 4 mph – it is estimated that American’s
(on average) spend over 8 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, where today’s
young graduates will spend four-years plus of their lives behind the wheel
getting to work.
And yet there is a lot of truth to the saying, “You’ll get me out of my car
when you pry my cold, dead foot from the Accelerator.” This despite traffic
congestion, road rage, and polluted air and naturally the cost of a gallon of
petrol, we find that suburban commuters have shied away from van pools
and public transportation and our kids continue to fill high-school parking lots
along with the Sunday driver remaining a unique American phenomenon.
Our love affair with the car has matured, from a relationship to a marriage,
and now an addiction. Some of us refuse to consider other transportation
avenues, and after a short period of adjustment I predict once our
pocketbooks have realized that gas is priced at what it is and we have to
change our habits, it will once again become the idol in the American’s
lifestyle. It is engrained in our physical being, almost as much as the air we
breath, so much so we tend to look at developing countries who are know
catching our fever with a little distain, commenting – “why are you burning all
‘our’ fuel?” We place a “high” value on the seductive ideal of private
freedom, personal mobility and empowered spontaneity, a high value.
This four wheel gas guzzling ideal has become our temporary office, bank,
restaurant, easy chair and high-end stereo system – we talk on the phone,
eat meals, put makeup on, cash checks and listen to loud music and audio
books with a break now and then, to get out and interface with some of our
neighbors or family – maybe? It has replaced the front porch found on
houses built in the early years, and to store it we build little houses between
us and neighbors sometime having a chat with them while we apply the
latest and greatest protective goo on it to preserve the expensive paint job.
Strange as it may seem, some of the audio books we choose, like “Life in
the Woods” (HD Thoreau) or Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” (two most
popular choices) demonstrate the American’s commitment to the open road,
if only in our imaginations.