It’s been a long-long time since I’ve written about cars -- and now I am one of you: I own two cars, one here in Traverse City one in England.
This talk will be about the two sides: car are appealing, cars are horrible.
As someone once said: “Cars mean more to these kids than architecture did in Europe….They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color. Everything is right there.”
Architecture meant a great deal to Europeans. Cathedrals took centuries to construct. Every spare moment of their time was devoted to God, to building magnificent architectural monuments: Castles, grand houses, The Palace of Versailles, the Vatican. I cannot list all the wonderful monuments constructed by Europeans. These monuments revealed to the rest of the world that Europeans were powerful, great, magnificent, wealthy. Cars do all that for 20th & 21st century individuals.
As the writer said, cars have it all. Freedom: we can go anywhere any we want to any time we want to, and we can do it at 60 mph. The world is out there & our cars get us anywhere we want to get to out there. Prisoners dream about cars. Cars have become the ultimate sign of freedom.
The style of a car is very important. A car says a lot about us & that’s why we choose a Volkswagen Bug or a Cadillac or a jaunty sports car. Cars are often the most stylish we own, and we think the car will get us the girl & get us sex. Cars are power, motion, color.
One cannot say enough about the lure of a car. Cars control our lives and much of our lives are devoted to cars -- acquiring them, taking care of them, riding in them, loving them. Someone once said that for some people, the most appropriate headstone would be a list of the cars they owned.
But as someone else said, Cars are a Faustian transaction: Mobility in exchange for death & despoliation. I assume that all of you know that Faust sold his soul to the devil. All of us have sold our souls to the devil -- and in exchange we have received death & despoliation. Cars kill roughly 50,000 people every year. Fifty thousand American soldiers died in the Vietnam War. In ten years, one half million people in the U.S. die in car accidents. Who knows how many a year are crippled as a result of car accidents, and who knows how many people world-wide are killed.
And think of the despoliation. Cities are carved up by car roads. The American landscape is full of roads for cars. A Faustian transaction: mobility in exchange for death & despoliation.
I’m not telling you anything new, anything you don’t already half know, but other people’s words do illuminate our understanding. Cars are attractive -- freedom, style, sex, power, motion color. Cars also kill & despoil
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein