My office, home, basecamp on wheels & GO BIKES!

ON CARS & CAR CULTURE

Along the way, on my treks by bike, I find in general that North Amer-
icans are good people. Honest, hard-working, always ready to help.
Put, however, 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 road. (Unfortunately for the
rest of the world, the former naturally tends to place the latter behind
the wheels of government as well.)

Yet, because we can evidently only perceive this deep and destructive
division of North America’s national psyche by stepping resolutely out
of our vehicles, loyal citizens of Car Culture will, I fear, be unable to
clearly see the state into which they have unknowingly driven them-
selves. That is:—until the world’s gas tank hits empty.

Addiction to oil? The analogy is a poor one, I think. The addict, it
seems to me, always has a certain awareness that what he or she is do-
ing is wrong, is self-destructive. 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, un-
like the highs of drugs, do not wear off. Consider how the philosophy
of fascism blinded the Germans and Italians—two of the greatest and
most creative of European cultures—into seeing themselves as
essentially heroic protagonists acting out the perennial drama of Good
vs. Evil as portrayed in, say, a Wagner opera like Reinzi. In a similar
way, from inside the car, we are blinded by the comforting sense of me-
chanical power and that all is peace, order and tranquility. From outside
the car, however, in truth, at least in my view, all is in reality fragmenta-
tion and destruction.

As the final scene of the opera rapidly closes in on us, however, 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,
happy, rational and creative way, as well it should if only our ways of
thinking about energy might reach quickly enough the level of sophis-
tication 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.”

HERE

On the way,
many beautiful camps
offer themselves for the night.

But to know,
when to keep walking and
when to stay,

and, after stopping,
to know without a doubt
that this place, where one stands,

here,

I am at home.

Hummingbird Pass,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
Oregon, X.29.2008

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