For more than a century, the automobile has represented the essence of American life like nothing else, like no other artifact or idea. The freedom of the open road is a powerful age-old metaphor for life lived to the fullest, and in its heyday the automobile amped that up to the last limits of wish fulfillment. For the sake of argument, let’s peg that heyday as the 1950s and ’60s. We were cruising for burgers, having fun, fun, fun, escaping the tedium and responsibility of square adulthood with Jack Kerouac, and venturing into the romantic-ecstatic mythic zone out on Thunder Road.
The automobile also provoked a prodigious re-ordering of the landscape itself, the terrain of this beautiful continent only recently opened to European settlers. We took that to the limit, too, with the creation of the world’s first drive-in utopia, our beloved suburbia, and by the 1970s we had so mutilated that landscape that every fruited plain was covered with a hideous and depressing crust of tract housing and its accessories: strip malls, fast food shacks, muffler shops, et cetera, ad nauseum. And even that wasn’t enough. Come the new millennium and we found ever more new, ingenious formats for a car-centric living arrangement in all its totalizing horror.
Thunder Road [Blu-ray/...
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I like to refer to all that as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, because it’s what we invested most of our post-war wealth in. It’s coming to an end now for reasons I have stated in previous installments of this series, but which I’ll tick off just to remind you: peak oil (yes, still out there), a more general resource overshoot (ores, fertilizers, fish in the sea, etc.), a grotesque debt quandary, mutually reinforcing feedback loops of economic systems failure now in motion, and attendant political disorder. You can also throw in climate change, whether you’re expecting fire or ice, since it will ramify all the aforesaid. Hence, circumstances will be taking us in the opposite direction now: smaller, closer, finer.
I want to discuss here exactly how the car disgraced our beautiful continent, so you’ll enter this new disposition of things knowing exactly what went wrong and why we will benefit from living differently without cars. Cars destroyed all the traditional connections between things except for the car and road, and there was a lot more to man’s relationship with the landscape than just the need to go rapidly from point A to point B. Our relations with the world work in layers and hierarchies, and the car destroyed those relationships in our physical surroundings.
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I got a clear glimpse of that some years ago in a visit to Mackinac Island, Michigan. This summer resort, located at the keyhole strait between Lakes Huron and Michigan, banned the automobile from the get-go (except now for emergency vehicles). Everybody walks or bikes or goes about in horse-drawn vehicles. Even the colossal Grand Hotel takes deliveries by horse-and-wagon. What you see there now are relations between the streets and the buildings that were never dishonored by car traffic, never disrupted, maimed, or mutilated. The transition from the public realm to the private realm plays out seamlessly from street to sidewalk to gate to door yard to porch to front door—and it is as much a journey for the eye of a pedestrian on the street as it is for anyone actually going in and out.
Everywhere else in America, the presence of cars is so ubiquitously despotic and violent that buildings literally dissociate from the streets, turn their backs to it, answer the dialog between street-and-building disdainfully with rude gestures of detail. Hardly anyone in suburbia uses their house’s front door, which is often reduced to a cartoon applique.
