John Akre
It’s a small world. Everyone knows that: Deterding, Citroen, storks, tourists. And this tiny world has
too many people. Once upon a time there was a deluge. now Holland is drying out the Zuyder Zee.
Once there was a plague, People got used to it and survived it. Laboratories prepare longevity like
saccharine, and rejuvenated Methusalems giggle friskily. But the world isn’t getting any bigger. It’s
crowded now, like a clearance sale at a department store. War’s been done away with. People can
only live by using their elbows.
But then the automobile came to man’s rescue. It doesn’t wait for any notes, it doesn’t demand 14
points like Wilson. Meticulously and efficiently, it cleans the earth. All inoculations and all conferences
are powerless against it. The body is quickly removed by truck, the car is carefully wiped, and the
record is identified by a multi-digit number.
At first such things were known as "catastophes." Now people speak of "accidents." Soon they’ll
stop speaking altogether. Silently they’ll haul away the victim and silently write down the number.
Sentimental neighbors wipe their noses, of course, and philosophically minded people argue
about the "new peril." Commissions discuss protective laws. But the automobile keeps right on doing
its job. Sit Henry Deterding was destined to create an oil empire. Monsieur Andre Citroen was
destined to turn out cheap cars. Karl Lang the cabby was destined to cross intersections. The
automobile works honestly. Long before its birth, when it is still just layers of metal and piles of
drawings, it diligently murders Malayan coolies and Mexican laborers. It is born in agony! It shreds
flesh, blinds eyes, eats lungs, destroys minds. At last, it rolls out of the gates into the world which,
before its existence, was known as "bright." Instantly, it deprives its supposed owner of his
old-fashioned peace of mind. Lilac withers, chickens and dreamers dash away in terror. The
automobile laconically runs down pedestrians. It gnaws into the side of a barn or else, grinning,
it flies down a slope. It can’t be blamed for anything. Its conscience is as clear as Monsieur
Citroen’s conscience. It only fulfills its destiny: It is destined to wipe out the world.
Ilya Ehrenburg, 1929 (from The Life of the Automobile)
Back to the Top
"The more you drive, the less intelligent you become."
From the movie Repo Man
Back to the Top
"'One one-thousand,' environmentalist David Burwell counted, clocking an instant in the polluting life of the automobile. In that
single second America's cars and trucks travelled another 60,000 miles, used up 3,000 gallons of petroleum products,
and added 60,000 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If the canon of the environmental movement is to 'tread lightly
on the land,' nothing treads more heavily than the licentious motor vehicle. Traffic is what the eye can see; a car-packed
lifestyle and landscape oppress our existence. The motor vehicle and its by-products sully the earth at every turn. 'A car,'
to quote another truism, 'is a machine that produces pollution.' Multiply the single engine of contaminants by 200 million motor vehicles
and you have our major environmental villain."
Jane Holtz Kay, 1997 (from Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back)
Back to the Top
"dont know how to drive, just typewrite."
Jack Kerouac, 1953 (from a letter to Neal & Carolyn Cassady)
Back to the Top
Consider the man on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for most of my life. Well,
mostly he is a good man, but there is a change in him as soon as he mounts. Every man on horseback
is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot. The man in the automobile is one thousand
times as dangerous. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of
automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will mark
the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living happily in one home. It will
destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true sense of Nation. It will create giantized cankers
of cities, false opulence of suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerations of
specialized farming and manufacturing, it will breed rootlessness and immorality. It will make every
man a tyrant.
R.A. Lafferty (thanks to
Adbusters for this quote)
Back to the Top
My Kingdom For a Car
I’ve found my freedom/ Her and I been flying down that highway of gold/ My shirtsleeves
are rolled, my Colt 45 is cold./ I go fast, till I’m going faster.
Look how far we’ve come, look how far/ A car, a car, my kingdom for a car.
How I love the highway/ Picks me up and takes me wherever I please/ I race through the
trees bring space to her knees/ I am master of all that’s flying past me.
Look how far we’ve come, look how far/ A car, a car, my kingdom for a car.
Take me to tomorrow/ Let me go on racing with the wind in my hair/ There’s smoke in the air
but I do not care/ If you want me, you will have to pass me
Look how far we've come, look how far/ A car, a car, my kingdom for a car.
Come to me baby,/ We will leave this town it was not made for a man/ We’ll find a new land,
but the traffic is jammed/ I went far but it’s a time for walking
Look how far we’ve come, look how far/ A car, a car, my kingdom for a car.
Phil Ochs, 1968
Back to the Top
"Get a horse."
Early anti-automobile quote.
Back to the Top
Anybody who thinks we're going to be using cars twenty-five years from now the way we've been
accustomed to using them in the recent past ought to have his head examined. That phase of our
national history is over....
The regime of mass car use is an offshoot of our historical aversion to civility itself. The car allows
Americans to persist in the delusion that civic life is unnecessary. As a practical matter, this regime is
putting us out of business as a civilization.
James Howard Kunstler, 1996 (from Home From Nowhere)
Back to the Top
"I’m not sure he’s wrong about automobiles," Eugene said. "With all their speed forward they
may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add
to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come,
and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all
outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war,
and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways
because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can’t have the immense
outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right,
and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can
see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine, but
would have to agree with him that automobiles ‘had no business to be invented.’"
Booth Tarkington (1918) (from The Magnificent Ambersons)
Back to the Top
In the 1930s, when millions of comic books were inundating the young with gore, nobody seemed
to notice that emotionally the violence of millions of cars in our streets was incomparably more
hysterical than anything that could ever be printed. All the rhinos and hippos and elephants in the
world, if gathered in one city, could not begin to create the menace and explosive intensity of the
hourly and daily experience of the internal-combustion engine. Are people really expected to
internalize—live with—all this power and explosive violence, without processing and siphoning it off
into some form of fantasy for compensation and balance?
Marshall McLuhan (1963)(from Understanding Media)
Back to the Top
The car imposes huge indirect costs on the society. Some of the most obvious are the salaries
of highway patrolmen, the cost of traffic systems, the price of parking lots. And Charles Abrams has
computed the annual cost of the traffic jam -- in terms of time and wages lost, extra fuel consumption,
vehicle depreciation, etc. -- at $5 billion.
Michael Harrington, 1968 (from Toward a Democratic Left)
Back to the Top
We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legisaltive assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our
culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.
Edward Abbey, (from Desert Solitaire) - thanks to Michael Burton for this one.
Back to the Top
Whether the people are inside or out. Automobiles are a story unto themselves. They've come
so far in such a short time. They have taken over everywhere. They break thru the forests and the
dunes and the mountains and bring civilization faster and wilder than the railroads ever could. They
aren't bound by two rails. They suggest an absolute freedom, freedom that could take the mind to
anywhere. They can go even where there are no roads; they can run over everything old and
suggest a constant present. They seem like so much freedom but they actually are so much
dependence. When you gain a car you lose a self. Cars keep driving to the furthest reaches,
past where the roads peter out. The people stay inside them, enclosed in glass and steel.
Eyes of night
in full daylight
squeaks don't stop trucks
A car can drive. A car can give drive. A car can give you drive. That's why you never stop.
That's why you never begin.
John Akre, (from Billion Million Thousand Hundred Novel Not Extinct)
Back to the Top
