UD has always found his 1997 essay, Cars and their Enemies, repulsive. A striking example of American entitlement, it’s also pointlessly flippant and nonchalantly incorrect.
Nowhere, in his paean to the car, does Wilson talk about any location in the world but the United States of America (occasionally he touches on Europe, in order to ridicule its system of trains). It seems not to occur to him that what the car does, it does to the globe, and so confining yourself to what it does to Washington DC and San Francisco is irresponsible.
Wilson loves the feel of the wind in his hair as he speeds through the countryside. He can’t get this feeling unless he’s alone, and only a car delivers absolute privacy.
These feelings are quintessentially American, and people who don’t like cars are unAmerican:
Cars are about privacy; critics say privacy is bad and prefer group effort. (Of course, one rarely meets these critics in groups. They seem to be too
busy rushing about being critics.) [No one says privacy is bad and insists on solidarity all the time… except … what? Socialists?] Cars are about autonomy; critics say that the pursuit of autonomy destroys community. [Ask someone who has pissed away large amounts of his life sitting in traffic how autonomous that made him feel. He’s stuck in traffic because like everyone else around him he has no option but to take the one feeder highway available to his job. Talk about personal liberty.] (Actually, cars allow people to select the kind of community in which they want to live.) [Just the opposite. Many people tend to live in very distant, less expensive exurbs because they figure they can commute a bit longer and save on the price of the house. They’re not choosing hours each day of car dependency.
This is simply the best they can do.] Cars are about speed; critics abhor the fatalities they think speed causes. (In fact, auto fatalities have been declining for decades, including after the 55-mile-per-hour national speed limit was repealed. Charles Lave suggests that this is because higher speed limits reduce the variance among cars in their rates of travel, thereby producing less passing and overtaking, two dangerous highway maneuvers.) [Critics abhor the fatalities cars cause. Note that Wilson says nothing here about injuries rather than fatalities.] Cars are about the joyous sensation of driving on beautiful country roads; critics take their joy from politics. [Does Wilson really think he’s making a point here? Is he being funny? He doesn’t care about the answer to these questions. He’s too insouciant. That’s been his tone throughout. I like cars, and you can fuck yourself.] (A great failing of the intellectual life of this country is that so much of it is centered in Manhattan, where one finds the highest concentration of nondrivers in the country.) Cars make possible Wal-Mart, Home Depot, the Price Club, and other ways of allowing people to shop for rockbottom prices; critics want people to spend their time gathering food at downtown shops (and paying the much higher prices that small stores occupying expensive land must charge).
Endless rockbottom-price exurbs full of people bumping around in cars all day — I’ve drunk the milk of Paradise.
March 2nd, 2012 at 6:22PM
UD hates this guy so much that she wrote an obit for him? Either Andy Breitbart was working strictly in video (no writing to criticize) or too many others got there first…
Kidding aside, I’m not that familiar with this guy and I like to think that I’m an information junkie. But a quick look at wikipedia was all the reminder I needed: political scientist pushing the ‘broken windows’ theory of law enforcement from back in the 80s.
Ever go over to eschatonblog.com? That’s one of the few places I see the public transit vs. cars, cars, and more cars issue come up with any regularity.
March 2nd, 2012 at 7:00PM
Mike S: I like some of Wilson’s work too – but I really hated this essay of his…
I’ve been reading about Breitbart – I knew nothing about him – only learning about his views now…
March 3rd, 2012 at 8:49AM
Regarding preferences for living close to or far from one’s work, see the trolley–a view from 1902. It appears that the preference for suburbia predates the automobile.
My most recent post…Author Appreciation: Fanny Kemble
March 4th, 2012 at 6:41AM
I guess if the choice is sitting in your car like Wilson describes or living in a 1200 sq ft apartment and paying $70K per year for private schools to live in NYC (http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2012/02/29/the-new-poster-child-for-class-warfare/
I think more people will take the car.
One of the driving motivations for people in the U.S. is to not live near poor people. Having a car makes it easier to not live near poor people. As the stories about NYC demonstrates, living near poor people can be very expensive.