The quest for the holy rail.

AuthorHayward, Steven

The car is rapidly becoming the ultimate Rorschach test of political and social attitudes. Try it: Do you see the car as a means of freedom, a great democratic tool offering mobility and independence to the masses, a symbol of comfort and self-expression, an instrument capable of providing pleasure and enjoyment, a venue for romance? Or do you think of the car as essentially a rolling cigarette, complete with addictive properties and second-hand emissions that are harmful to our children? Do you think the car is a symbol of dependence instead of freedom? Do you speak disdainfully of Americans' "love affair with the car" as though it were a despicable perversion, or at least some kind of serious irrationality? Do you think American Graffiti should be classified as a pornographic movie? Do you think cars lead to aggression and crime (think of "road rage" and those drive-by shootings), and are responsible for despoiling the earth ("They paved paradise/Put up a parking lot")?

The second set of attitudes now constitutes the politically correct view of cars and car culture, and if the car haters have their way, it won't be long until the "car lobby" evokes the same odious connotation as the "tobacco lobby." If you think this is a paranoid exaggeration from a Jeep-driving life member of the Auto Club, just browse practically any page of Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation, which is the most complete compendium of anti-car claptrap ever assembled. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the result, since Kay is the architecture critic for The Nation. The book would make for hilarious saloon reading - in fact, I thought perhaps the book could be a tongue-in-cheek put-on, which is what I think Click and Clack of NPR's Car Talk had in mind when they provided a dust jacket blurb - were it not for the fact that anti-car sentiments are becoming increasingly accepted. Not long ago I watched a grown congressman on C-SPAN calling for a tax break for commuters "who would like to do the right thing" and ride mass transit instead of driving to work. The premise - that driving to work is immoral - went unchallenged.

You know you're on the wrong side of the elite divide when the very first sentence of the book begins with "It took a village" - I'm not making this up - "to raise this book." "Our transportation is a tangle," Kay writes, "our lives and landscape strangled by the umbilical cord of the car." Cars are bad because they are a means of "instant gratification,"...

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