When they invented the car, they invented the collision.—David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, p.178

Last week I had occasion to pilot an automobile for the first time since the summer of 2005. Wishing to visit a 94-year-old friend who recently moved to an assisted living facility in Media, Pennsylvania, I had made diligent inquiries about public transportation options, only to discover that if didn’t choose to drive there, I’d be forced to either cadge a ride or walk. (How ironic that my friend, a true Manhattanite who used to walk or take the bus everywhere, was now marooned in driving-land.) Consoling myself with the thought that it’s good to practice my driving skills occasionally, I bit the bullet, rented a car from a facility right up the street from my earth-friendly Food Coop, and drove over the Verrazano Bridge to the Jersey Turnpike, thence to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and so to Media.

It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve had regular access to a car. Not owning one is a blessing rather than a singular hardship because I live in New York, arguably the only major metropolitan area in the U.S. where being carless is a common if hardly ubiquitous middle-class phenomenon. I actually know a fair number of perfectly competent, functional adults who’ve never had a driver’s license! Still, I’m conscious of the importance of holding onto my own license, not only because it allows me to get on an airplane but because I hail originally from the real America, the one where access to a metal structure on wheels that functions as a sort of prosthetic extension of the natural body is tantamount to adulthood, selfhood, and citizenship.

My relatives in other parts of the country take this prosthetic use of the car for granted. I’ll never forget a comment made by a maternal uncle of mine at some family gathering in Minnesota. The talk had turned to my life in New York –always a big mystery to most of my extended family—and to the fact that I survived quite well without an automobile. “I can’t imagine being without a car,” Uncle Don said quietly, with the fervor with which I myself might have said, “I can’t imagine not being able to read,” or, “I can’t imagine being locked down in my cell 23 hours out of every day.”

In part because I drive so seldom, but also because when I do, my residence at the center of an arterial congestion that a certain William Gibson novel memorably terms The Sprawl immediately confronts me with some of the more extreme automotive experiences our nation has to offer, I notice that my forays into the American Way of Speed give me a startlingly clear perspective on a prime example of what David Wojnarowicz calls “the pre-invented world”—an environment encrusted with “senseless” rote activities that we conform to, like it or not, because to refuse is to volunteer for a kind of social death. On my trip to Media, I got an almost ecstatic sense of the many tentacles of insanity that seemed to reach out from me in my fetching little brand new scarlet compact to strangle the universe:

• the insanity of CO2 emissions blithely nudging global warming to ever more dangerous extremes
• the insanity of wars for control of energy resourcers
• the insanity of handing more oil profits to corporate interests that will use some of those profits to tighten their stranglehold on our debased political culture
• the insanity of living in the environments created by the noise and stench and aesthetic monotony of millions of automobiles
• the insanity of remolding the earth to make it more car-friendly, such that the places to which we might like to gain access via the magic of the internal combustion engine cease to exist or no longer seem any different from our point of origin because of the homogenizing effects of automobile traffic
• the insanity of making the car itself our accustomed environment—daily hours spent commuting, long trips during which what one “sees” (cut off from every other form of sensory connection to surroundings) is mostly other cars, roads, access ramps, and service area parking lots
• the insanity of the danger involved in turning ever larger hordes of fallible, distracted, frustrated people loose to travel at maximum velocity, “protected” by the snake oil of seat belts, air bags (which I’ve been told may injure me if I move my seat far enough forward to comfortably reach the brake and accelerator, given that American cars are designed for the safety of full-sized Americans, and at 5’3” I’m too tiny to qualify), and speed limits that the vast majority of drivers commonly exceed by at least 10 to 15 miles per hour, evidently without fear of incurring a penalty
• the insanity of the danger involved in designing highways to be shared “equitably” by compact cars, SUV’s, and enormous tractor-trailer rigs
• the insanity of allowing enormous tractor-trailer rigs to race each other at speeds often exceeding 70 mph, sometimes bearing down two abreast on the slower travelers occupying the only available lanes, zooming blithely past signs that instruct “Do Not Tailgate”
• the insanity of accepting the ubiquitous use of speed as a drug, such that one is tempted to exchange anything approaching a decent “quality of life” (which doesn’t, in any event, appear at all accessible) for the available semi-godlike pleasure of hurtling over the hills; snarling “I’m outta here” and doing as I ended up doing with the tractor-trailer rigs: speeding up to in the hope of maintaining more control than I have when I incur the wrath of the many-tonned by driving with comfortable restraint
• the insanity of acquiescing without a murmur in…how many thousand? domestic traffic fatalities per year (imagine the outcry if these were deaths from any other preventable source)

As you can probably figure out, I’m just “anti-car” (to borrow an epithet flung at certain New Yorkers he disdained by our former Mayor Giuliani, also known for his conflation of democracy with obedience to authority). Ironically, I’m also a proud member of not one but three United Automobile Worker locals: 7902 (through my faculty job at the New School), 2322 (through my job at Goddard College) and the National Writers Union. The earth-murdering industry that prompted the heroic worker activism that eventually made possible my own union life (organizing efforts amongst underpaid adjunct faculty having been quite literally financed by the dues contributions of the real Auto Workers who briefly achieved decent blue-collar compensation during the era of “Fordist” capitalism) is now tossing American workers overboard like so much ballast: “Whatever you do, don’t rent a Ford Focus,” advised my good union buddy when I asked him about car rentals, “it’s a piece of crap.” (I took his advice and drove to Media in a Hyundai.)

Yet let the record reflect that I enjoy driving. I get a thrill out taking my life in my hands. The speed-as-a-drug thing works for me. On top of which, I relish feeling like a real citizen, and someone who has mastered the adult tasks of my so-called civilization. I’m aware of, and respond to, the car’s function as a flatterer of so many of my baser impulses—a distinguisher of persons, a reminder of my status as conspicuous consumer, one of the “haves” of our Consumer Planet, born to squander more energy in a trip of a hundred miles than some people use up in a year of getting from place to place. My seat behind the wheel reminds me that I’m better off than Saudi women who are not allowed to drive, better off than people who can’t whip out a major credit card as a means of access to vehicle rentals and gasoline purchases. I’m so gratifyingly much more mobile than the incarcerated people I envision behind the walls of the newly constructed McPrison—identified by its stockade-like window slits and extravagant billows of razor wire—looming right beside the turnpike. (Remember when prisons used to be old buildings, tucked away upstate? Now you see them popping up all over.)

Unlike my 94-year-old friend, who stopped driving long ago and must depend on group shopping trips organized by the management of her facility, I’ve got the keys to the highway.