“America’s love affair with the automobile” might be a trope, or maybe a cliché – it’s not a meme – but at any rate it is likely you’ve heard it before and isn’t it obvious why? The phrase can actually be traced to a single television show, believe it or not, an NBC Sunday night special from October of 1961, hosted by Groucho Marx, no less, entitled Merrily We Roll Along, where the whole love and love affair concept was introduced and repeated in so many words throughout. The show was sponsored by DuPont, which owned 23% of General Motors and are you surprised, at all? The love affair, which had started about 1908 with Henry’s “T” and gained full steam by about 1920, was never quite called that until Groucho said it before an audience of millions. The history of words is funny that way, at least sometimes.
What is also funny is that my own arousal of the same passion happened right about then, as well, though I have no memory of any DuPont-sponsored show with Groucho. Our family watched Disney on Sunday nights and nothing more need be said. I was twelve years old growing up in Los Angeles where the car dominated everybody’s life at a time when this was the norm in America everyplace, but LA, I think, was special in some ways. Freeway culture was new and in full swing – hey! you can drive so far and so fast and barely ever have to slow down, talk about a magic carpet! Of course congestion was sometimes awful but not all that often in the 1960s, and of course for decades they’d build more and more freeways to keep ahead of population trends spreading people out into the desert and up onto the foothills and that has never ceased.
And we’d go to all the dealers when the new models were introduced, going back to the late ‘50s (we all hated the Edsel, may it rest in peace) and my father was a “Ford man” and worked on his own car as I watched, or helped, especially when he had to “bleed the brakes.” We went to a few dirt-track races and the drags once or twice – when it came to cars, dad could be a sporting guy now and then – but the deal in LA is that the weather is always sunny and it’s never that cold and they never use road salt and cars age incredibly gracefully, so there were always old ones around that didn’t look old. More important, LA was a place where there was lots of money, and fancy expensive cars were everywhere, especially on the freeways, the great melting pot of motordom. It’s a great place to drive a convertible, that most romantic of all cars, and years later I’d read about Clark Gable and Gary Cooper drag racing their Duesenberg SSJs – the only two ever made – back in the ‘30s and would you believe that race might’ve never really happened? It is an actual fact that Coop’s car sold for $22 million in 1918. Fast cars and money, my friend, are what it’s all about and it’s been that way for a long long time, or at least 100 years or so, here where our love affair with the automobile sets the standard for the world, and America no longer holds a monopoly on the passion. The Chinese experience of the last 20 years says it all, but of course it’s about a whole lot more than just them.
On some level it’s probably also about you, though you might be disinclined to call it passion. I on the other hand have no reservations about admitting it, and it all started back in LA, seriously for me when I picked up a copy of Car and Driver at the supermarket around 1963 because it had a picture of the new Porsche on the cover and I’d seen them on the streets. They made a lot of strange noises because they were air-cooled, just like Volkswagens, which were everywhere in LA by then, but whereas VWs looked like beetles, Porsches in those days looked like overturned soap dishes. LA and California in general have always led the country in picking up on automotive trends, where we saw the first VWs and later Hondas and Toyotas and today it’s Teslas, probably trending towards something else as I write this, like flying cars who knows? Stay tuned.
Then there were personal elements. There were already family stories about cousin Little Eddie, my mother’s sister’s kid (his dad was my Uncle Ed), who flew bombers in the Air Force. He’d picked up a Porsche (Porsh-uh, two syllables though for a long time most people would say “Porsh”) in Germany back when almost nobody had one and the story was he drove it right there on the flight-line where the nuclear-armed planes were all sitting in a row waiting for a mission (many years later the story was that Little Eddie had switched from bombers to air transport and was “flying boxes back from Vietnam”). Then there was our neighbor Jean’s fiancee, Ken, who actually raced sports cars in local events, and my buddy Ray’s dad who owned an Austin Healey and went to races. And my dad, who turned out to be more of a sporting guy than I’d figured, and watching sports car races became a thing with us. Hey, it was California in the 1960s and I was one of the luckiest teenage boys in the world! I miss my dad. I also still subscribe to Car and Driver and keep an eye out for good car shows. A classic or quirky or interesting car is a beautiful thing, and most of the pictures here are faves seen on local streets that were worthy of saving with an image.
Of course, in the beginning there was only dad’s car, then mom finally got one to drive to work (she’d walked to work previously, and I still can hardly believe that) and all the money I made working after school was for college and that was that. But luck can be a funny thing, for by some stroke of good fortune I got a job driving for a local pharmacy, Vernon’s Rexall (owned by a guy name Ken, go figure), and the delivery vehicle was a cheap and bare-bones Chevy Nova, a true “stripper”, which was much smaller than an Impala – hey, that almost made it a sports car – and it had a manual transmission. Sure it was only “three on the tree” which means the shifter was behind the steering wheel, not a cool floor shifter with four speeds like a true sports car (or a Volkswagen). But what matters is that I learned to work a clutch and savor the full “driving experience” that a manual provides. The thrill didn’t wear off for years, until a longtime later when too many hours crawling in traffic with one’s left leg getting very very tired was no fun anymore. I loved rainy days, when things got slippery and I could skid those cheap tires around corners and practice counter-steering “into” the skid and I never crashed and nobody was the wiser. There are evidently a number of references in the Bible as to how God protects fools and this was clearly about that. I was also having the time of my life, with the only downside being all that other stuff required of a drugstore employee, like stocking shelves, that gets especially tedious when they had sales and all these little stickers for the shelves that the sales required. It seems drugstores still do this sort of thing around here, a nod to history and tradition.
As with any love affair, much of my automotive experience involved fantasy. In my bookish passion – which is how I approached everything – I’d read The Racing Driver: The Theory and Practice of Fast Driving by Denis Jenkinson, where I’d absorbed all this technical information about understeer and oversteer and taking proper lines through corners, and I’d watched plenty of real life drivers practicing this. Motorsport is not for everyone but it’s also kind of boring unless you’re there in person, at the track, where the noise and the smells and the terrifying antics of the drivers was mesmerizing and wonderful but you had to be there. The point is, if life were different and I’d been a spoiled rich kid with a fast car of my own – and southern Cal had more than its share then and probably still does – God might’ve grown tired at some point of protecting me and only She knows what would’ve happened and it could have been very, very bad. We will never know.
Instead I have always owned practical cars and driven them less than prudently, at times, but not often, and I have never driven on cheap tires. There might even be a safety angle, here, as I’ve always taken driving very seriously and know the value and satisfaction that come from doing it well. I hope that doesn’t sound like bragging, though maybe it is. Good driving includes knowing how to manage traffic, with a dedication to flow and moving through it all smoothly, while generating as little disturbance as possible. Communication is key, as it makes everybody move faster if they know which way everybody else is moving, and I am a fanatic signaler and am dumbfounded by all the folks who don’t signal or who indicate their turn just as they make their move. Aren’t we all in a hurry?
In Boston, the preferred way to hurry seems to be to run red lights, cut off oncoming traffic to make a left turn, and do 40mph through dense neighborhoods whenever the coast is clear – and when you are forced to stop at a red light, become so absorbed in your phone that somebody behind must honk to wake you up and get you going. Of course we live in an age where nobody pays much attention to the road or to the task of driving, and the levels of congestion and accident statistics reflect this. In sharp contrast I am constantly scanning the road ahead and paying heed to what’s coming up behind and am intensely aware of every nanosecond I stop doing this, and it is partly due to concerns about safety but much more about taking care and pride in my role as a driver. I am a dinosaur (or a cranky old man) in this respect but so be it.
The beauty of a love affair is that much of it is fantasy until it either blows up or turns into a relationship. Love is blind but getting married gives you 20/20 vision, as the saying goes, and of course marriage is in no way required for this to happen. If humanity’s love affair with the automobile has evolved for 100 years, it is possible that one of the best expressions of what it was like way back in the beginning can be found in the words of the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who founded an art movement he called Futurism in 1909. He wrote a Futurist Manifesto that goes most insanely overboard with enthusiasm for the industrial age and things like factories and bridges and locomotives and aeroplanes and as for automobiles: the world is “enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents and explosive breath…a roaring motor car, which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”, which is a reference to a masterpiece of ancient Greek sculpture. The Futurists celebrated “speed, machinery, violence, youth, and industry” which gives you a hint of how they sort of went off the rails in some ways, as did Italy when it turned to Fascism, a move toward which the Futurists were already pointing. Hey! They were about the future! They also were totally swept up in the promises of the Machine Age, which led directly to America’s love affair with the automobile and eventually to Groucho Marx on a Sunday night.
Much of clinical social work is about helping people deal with love affairs that have evolved into relationships, when the thrill is gone and the bloom is off the rose and the hope is that something more enduring and rewarding has resulted or might result in the future, if one plays it right. Which of course is never the case if somebody shows up in the counselor’s office. The typical love affair invariably involves a degree of fantasy and a good dose of denial that there might be flaws or problems in the relationship. If it’s just people involved, that’s one thing, but what if it’s about a machine and an industry and an entire national culture? When it comes to cars, the Futurists sort of nailed the speed & power & excitement part, and for most people there is the convenience and comfort and incredible freedom-of-movement part that may have done more to keep it all going for so long, as the affair long ago matured into a relationship. Both are vital to keeping the passion high and the vehicles selling, not to mention the roads getting built to facilitate the sprawl that the car has made possible, which lies at the core of American identity. Ours is a country that spans an entire continent, where we’ve been spreading out since the beginning and that spreading out is not about to slow down, especially now that some of us can work remotely. Just give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above (even if it’s just my suburban yard with a pool) and God forbid I should live in a crowded city!
What is interesting about the denial part is how most negative aspects of car ownership are widely acknowledged, but the response to this can vary tremendously. Unless you’re financially successful at some level, a car an be very expensive to purchase and maintain and insure, especially in urban neighborhoods. If you are young and male it’s that much more. Keeping an old heap running when resources are limited can be incredibly stressful with each new thing that goes wrong (I’ve been there) and once one becomes car dependent, nobody returns to being carless willingly, which also means the car being out of commission can be a disaster. Millions of Americans live this way, and it’s possible this story is not unfamiliar to you.
You might also be familiar with the role a car can play regarding status and image; everybody knows how nothing can make a person feel better about themselves – and enhance how others see them, especially people who know nothing about them except for the car they’re driving – than a shiny new machine. The downside is that many people go into incredible debt to maintain this illusion, and it is a curious modern urban phenomenon that many streets of decrepit-looking houses are parked up with mostly pretty nice or really nice late-model cars. This is not a criticism, in a country where the high costs of owning a nice car cannot be compared to the cost of housing, which borders on the impossible and is getting steadily worse. But the financial burden of an automobile can be stressful and considerable, even for people with decent jobs. The latest phenomenon is people buying or leasing new or newer cars while still owing money on the car they are getting rid of, so maybe this need to project an impressive image – igniting the spark in the fading affair – is not a good thing, at all. A clinician might say dysfunctional. But nobody’s complaining, certainly not the car dealers or the banks, so it’s all good, right? And people do feel good about themselves, driving that new car, no doubt about it.
I have saved the most important point for last, one with which you are so familiar that I will not belabor it, as so many have belabored it ahead of me for decades. Cars and driving are crazy dangerous and did you know the statistics for death and injury in this country are on a serious uptick right now? Like your chances of getting killed in a vehicle are down to something like a hundred-to-one right now, and those are terrible odds every time you get in your car. But as always, the level of denial of this, abetted by government and the car industry and all those related industries that depend on it, continues at the same high level that has endured for at least a century. Nothing new here, folks!
Perhaps the most sad and destructive outcome of any love affair that clinicians witness with regularity is the kind that leads to domestic violence. You’ve heard of it. It’s the one where one partner mentally and often physically assaults the other on a regular basis, presenting constant danger that can end in injury and sometimes death. A very common element with d/v is denial, where the abused partner minimizes or denies the damage being done, usually because the perpetrator is incredibly persuasive and charming and even charismatic, at times. All too often, tragically and inscrutably, there is also a pattern where the victim sees the light and escapes or gets out of it in some way (a move sometimes fraught with danger), only to be lured back in by that “wonderful” person they just left, or in some cases, the next partner they find turns out to be similar to the previous one. But it all starts with love, or something that looks like that. People’s attitudes towards their cars and driving and the denial their behavior displays regarding the dangers involved (of which they are constantly reminded ad infinitum) is not at all like d/v, of course, but couldn’t one say there are some striking parallels? A great affair gone really bad?
One lifelong strategy that has worked well for me has been to eschew the car in favor of bicycling, whenever I can. Living in the city, that means most of the time. It helps of course if one has skills and experience, and can you believe a person can find riding in traffic exhilarating and fun? which is the exact opposite of the driving experience in this city and most others. It helps that I happen to be a passionate student of traffic flow, which probably played a factor in my brief career as a bicycle courier downtown during three consecutive winters awhile back. I loved that job, as did all couriers who took it seriously; nothing flows through the city like a bike, and the (very obscure) book about it and courier culture, in general, is aptly titled Urban Flow, by Jeffrey Kidder. I long ago gave up on trying to convince frustrated and unhappy motorists to get out of their cars at least sometimes, and try biking in the city. That’s because I realized those destined to do it will eventually figure it out on their own, and not before. They know when the affair with their car is over. For all too many this conclusion remains elusive, and some who might benefit are the poorer for it, but they’ll never know. Love can be like that.
