hating the automobile

I hate automobiles---for quite visceral reasons, as any reader of this blog will realize.

The anthropologist, Catherine Lutz, together with Anne Lutz Fernandez, has now written a book about the evils of the automobile.

She will (I predict--as I haven't read the book---) be much more objective and scholarly, but I have no reason to think her conclusions will differ from my own...(viz., we should get rid of cars; they are, as the Czech philosopher/sociologist Vaclav Belohradsky has said, an obsolete form of technology---and that is a polite under-statement.......)...

http://www.carjacked.org/

As I've not read the book, it is, to some extent, dangerous that I've added this link, dangerous that I've made this entry. Well, I'm living dangerously. (and especially when I find myself traveling at 60mph or more with cars close behind, close to the right, etc.----involuntarily doing so as the public transit locally is total shit.....) Someone might come to a more nuanced or critical view of cars reading this work. I hate cars too much to spend time reading about them. Least of all do I want to re-live the experience of having to have a car, the enormous amount of wasted mental space, worrying, planning, spending, etc, etc. which is forced upon us in this hideous unfree country because public transport is inadequate.....

On the other hand, I've read C. Lutz's book about emotions, so I trust her to say something worth hearing.

The Grouch Reads...

Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy, & Liberty

As I continue to experience the fundamental lack of civility in El Paso Texas--the non-stop noise of pounding stereos in cars and in houses, dogs with their screeching barks, and the sheer aggressiveness and indifference of drivers toward pedestrians, I am always heartened to find that someone is aware of the general problem, even if their acknowledgment is made very much in passing, as below:

Bicycles and motor-cars can be lumped together because they have the same basic function, but there are differences between them which are interesting from certain points of view (the bicycle is thermodynamically more efficient than the car, is less destructive of people and environment and community and so on).

(added emphasis, Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy & Liberty (Cambridge UP 1982), p.p. 7-8)