In his classic 1973 essay, The Social Ideology of the Motor Car, philosopher Andre Gorts

wrote that cars offered the masses the bourgeois privilege of going faster than everyone

else.

But quote, as the working class began to buy them as well, defrauded motorists realized

that they had been had, they had been promised a bourgeois privilege, they had gone into

debt to acquire it, and now they saw that everyone else could also get one.

But good is a privilege if everyone can have it.

It's a fool's game, worse, it pits everyone against everyone else.

General paralysis is brought on by a general clash.

For when everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie,

everything comes to a halt.

In the speed of city traffic plummets, in Boston, as in Paris, Rome, or London, to below

that of the horse car.

At rush hours, the average speed on the open road falls below the speed of a bicyclist.

That's my most memorable experience of driving, sitting in traffic.

Because like most Americans, I often can't choose a bicycle, or a train, or a bus.

The freedom promised by the car is an illusory one.

It obscures the reality that we are subject to a system of control.

We are forced to drive, slowly and miserably, because our infrastructure commands it.

Until we decide to leave the city, and go on a road trip, the ultimate, atomized American

pastime, racing through space with the windows up in the AC blasting.

That's where today's story starts.

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