The Weekly Screed #751

To drive or not to drive
by David Benjamin

“… Went around a corner and I passed a truck
I whispered a prayer just for luck
Fenders was clicking the guardrail posts
The guys beside me were white as a ghost…”
                  — Charlie Ryan, “Hot Rod Lincoln”

MADISON, Wis. — My mother was a debutante without a ball.

Despite straitened and regularly destitute circumstances, she maintained an incongruous hauteur that befuddled us, her children — for whom she was more a big sister than those grownup TV moms who wore pearls in the kitchen and waited with milk and cookies for kids named Bud and Beaver to come home from school.

Mom was a working single mother when that status was a synonym for “scarlet woman.” But in her formative years, she had somehow come to believe herself a princess thrust — by some epic injustice — among the peasantry. She might never escape the company of the rabble (among whom she included us, her very kids), but she could at least carry herself as though she was above it all.

Mom was born, in sum, to have a chauffeur.

This is why it was vital in our family that I should get a driver’s license as soon as I turned sixteen. Mom needed a driver and I didn’t object. Chauffeuring Mom and dropping her off left me in charge of our ’61 Fairlane (dubbed, by Ray Keener, the Brown Bomb) for hours of unfettered tooling around.

There are rumors abroad that the century-old love affair between American teenage boys and cars has finally ended. Nowadays, apparently, a horny 16-year-old would rather have an app-loaded iPhone. Well, OK. But in the manly Sixties of Thunderbirds and bumper bullets, car love was in full flower. Turning 16, passing your driver’s test, hitting the road — this was a rite of passage more profound, and definitely more likely, than getting laid by the prom queen.

Driving — even if only in your parents’ sedan once or twice a week — was freedom. It was range, setting you loose from the neighborhood, and it was speed. You could get to Shakey’s in ten minutes, rather than the exhausting hour it took on a three-speed Schwinn.

Driving was wealth, because you could get a job and drive to work. And it was prestige, especially if you had your own wheels. Besides the Brown Bomb, I got around after football games in Mike Webster’s classic ’54 Chevrolet Webmobile and in Dick Albright’s yellow ’57 Chevy Bel Air — possibly the  most envied automobile in the parking lot at LaFollette High.

And driving was, if course, sex. No guy had a chance without a car.

And driving cars, fixing, rebuilding and customizing them, painting them, racing them, even designing cars, was — for a lot of kids — a vocation and a dream. My brother Bill is a car guy. So is my daughter’s consort, Steve. I’ve never met a true car guy who’s not stand-up and salt-of-the-earth. There’s something about flushing radiators and gapping plugs that builds character.

Even Shakespeare foresaw the romance of the road when, in Hamlet, he wrote:

To steer — perchance to crash: ay, there's the rub!
For in that flirt with death what dreams may come…

Mom, of course, being a princess, wasn’t seduced. She resented the chore of driving and lived in constant fear of the fatal deer that would plunge through her windshield on Interstate 90. So she turned the wheel over to me, and then to Bill.

I realized recently that Mom lived too soon. Sometime early next year, Ford and Google (Foogle?) will be announcing a new generation of computer-driven “intelligent” cars, shaped like adorable warts, sans steering wheels, that taxi timid passengers hither and yon, on programmed routes, without undue speed, bereft of drama and totally devoid of any sex appeal (except, of course, you could actually have sex inside your Foogle while riding, oblivious to road, weather, traffic and all those fatal deer, to Grandma’s farm for Thanksgiving dinner).

If everyone were my mother, autonomous cars like Google’s glorified golf cart, would be the Next Big Thing tomorrow. But, even though car companies and Silicon Valley seers keep announcing new breakthroughs in self-driving auto-tech, I still think this Foogle’s going to be a hard sell — at least to guys.

I think of Hamlet’s NASCAR dreams. I think of Dead Man’s Curve and the Beach Boys’ four-speed dual-quad posi-traction 409.

I look at the Google car, a sort of pastel Teletubby on little toy wheels, and then I picture, say, a classic Camaro, James Bond’s Aston-Martin, Nash Bridges’ ‘Cuda, and above all, Steve McQueen’s Mustang, its phallic form plunging Bullitt-like into the welcoming maw of the Route 101 tunnel — where it overlooks the San Francisco skyline — and I think, “Not so much.”

I think of the closest common object in American culture to the blatantly priapic blend of form and raw power intrinsic to say, a ’73 slant-six Duster, with a gripper-wrapped steering wheel, four-on-the-floor, a compass on the dash, an optional roll bar and maybe a nice pair of giant foam dice hanging off the rearview, and what comes to mind?

Right! A gun.

It seems to me that even as millions like Mom will welcome the advent of cars that can get you there without the anxiety of steering, the ordeal of navigation and the fear of collision, there will rise up an equal, opposite and far more passionate enemy camp. Its millions will perceive the self-driving car as Big Business and Big Government conspiring to close down the open road, to strip from the beleaguered working class its last link to independence, to shred our gears and render every real American guy (plus Danica Patrick and Shirley Muldowney) effeminate, impotent and superfluous.

I see road rage. I see war.

I see Foogles forced into ditches by 30-year-old Dodge Rams. I see grease-monkeys learning to program, so they can hack into little old ladies’ (LOL) autotubbies, lock all their doors and send them, careening and infarcting in endless circles on traffic rotaries, around and around while the grease-hackers laugh out loud (LOL).

I see, above all, a resistance so deep and lasting that auto-tech issues will migrate from Detroit and Sunnyvale to park in Washington, where car wars will rage incoherently for years, where Congressional battles will cite safety and economy and ecology, freedom and government overreach.  But all the talk will really be about manhood, muscle and erectile function.

Because taking the steering wheel away from an American guy is going to be just as hard as getting him to give up his Smith & Wesson, his Remington 12-gauge, his Colt .45, and especially that classic ’55 Type 3 Kalashnikov with a hand-tooled mahogany stock, a night-scope rail and a 30-round clip.