Americans love to drive. People all around the world drive but Americans like are really into it. Like really really into it. It’s part of our national imaginarium.[1] Getting a driver’s license is a huge rite of passage in most of the United States, as is getting your first car. Highway 66 is as important to the American mythosphere[2] as cowboys and McDonalds. When I teach American history classes I always spend at least a couple of minutes talking about “Car Culture,” first in the 1920s and then later in the 40s and 50s. Heck, just watch any truck or car ad ever and half of them will be about the “Freedom of the road,” or “the spirit of freedom,” or some similar nonsense. What I’m saying is, most Americans want to reenact that scene from Crash.
Contrarian that I am, I don’t love automobiles. I don’t love driving. They are also bad for the environment, expensive to maintain, and make city living far less enjoyable than it should be. I’ve written in support of a ban on all cars in urban areas on this very site. I still maintain that buses, trains, and hell, even those little electric scooters, should be the only vehicles – outside of emergency ones - allowed within the limits of metropolitan zones. That is a good idea. I also believe that riding around in the car during the summer while blasting some sick tunes is cool as hell. Sorry that I contain multitudes.
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I have a memory that I’m assuming a lot of people share. Perhaps not the specifics, but the same general vibe. It was 2009 in Evanston, sometime in July or August. For me, the summer between high school and college. It was late on a Friday and one of those beautiful summer nights that only Lake Michigan provides. 85-ish during the day and 75 at night. Me and two friends were driving around in a third friend’s Jeep. He had taken the top off and rolled the windows down. I think we were somewhere on Chicago and Dempster just bopping around without a curfew. We were listening to Passion Pit’s “Little Secrets” which had just come out. The wind was blowing our hair and the whole world was in front of us. At that moment, I understood the joy of driving around listening to some damn tunes.
A note about “Little Secrets” by Passion Pit: this is a perfect song. It is also the apotheosis of 2000s-2010s Indie Pop. Delicately electronic melody line, obtuse but singable chorus, danceable but not in an obvious way, and just enough fuzz to be interesting, “Little Secrets” really does it all. While it’s best enjoyed in early spring and summer it can be imbibed year-round without worry.[3] If you haven’t heard this song, or don’t immediately recall what it sounds like, please, I beg you, listen to it right now. You won’t be disappointed.
Another slightly more embarrassing memory. It was the summer of 2006. I was working as a counselor at Crooked Creek Christian Camp in Southeastern Iowa. Some of the other counselors and I had a night off and we were driving around some of Iowa’s many dirt roads, probably in between Kalona and Wellman. It was a clear night, almost too cold, but not quite. Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” came on the radio, immediately followed by The Plain White T’s “Hey There Delilah.” We, collectively, sang our hearts out to those two songs motoring in between fields of feed corn and soybeans—another great summer night spent jamming to tunes in a car.
I don’t want to use Dang Dude to encourage more people to drive more often. Even if rolling down the windows and playing some Avril Lavigne or Passion Pit feels rad as hell. Buses and trains whip! They’re wildly impressive feats of engineering. Any city worth its salt needs to ensure the continued success of its public transportation systems. Bikes and bike infrastructure, also rips, even if I don’t do it as much as I should.
So, what is the point of this piece then? To just talk about how cool something is and then castigate others for doing it? Doesn’t seem like a very effective argument. I’m also not speaking from some like enviro king perch, looking down upon all the polluting peons. I drive pretty regularly, not every day, but more than most. I have not eliminated single-use plastics from my life, though I do recycle and compost whenever I can.
That all being said, solving the climate crisis is going to take getting rid of some things that rule. Life, especially for many people in the United States, will need to become a little less convenient if we’re going to save the planet. Driving around blasting music just might have to become a thing of the past.
To me, it’s worth it. I can enjoy music a million different ways, with friends, without them, in public and in private. If it means that there is a habitable world for everyone, then that’s certainly a sacrifice that everyone should be willing to make. Including me! Americans are typically uncomfortable with sacrifice. Laws to raise taxes to fund schools or public works routinely fail across the country. We don’t really like being asked to consume less, drive less, or eat differently. Trump built his whole campaign around the idea that consuming more is good and people’s birthright. Democrats, even if not as vocally, promote similar arguments, refusing to spend money in ways that meaningfully promote environmental change. Hell, Biden won’t even stop people from drilling in Alaska. It’s a hard lift to get people to give up stuff they like.
I don’t know what the answer to this question is, other than that it will take a lot of organizing and heavy lifting. More directly, it’ll take convincing people that the climate crisis truly is an existential threat that we can do something about. So far, seems like it’s going to take a lot of work to do. But hey, hard is not impossible, and that’s something worth trying.
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[1] Did I just make up this word or is a something that academics use? I’ll let you decide!
[2] Did I just make up this word or is a something that academics use? I’ll let you decide!
[3] Do my music reviews sometimes sound like wine-pairing notes? Yes, they do. So what?