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I've been reading a lot
lately about Americans and driving, and about
how we like to drive but how lately we've come to
not like driving nearly so much. The best-selling
Traffic
and the more academic Autophobia
both describe the symptoms (and both are reviewed
on this website). But it wasn't until I tackled Cotton
Seiler's Republic of Drivers that I actually
began to understand why cars and driving them have
fallen out of favor, become more dreaded than delightful.
Warning: Just as the Porsche 911 Turbo is not a
car for the casual driver, Republic of Drivers
is not a book for the casual reader. To properly
put a Porsche through its paces is a lot of work,
albeit with a lot of reward for the driving enthusiast.
Likewise, Seiler's book reads like a Ph. D thesis.
The 15-page Introduction is basically a definition
of terms and 50 of the book's 192 pages comprise
evidentiary notes and bibliographical details. Meanwhile,
the 134 pages of text are full of polysyllabic words
that may have you, as they did me, reaching for the
dictionary.
Seiler is an associate professor of American studies
at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The
school's website reports that he teaches cultural
and intellectual history, popular culture and social
theory. In Republic of Drivers, he "asserts
automobility as essential to shaping the dominant
meaning of "America" and "American"
in the twentieth century.
For example, he notes, "the state-issued driver's
license - currently held by 87 percent of United
States residents of driving age - has become the
basic means of authorizing and verifying not merely
driving ability, but individual identity and - as
the recent controversy over licensing undocumented
immigrants shows - national belonging."
Citing everything from the lure of the "open
road" to Cold War, us versus them propaganda,
Seiler shows how the automobile (and the Interstate
highway) has come to represent that most cherished
of American values -- freedom.
According to a 1936 driving manual, "You cannot
teach people to be good drivers without teaching
the same kind of things that make them good citizens."
Seiler also shows how driving the automobile has
become a road for freedom, first for white men, later
for white women, and eventually for African Americans
(and other ethnic groups) - at least when they travel
within the anonymity of the Interstate highways.
Venture off the exit ramp, however, and risk racial
profiling and other local hazards.
The book provides well documented historical perspective
and well-told stories on such issues and will have
you pondering how "women's automobility was…
shaped rather than curtailed" or the phenomenon
that "Like sexuality, automobility's emancipatory
pleasures and destructive potential called for the
construction of an apparatus… that would simultaneously
enable and constrain, cultivate and regulate, govern
and license it."
Seiler quotes a succession of those who went before
him - from poets to politicians, philosophers to
pundits, from Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac -- who
saw the automobile as a facility for freedom and
self-improvement (and self-empowerment), transforming
us to become "invincible" and "free."
As one columnist put it: "at the deepest level,
our cars are a tangible expression of our most important
values. Freedom. Choice. Privacy. Individualism.
Self-reliance."
Speed became a drug. The car let Americans explore
their nation. It restored the romance, the wonder,
the adventure of travel. "A man in a train,"
it was argued, "is a man in a straightjacket."
And yet, increasingly, we find ourselves feeling
as though we're in that straightjacket as we drive.
Seiler notes "the U.S. government reported
in 1968 that 'the average American citizen [has]
more direct dealings with government through licensing
and regulation of the automobile than through any
other single public activity'."
And it's only gotten worse since then. Increasingly,
we find roads not freeing, but gridlocked with traffic,
and our movement not free, but monitored by speed,
red light and even toll way "express" lane
cameras. (Seiler notes there are similar tracking
devices involved with everything from the Internet
- the "information superhighway" -- to
the ATM machine.)
Highways, Seiler notes, "restrict and regulate
the driver even as they facilitated speed and expanded
the choice of vectors." In other words, he says,
they become Mobius strips providing the thrill of
acceleration, the illusion of escape, and yet that
drive into the sunset simply takes you back to where
you started.
It's been nearly two decades since philosopher Gilles
Deleuze wrote, "You do not control people with
a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the
means of control… people can travel indefinitely
and 'freely' without being confined while being perfectly
controlled. That is our future'."
Are we there yet? is a question every parent has
heard. Reading Seiler we hear the voice of the navigation
system informing us that our republic of drivers
has, indeed, arrived at its destination.
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