HEAVY METAL FREEWAY*

War is the moral equivalent of traffic — or is it the other way around? Forgive me if my categories are slightly scrambled, but I live in Southern California which, to misquote Woody Guthrie, is “a paradise to live in or see, but only if you got an SUV.” My daily commute, a grim ninety miles each way, increasingly resembles the famed tank battle of El Alamein. What a writer back in the 1920s called “Southern California’s juggernaut of pleasure” is now war without mercy as 18 million people in 14 million vehicles struggle with the worst traffic congestion in the country. Each morning I saddle up my own personal armored vehicle — a sinister-looking V8,4-wheel-drive Toyota Tundra pickup — and plow into one of the middle lanes of Interstate 5. For the next hour and half, I fight my fellow citizens—no quarter given or requested—for freeway lebensraum.

Panzer divisions of “sports utility vehicles” — imagine the old-fashioned family station wagon on steroids and meth — now dominate the freeways. Pole position on a Southern California freeway has always been a harrowing place, but it is especially terrifying now that heavy metal rules. The basic strategy of rush-hour road war is to terrorize the car in front of you. This is especially easy when you are driving some huge hunk of combat steel like a Chevy Suburban or Ford Explorer while the poor sod ahead of you is puttering along in his pathetic Corolla or Ford Escort.

Ideally you should take him by surprise. The standard practice is to stealthily pull up a few microns behind his rear bumper. It is bad form (or worse, a New York custom) to honk. It is better to wait until he suddenly notices your towering menace in his mirror. His panicked lane change is then sweetly savored social deference. Most of the time, however, one SUV simply piles up behind another. Class privilege cancels itself out, and there is no alternative but to wait until someone’s nerves crack and he or she moves out of the way. As in war and other blood sports, coolness under stress is the supreme virtue. Who cannot but admire the brave Westside housewife, so calmly sipping a cappuccino and chatting on her cellular, as her massive Dodge bears down suicidally on the snarled traffic ahead?

It is true that recovering heart patients, poor immigrants in jalopies, frightened moms with babes on board, and followers of Mahatma Gandhi usually cling to the slower right lanes of the freeway. But it is a foolish sanctuary since they are either directly in the path of merging SUVs entering the freeway at warp speed or sandwiched between 70-foot-long semis that can crush them like aluminum cans. Inevitably, the hegemony of SUVs in traffic dictates defensive rearmament and a logic of mutual deterrence. Although, as a tree-hugging radical, I would theoretically prefer to drive an eco-friendly electric car, or, better, bike to work under the warm California sky, I see no realistic choice but to protect myself with a gangsterish pickup.

We need to remind our children, however, that traffic, even in Southern California, was not always this red in tooth and claw. There was a time, roughly between tail fins and SUVs, and in the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis, when plucky, fuel-efficient little compacts, made by ingenious Japanese elves, temporarily dominated the freeways. This was internal combustion’s Middle Earth. Why did it disappear so abruptly in the 1990s?

The answer, I am sure, is because there was such a perfect pathological fit between the SUV and middle-class anxiety in the early 1990s. It is surely not accidental that Detroit’s new generation of family tanks appeared at the moment when “carjackings” and freeway shootings dominated prime-time news. Or when good burghers by the hundreds of thousands were retreating into gated suburbs guarded by armies of private security guards. The SUV was similarly perceived to be a steel cocoon of middle-class security in the freeway badlands. These huge hunks of Japanese and Korean steel also quickly became the muscular symbols of the new, I-will-invade-your-country-and-kill-your-momma Republicanism. The 9/11 attacks added flagpoles as auto accessories, giving Suburbans and Explorers bedecked with Old Glory the patriotic panache of the Seventh Cavalry charging into a Sioux village.

Finally, SUVs are luxury temporary housing for enduring commute hell. Southern California traffic remains the worst in the United States (although Seattle and Washington, D.C., are not far behind) with drivers from its outer suburbs sacrificing the equivalent of two extra work weeks per year (seventy-five hours) to the demon god of gridlock. The estimated annual economic cost to commuters is almost 9 billion dollars or $ 1,668 per person in the Los Angeles region. Traffic, moreover, is increasing much faster than population and new freeways are clogged within four years of construction. A recent study has shown that Los Angeles is the most difficult metropolitan area to escape from through travel on weekends: scientific confirmation for the angry claustrophobia that is replacing the region’s once vaunted culture of physical mobility and long weekend drives. In a recent, authoritative survey of Southern California public opinion, traffic ranked far ahead of jobs, crime, education, and housing as the region’s foremost problem.

Local talk radio and right-wing blogs are clogged toilets of nativist hysteria blaming gridlock on illegal immigrants. But the real motor of congestion is sprawl and land inflation, not demography. In their ceaseless quest for affordable housing far away from epicenters of urban violence, several million families have moved out to the edge of the desert or beyond. Since jobs, by and large, have not followed them, the price tag of the Southern California dream is now a three-hour round-trip each day between interior homes and coastal jobs. At the same time, California’s transportation infrastructure—once the freeway wonder of the world—now lags hopelessly behind the standards of the rest of the advanced industrial world. Since the tax revolts of the late 1970s, the state’s roadways have become as potholed and unreliable as its collapsing inner-city schools and decrepit power grids. Despite twenty years of apocalyptic warnings, the gap continues to widen between the state’s concentrated wealth and coastal home values, on one hand, and its expenditures on physical and social infrastructure, on the other.

The failure of local political systems to stem violence, control sprawl, or invest in efficient mass transit ensures that the vast parking lot of the Southern California freeway system will become even more nightmarishly congested over the next generation. The current seven hours per day of rush-hour immobility will eventually become twenty hours, and average freeway speeds will decline to horse-and-buggy velocities. Indeed, regional planners worry that the predicted 30 percent increase in traffic will literally strangle the world’s twelfth largest economy to death. Before future mass transit can ride to the rescue, Southern California stands to lose myriads of middle-class jobs and middle-class residents to metropolitan areas with less gridlock, shorter commutes, and higher qualities of life.

In the meantime, SUVs provide magical, if temporary, compensations of power and comfort. In the dreary democracy of gridlock, they seemed to confer a noblesse oblige, or, at least, an arrogant ability to hog the left-hand lanes. (Their owners, however, tend to ignore the fact that their size and high center of gravity, which makes them so intimidating to smaller cars, also make them lethally unstable and prone to fiery rollovers.)

The irresistible trend, then, is toward an SUV-led militarization of and immobilization of urban space. The most blatant symbol of this is the current mass marketing of a literal war wagon, the army’s Humvee, as state-of-the-art family transport. The scarcely modified civilian version, the Hummer, is the emergent Tyrannosaurus Rex of the freeways, and chief enthusiast and salesman is actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose own customized Hummers (he owns four) have long been tourist attractions in Santa Monica. A rising star in the Republican Party, Schwarznegger is also rated as a leading contender for governor of California. It is a prospect dreaded by environmental activists. With the Terminator himself in power and millions of barrels of “liberated” Iraqi oil on the market, the Age of the SUV may never end.

(2003, II Manifesto)
[Insert] Shortly after his election in November 2003, Schwarzenegger rewarded SUV drivers and dealers (some of his most important campaign contributors) by repealing recently enacted car license fees. The resulting $4 billion budget shortfall in the state budget was compensated with cuts in vital services for the poor. In the wake of soaring gas prices, I sold my gangster truck and bought a smaller (but scarcely greener) SUV; but after being pushed around by the yuppie megafauna on 1-5, I have decided to return to heavy armor as soon as possible (preferably with custom-mounted twin 50-caliber machine guns). Yield right of way or die.[/Insert]

* "In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire", Part Three: "The Unease in Gaul"
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/review/2852/