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talktoolooseThose who know me know my passionate dislike for the institution of the automobile. It is one of the great blindspots of our society that our streets are lined with parked cars and yet we don't see these streets as junk heaps, as scrap yards.
The car represents to me everything that is wrong-headed and dead-end about our civilization, a wrong path we took that is killing us. Our only response is to roll up the windows, crank the AC and turn the tunes up louder.
But there was a time when the cars represented freedom and innovation and the vastness of the land. I've been reading Drawn and Quarterly's reprints of early Gasoline Alley comics which they've printed under the name Walt and Skeezix, after the main character and the baby son he finds in his garage one day.
These are strips that appeared before my 82 year old father was born. In Volume 2, Walt and a neighbour embark on a cross-America race in their beat up cars and over the weeks that the story-line unfolded, you see how rare and wonderful it was to be flying through the unblemished countryside on roads that were still in their infancy, patching your vehicle with whatever was at hand and hoping for a spare can of gas from a farmer when you were stuck.
This was an America before the landscape changed to one long vulgar billboard and the car and oil companies conspired to destroy the burgeoning cosmipolitan centres with their dream of a car-powered suburbia.
I get it. I get the romance. But it's so over, people. It's just so over.
The car represents to me everything that is wrong-headed and dead-end about our civilization, a wrong path we took that is killing us. Our only response is to roll up the windows, crank the AC and turn the tunes up louder.
But there was a time when the cars represented freedom and innovation and the vastness of the land. I've been reading Drawn and Quarterly's reprints of early Gasoline Alley comics which they've printed under the name Walt and Skeezix, after the main character and the baby son he finds in his garage one day.
These are strips that appeared before my 82 year old father was born. In Volume 2, Walt and a neighbour embark on a cross-America race in their beat up cars and over the weeks that the story-line unfolded, you see how rare and wonderful it was to be flying through the unblemished countryside on roads that were still in their infancy, patching your vehicle with whatever was at hand and hoping for a spare can of gas from a farmer when you were stuck.
This was an America before the landscape changed to one long vulgar billboard and the car and oil companies conspired to destroy the burgeoning cosmipolitan centres with their dream of a car-powered suburbia.
I get it. I get the romance. But it's so over, people. It's just so over.
