Source: TW
Cars
From George Kennan’s memoirs on his childhood memories the rural Wisconsin of the pre automobile era in contrast to the new era. Note the carnage of turtles he mentions, the # of small wildlife killed on roads by automobiles is very high.
I thought, by way of contrast, of the sociable English highway of Chaucer’s day, sometimes full of human danger but full, also, of life and companionship. It seemed to me that we had impoverished ourselves by the change; and I could not, after the years in Europe, accustom myself
The Invisible Empire: Alt-Right Afterlives of George Kennan
BY MATHIAS FUELLING | 2.24.19One of Kennan’s greatest fears was the baleful effect of technology on American culture, society, and even racial vigor. Kennan held that cars were enemies of community and that investment in public transport was necessary in order to restore broader American solidarity. The automobile was a boon to “crime and to juvenile delinquency.” Cars were forces of pollution, atomism, and social destruction. These were long running ideas for Kennan.
In his diary in 1974 he wrote that “the internal combustion engine is now king over man.” In a late letter from 1998 he held that cars, television, drugs, and computers had become “forms of entrapment” which suffocated creativity and language and created a slavish mentality. Television in particular bred a false sense of reality and promoted “personal immaturity.” He criticized what he called the hysteria in response to Princess Diana’s death as a result of television and mass media. Television for him was a source of “enervation and debilitation and abuse of the intellect.” … Kennan was no realist, but rather an idealist, pursuing a foreign policy based upon reactionary and romantic principles of warding off decline.
From 1974:
The tendency of the motor age is to overwhelm, subdue, and eventually destroy, in its life-giving qualities, the sea… with the blessing of peoples and governments, for the internal combustion engine is now king over man
February 6
Princeton still in the throes of the gasoline shortage and the truckers’ strike. It is revealing to observe what an addiction the use of the automobile has become for our fellow citizens, and how furious and ill-mannered they become when anything operates to deny them the privilege of driving their cars.
Also in 1975:
Second, there is the automobile’s extreme wastefulness. It is wasteful of material, of energy, and of space. The very idea that for the displacement of one or two human bodies on their daily comings and goings there should be required something upwards of a ton of metal, the power of something like a hundred horses, and some ninety square feet of paved highway, is in itself an absurdity of the first order. The railway is in all these respects far more economical. All this is well known to public authority; and it is at this point that the lack of a national transportation policy transects the similar lack of a policy in the field of energy. And because the automobile is more wasteful, it is also more expensive to the individual owner and to the economy at large.
Third, the automobile is, as everyone knows, a major polluter. So, no doubt, was the steam locomotive, but in a different way, and in far less volume. The source of energy for the electrically driven train also involves pollution; but it involves far less of it than do the many automobiles required to replace it; and even this pollution could surely be further curtailed by other expedients. Fourth, the automobile, insofar as it replaces walking for the displacement of human bodies over short distances, is a distinctly unhealthy innovation. Walking, the experts tell us, is the most useful and readily
It would be wrong to suppose that any adjustment of that sort could be carried through in any short space of time. It has taken seven or eight decades to bring about the present, unhealthy dependence upon the automobile; it would presumably take nothing less than several further decades to reduce it to its proper place in modern American life. This would be true if only for the fact that the personal financial and other interests of millions of people would be affected. Even more important would be the psychological adjustment this would imply. But every useful process has to have a beginning; and in this instance the beginning is far overdue.
Jan 3, 1955:
It is not I who have left my country. It is my country that has left me, the country I thought I knew and understood. As for the rest, I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshield, the chrome, the asphalt,
1938:
It seemed for a moment as though this quiet nocturnal stream of temporary moving prisons, of closed doors and closed groups, was the reductio ad absurdum of the exaggerated American desire for privacy. What was in England an evil of the upper class seemed here to have ..
September 4, 1928:
Americanism, like Bolshevism, is a disease which gains footing only in a weakened body. I have lost my sympathy for the Europeans who protest against the influx of American automobiles and American phonograph records.
1937:
It was very nice and encouraging but in the distance, the roar of the Sunday traffic on the big turnpikes was never lost, and it was never clearer that man is a skin-disease of the earth.
where human warmth and simplicity and graciousness defied the encroachments of a diseased world and of people drugged and debilitated by automobiles and advertisements and radios and moving pictures.
1956:
I wish the ice would stay good and smooth and slippery for days. Let them slither and struggle, I say to myself, until they comprehend what a frivolity they have committed in selling their habits and their souls to the automobile