Taken from the Uruguayan periodical Brecha, March 29, 1996.
[Note: This is an unauthorized translation. Please don't redistribute this yet. I have not yet obtained approval from the author.]
As is often the case with other Gods, the God on Four Wheels, though born with the promise to serve the people,and to magically conjure away fear and loneliness, has ended with the people as His servants. The Religion of the Automobile, with its Vatican in the United States of America, has the world on its knees before it.
The image of Paradise: each American citizen has his car and his gun. The United States has the greatest concentration of automobiles and also the biggest arsenal of weapons, the two basic foundations of the national economy. Six, six,six: of every six dollars the average US citizen spends, one is dedicated to his automobile(s); of every six hours of his life, one is dedicated to travelling by car or working to pay for it; and of every six employees, one is directly or indirectly related to violence and its associated industries. The more people killed by automobiles and guns, and the more of the natural world wiped out, the more the Gross National Product grows. As the German researcher Winfried Wolf well noted, in our times, the productive forces have turned into destructive forces.
Talismans against helplessness, or invitations to crime? The sale of cars is symmetric with the sale of weapons, and one could well say the one forms a part of the other: road accidents kill and wound each year more US citizens than all the US citizens killed or wounded over the whole course of the Vietnam War, and the driver's license is the only document needed for anyone to purchase a machine gun suitable for mowing down one's whole neighborhood. The driver's license is used not just for these purposes, but is also indispensable for paying with checks or chargecards, and for conducting any formal business or signing contracts. In the US, the driver's license serves in place of a universal identity card. Automobiles grant people their identity.
The country enjoys the cheapest gasoline in the world, thanks to corrupt presidents, sheiks in dark sunglasses, and master puppeteers who ensure the subsidized sale of gasoline, the proceeds of which go to abusive regimes for buying arms and violating human rights. Saudi Arabia, to take a case in point, figures prominently in international statisctics for the wealth of its wealthiest, as well as its high rate of infant mortality and the atrocities of its executioners. Meanwhile, it is the US defense industry's principal client in weapons sales. Without the cheap oil these allies of democracy provide, such a miracle wouldn't be possible: in the US, everyone can have a car, and many can change cars frequently. And if your money won't afford you the latest model, they still sell air fresheners that will make your old heap, the "autosaur" you bought three or four years ago, smell like new.
Tell me what car you drive and I'll tell you who you are, and how much you're worth. This civilization that so adores cars has a morbid fear of old age: the automobile, the promise of eternal youth, is the only body you can change for a new one.
To this body, of the four wheels, most advertising on TV is dedicated, most conversation, and most of the space in cities. The automobile enjoys restaurants, where it can feed itself with gasoline and oil, and it even has pharmacies at its service where remedies can be bought for it, and hospitals for it to recuperate in, be diagnosed, and cured, hotels for it to sleep in at night, and cemeteries for it to reside in when it dies.
It promises personal liberty, and for this reason the highways are called "freeways," though they are actually moving cages. Hours of human labor have actually been reduced little or none, and in return, year after year, one piles up more time stuck in traffic jams where one moves haltingly or not at all, caught in the sheer mechanics of transport. One lives in one's automobile, and then it won't let you go. "Drive-by shooting:" without leaving the car, at full speed, you can squeeze the trigger and kill anyone without even seeing who, as is the style of late in Los Angeles. "Drive-thru teller," "drive-thru restaurant," "drive-in movies:" without once leaving your car, you can do your banking, dine on hamburgers, and watch a movie. And without leaving your automobile, you can even get married, the drive-in marriage: in Reno, Nevada, the car passes between arches of plastic flowers, by one little window where a witness watches, and another where the pastor, his bible in hand, declares thee and thy bride husband and wife, and at the exit an official stands to collect a tip, which they call the "Love donation."
The automobile, the renewable body, has more rights than the human body, condemned to decrepitude. The United States of America has undertaken, in the last few years, a holy war against the evils of tobacco. In magazines, cigarette ads are emblazoned with obligatory public health warnings. The ads warn, for example, "Cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide." But no ad for cars warns that much more carbon monoxide comes from the exhaust of automobiles. People can't smoke, but autos are allowed.
In 1992 there was a referendum in Amsterdam. The inhabitants of the Dutch city resolved to reduce by one half the space, already very limited, allowed to cars. Three years later private car traffic was prohibited in downtown Florence, a prohibition to be extended to the whole city as soon as the development of metro lines, buses, and pedestrian walkways permits. Also bike lanes: soon you'll be able to cross the entire city without risk, pedalling to any part via a mode of transportation that costs little, doesn't invade human space nor pollute the air, and was itself invented five centuries ago by a Florentine denizen by the name of Leonardo da Vinci.
Meanwhile, an official report confirmed that automobiles occupy a great deal more space than people in the city of Los Angeles, but there it hasn't occurred to anyone to commit the sacrilege of expelling the invaders.
Amsterdam and Florence are exceptions to the universal rule of usurpation. The world has motorized at an accelerating pace, and in such a way that both cities and distances have grown in lockstep, while public transport has given place to the private automobile. The President of France, Georges Pompidou, celebrated this saying, "it's the city that must adapt itself to automobiles, not the other way around," but his words soon took on a tragic air when it was revealed that the number of deaths due to air pollution had increased brutally in Paris during the public transit strike at the end of that year, which caused car trips to multiply and made the lives of city dwellers miserable from living under a pall of smog.
In Germany, in 1950, the trains, buses, metros, and rail lines accounted for three quarters of all transport of persons; today, that figure is down to a little less than one fifth. The European average has fallen to one quarter, which is still much higher than the US, where public transit, virtually exterminated in most cities, only comes to 4% of the total.
Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone were intimate friends, and both were on the best of terms with the Rockefellers. This reciprocal affection flowed into an alliance of influences that had much to do with the dismantling of the railroads and the creation of a vast network of higways, later converted into superhighways, in all parts of the US. With the passage of years the power of the auto industry and all its relatives, tires, petroleum and petrochemical, has become ever more crushing. Of the sixty biggest firms in the world, half belong to this holy alliance or are in some way closely related to the dictatorship of the four wheels.
Human rights must now yield to the rights of machines. Automobiles emit with impunity a cocktail of deadly substances. The poisoning of the air is spectacularly visible in Latin American cities, but is much less noticeable in some cities of the North. The difference is explained in large part by the obligatory use of catalytic converters in each vehicle in the more developed countries. However, quantity tends to cancel out quality, and these technological advances are whittled away by the ever more dizzying proliferation of autoparks, that seem to reproduce as if made by rabbits.
Visible or veiled, reduced or not, these poisonous emissions form a long list of villains. To take only three examples, experts at Greenpeace have denounced the fact that from cars derive not less than half of all carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and other hydrocarbons that are so effectively contributing to demolishing the planet and human health.
"Health is not negotiable. Enough with half measures," declared the official in charge of public transport in Florence at the beginning of this year, while announcing that his would be "the first European city free of automobiles." But in almost all the rest of the world, it is taken as a given that the Divine Motor must inevitably be the axis of human life in the urban era.
The droning racket of the engines drowns out the voices that condemn this trick of a civilization that robs you of your freedom only to later sell it back, that cuts off your legs and obliges you to buy cars and exercise equipment instead. This model is imposed throughout the world as the only possible way of life, a nightmare of cities where the auto rules, devouring everything green and lording it over all formerly human spaces. We breathe what little air is left to us, while meanwhile whoever doesn't die in car accidents is condemned to suffer gastritis waiting in traffic jams.
The cities of Latin America don't want to be like Amsterdam or Florence, but like Los Angeles, and are consigning themselves to being converted into the horrendous caricature of that sinkhole I've described. We've had five centuries of training for doing nothing but copying others instead of creating. Since we're condemned to "copyitis," we could at least choose our models with a little more care. Anaesthetized by the television, TV advertising, and the culture of consumption, we've made ourselves believe in the fairytale of modernization, as if this sick joke or black humor were the magic potion of happiness.
Advertising paints the automobile as a blessing within the reach of all. A universal right, a democratic conquest? If this were true, and all human beings could become the proud owners of this means of transportation turned talisman, the planet would suffer rapid death by asphyxiation. And even sooner, they'd stop working for lack of fuel. We retain today enough petroleum for two generations at current rates of consumption. We've already burnt up in a few short years the greater part of all the petroleum formed over millions of years on this Earth. The world produces cars at the rate of heartbeats, more than one per second, and these are devouring more than half of all the petroleum the world produces.
Ofcourse, the advertising lies. The numbers tell us that the automobile is not a universal right, rather a privilege of few. Only 20% of humanity dispenses with 80% of all cars, although 100% of humanity has to suffer the consequences. Like so many other symbols of the society of consumption, this is an instrument that is in the hands of the the North of the world and the small minorities of the South that ape the customs of the North, and believe, and make believe, that anyone without permission to drive hasn't even permission to exist.
Eighty five per cent of the population of the Mexican capital travel in 15 % of the vehicles. One of every ten inhabitants of Bogota is owner of nine out of ten automobiles. Although the majority of Latin Americans don't have the right to buy a car, everyone gets to pay for them. Of every one thousand Haitians, only five are motorized, but Haiti dedicates one third of its imports to vehicles, spare parts, and gasoline. El Salvador a third also. According to Ricardo Navarro, a specialist on these issues, the money that Colombia spends every year on subsidizing gasoline would be enough to give away 2.5 million free bikes to the population.
One country alone, Germany, has more automobiles than in all the countries of Latin America and Africa combined. However, three out of four traffic fatalities in the world occur in the South. And of those three, two are pedestrians.
In this, at least, advertising doesn't lie. Cars are commonly compared to weapons; to accelerate is to shoot, providing the same pleasure and sense of power. Hunting pedestrians is frequent sport in Latin American cities, where the courage of the four wheels stimulates the traditional domineering nature of those who rule or act like they rule. And in recent times, times of growing insecurity, panic and fear of assault and kidnapping adds stimulus to the traditional bullying with impunity of the upper classes. There are ever more people disposed to kill anyone who gets in their way. The privileged minorites, condemned to live lives of perpetual fear, floor the accelerator as a way of flattening reality, or fleeing from it, reality being a very dangerous thing that lies on the other side of the tightly rolled up windows of their cars.
Although only a small percentage of all cars in the world drive the streets of Latin America, some of the most contaminated cities in the world are to be found here.
The servile imitation of modes of life in the great dominant centers produces catastrophes. The copies multiply to dizzying extremes the defects of the original. The inherited structures of injustice and ferocious social contradictions have generated cities that grow out of all possible control, giant, grotesque Frankensteins of civilization: the importation of the Religion of the Automobile and its identification with democracy in the society of consumption has, in these days of every-man-for-himself, effects more devastating than any aereal bombardment.
Never have so many suffered at the hands of so few. Disastrous public transit and the absence of bike lanes has made automobile use obligatory, but the immense majority, who can't buy one, live corraled by traffic and choked by smog. The sidewalks grow fewer and fewer, while there are ever more parking lots and fewer neighborhoods, ever more cars passing hither and thither and fewer persons seen. Buses are not only scarce: even worse, in many cities public transit runs on the most dilapidated wrecks that spew out more poison than they relieve.
Private automobiles, in the major cities of the North, are required to use less poisonous fuels and less wasteful technologies, but in the south the impunity of money is more deadly than the impunity of military dictatorships. In rare instances, the law requires the use of unleaded gasoline and catalytic converters, that require strict controls and whose lifetime is limited: when the law requires it, it is complied with but there is no followup, as the tradition that comes from colonial times would have it.
Some of the major cities of Latin America live under rain and wind, which doesn't clean the poisons out of the air, but at least carries them someplace else. Mexico City lives in a state of perpetual environmental emergency, brought about in large part by automobiles, and the advice of the government to the population facing this devastating motorized plague sounds like practical tips for facing a Martian invasion: avoid all exercise, hermetically seal your houses, don't go out, don't move. Babies are born with lead in their blood, and one third of citizens suffer chronic headaches.
"Either you quit smoking, or you'll be dead in a year," warned a doctor to a friend of mine, who lives in Mexico City and has never smoked a single cigarette in his entire life.
The city of Sao Paulo breathes on Sundays and chokes the rest of the days of the week. Year after year the air of Buenos Aires (which means "Good Air" in Spanish) grows more polluted, at the same rate that autoparks grow, which last year surpassed half a million vehicles. Santiago in Chile is separated from the sky by an umbrella of smog, that in the last fifteen years has doubled its density, while in the meantime, coincidentally, the number of cars has also doubled.