Matthew Crawford, noted writer and gear head, is not happy about a recent trend in automobile modification:
”The new thing is modern V8 muscle cars (Chargers, Challengers, Mustangs and Camaros) with exhaust cut-outs. They are deafening, and they are everywhere where I live in San Jose (which is not one of the genteel areas). They are also illegal, of course.
For those not satisfied with inflicting low-level hearing loss, a special Platinum A**hole feature is available on the aftermarket. It alters the engine’s spark and fuel map to deliberately induce explosive backfires that sound like a 12-gauge shotgun at close range.”
We have these cars in our neighborhood though they tend to be heavily modified Camrys, Kias, and other small sedans. He’s right about the modifications to produce backfires, even from ½ mile away sounds it just like an old 12-gauge Mossberg I used to own.
I had always classified such car owners as narcissists, but he cites another possibility:
Julie Aitken Schermer is a professor of psychology, at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She conducted a study of people who modify their cars to make them louder (n=529), using a standard inventory of psychological traits. She was expecting to find narcissism, but what she found instead was “links between folks with a penchant for loud exhausts and folks with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.”
“The personality profile I found with our loud mufflers are also the same personality profiles of people who illegally commit arson,” she told a reporter. These are people who have a hard time with “higher-order moral reasoning with a focus on basic rights for people.”
Crawford goes on to cite the impact of one particular miscreant in Seattle, the reaction (or lack thereof) of the police to said miscreant, and the impact the guy is having on the neighborhood. Crawford then gets to, for me, the interesting part:
“… that the fabric of the world is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space.
This can have an unfortunate resemblance to conquest, if those making a nuisance of themselves recognize one another as like beings, bound up in a common fate, and notice also that the space vacated by those sufficiently annoyed or intimidated is now theirs, collectively.’
The interesting concept that Crawford introduces is public space and how it can be disrupted. We Americans typically speak of public space in fairly legalistic terms; what is public property and the things that are and are not permitted therein.
However there is another conception of public space which is defined as the geographic space within which people interact together; it doesn’t have to be a park, publicly owned property, or even a public accommodation such as a grocery store (as found in civil rights law). It can be something as amorphous as where your private property interfaces with public property such as your front yard or your porch (ask your HOA) or a public event such as an Independence Day celebration or a school play. The term “public space” could also be termed “community space”.
A key observation is one that Crawford implicitly makes which is the ability of a very small percentage of the population, if so motivated, to degrade if not destroy that public space. There is the previous example of the modified car owner in Seattle and the impact this man had on the local neighborhood, but it could just as easily be other factors which convey menace and disorder; a street encampment, widespread open-air drug use, or a flash mob. Or…. to use our expanded notion of public space, do you feel safe leaving your car in the driveway or wonder what you’ll see in your front yard in the morning?
Our notion of public space and how we interact with it has changed over the years. It was within our lifetimes that it was expected that men and women dress and in general comport themselves according to certain public social customs. Now that has changed and not only from the sense of crime and disorder on the streets, but also a general lack of courtesy and “social grease” used to smooth interactions among strangers. That problem will loom greater both with more “diversity” and the demarcation of the population into various identity groups that a lack a common identity.
Crawford also points to another dimension of public space, transportation, specifically roads and how we interact with it. From his book, Why We Drive:
”Before the arrival of automobiles in significant numbers in the 1920s, the urban street was a place dominated by pedestrians, horses, and streetcars that ran on tracks. It was the place where children played—and why not?”
We share a public space through the use of our private property, cars. However transportation, that is how convey ourselves through public space, is also a matter of public policy and viewed as a strategic choke point by the Left for reconstruction. The street and other parts of the local/regional transportation system are being physically reconstructed, not only to discourage cars and in favor of public transportation but also to drive use of vehicles with limited range such as bicycles and personal mobility scooters. I should also that the introduction of self-driving care, their inability to share the streets with human-oriented automobiles, and the introduction of the public space into cars themselves through technology kill switches will have a similar effect.
In addition to the physical dimension, the transportation system is also being socially reconstructed because these alternate methods of transportation are limited in their range and flexibility. This social remodeling will entail, either directly or indirectly, changing the places where we live (“the 15-minute city”) due to our limited ability to travel and our ability to physically access the wider world beyond.
If socially reconstructed ideas of transport sounds suspiciously like the COVID lockdowns and the resultant vision of a “Great Reset” you are not alone.
More on driving and the exercise of citizenship another time. For now, exercise your sovereignty of human agency, gas up your truck, and just go some place far away for the day. Just because in the wonder that is still 21st Century America, you can and not have to justify it to anyone.
You can have my loud car when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Granted, I don’t have the Pops and Bangs tune on it, so I guess I’m not a sadist.
“… the ability of a very small percentage of the population, if so motivated, to degrade if not destroy that public space.”
In the very far distant past — say, like a quarter of a century ago — the ability of that small minority to degrade the public space was very severely limited by the righteous acts of the majority to squash those who would steal the public space. Nothing has changed about the existence of that selfish minority — they have always been part of the human race. What has changed is the previous willingness of the majority to impose rules of civilized behavior on the minority. We have lost civilizational confidence — and now we are losing civilization itself.
WHISTLE TIPS GO WOO WOOOOOOOO
“Street takeovers”. Mobs of young thugs converge on some location, block traffic and compete in “drifting” their cars and doing “doughnut” spins. There are thousands of these incidents every year. It would not surprise me at all if these cars had intentionally loud exhausts.