I’ve come down with a bad case of Yossarian’s syndrome.
Like the hero of Joseph Heller’s novel “Catch-22,” I have an unshakable sense that people out there are trying to kill me. Yossarian, a World War II flyboy, got the feeling during bombing raids over Nazi-occupied Europe. I get it when edging my car out of the garage.
Yossarian’s commanding officer urged him not to take anti-aircraft fire so personally. In war, opponents shoot at whatever moves without putting anyone’s name on the shells. Friends take a similarly indulgent line with me.
They say I need to understand that when someone cuts me off in high-speed traffic, it simply reflects a contemporary phenomenon they call “road rage.”
But road rage is nothing new, and it is not my problem here. Road rage is a ballet a deux: I move into your lane, not noticing you’re there or even putting my turn signals on. After slamming on the brakes, you chase me down the highway to retaliate by putting an equally stupid move on me. We raise our fists, curse each other and either shoot or get on with our lives.
These days, though, it’s not my driving that infuriates fellow motorists. It’s my existence.
What I’m talking about is much bigger than a little roadway pathology. It is a new national identity, expressed, as the philosopher Hobbes might have put it, in a war-of-all-upon-all driving style.
Until very recently, the American driving style was colorless, especially compared with that of other nations. Italians have long loved to drive very fast and very accurately. The Greeks (and bless them, I’ve lived among them) consider the automobile an appendage to the horn, which they play like a musical instrument.
The Romanians love to zip through the countryside with headlights off, so as not to disturb the peace of the night. When the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, 20 percent of their casualties were traffic related; I’ve never ridden with a Palestinian cab driver who didn’t consider that a record to aim for.
Americans long have had a love affair with the automobile, as the old weekly magazines–Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post–used to remind us. But it was a static affair. People spent as much time on weekends washing and polishing their cars in the alley as they did riding in them. Even the hot-rod set was often to be seen parked at the curb, hoods up and drooling over chrome-plated carburetors like works of art.
To be sure, every neighborhood had its exception. In ours, it was a fellow known as “Crazy Al the Driver.” To pass the local divide into adolescence, you had to take a ride in his back seat, desperately trying to retain control of your bowels as he took corners on two wheels. Presumably, “Crazy Al” had his counterpart in the next neighborhood over. That was the extent of such driving back then.
Now it’s increasingly the norm. All the other drivers are out to get me.
That might sound paranoid or attributable to an overactive sense of self-importance. But I offer scientific proof. I recently stumbled onto a kind of living-laboratory test of my thesis.
I was driving out to O’Hare airport. It was late in the evening, and I found myself in the left-hand lane. I was going the speed limit, maybe even a bit above it. Car after car came up so close behind me it would take a micrometer to measure the distance separating their bumpers from mine. Traffic on the expressway was light, so they could easily have gone around me on the right. Instead, they flashed their brights and laid on the horn until I got out of their way.
After a few such encounters, I shifted into the middle lane. The same thing happened. Finally, I moved all the way to the right, to the very lane to which highway signs direct slower-moving traffic but kept going at a fast clip. It didn’t help.
Drivers still became apoplectic about my mere act of being–my esse, as the medieval theologians termed it. They must have felt I was depriving them of some God-given right to violate the speed laws without hindrance.
Clearly, something is in the air. The cops seem to recognize that, and they’re reliable social weather vanes. The inherent danger of their profession requires them to be attuned to changing mores. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see too many tickets being written for what used to be considered unlawful driving.
To me at least, it seems as if some police departments regard traffic regulations much the same as liberal politicians of the ’60s looked upon anti-marijuana laws: Technically, they’re on the books, but there’s no reason to come off looking uncool by enforcing them.
Why this asphalt equivalent of a sea change in our national identity?
Here I take my lead from a pioneering economist who once found a correlation between financial conditions and female body styles. Obviously, he preferred examining human figures to those in ledger books. In times of depression, fuller figures become stylish. Evidently, hard-pressed stockbrokers and investors need something zoftig to hang onto. In better times, leaner figures are more likely to be emotionally satisfying.
I would like to suggest a similar relationship between driving and what we might call a greed-altruism index. Back in the flower child era, the ruling social ideal was cooperation. You know–Woodstock, world peace, all of that. A favorite car of the period was the hearse. Hippies and would-be hippies would buy used hearses and outfit them as kind of moving flophouses for themselves and passing strangers, especially those of the opposite sex. By virtue of their age, such vehicles were slow moving, that was fine. By the mores of the time, you weren’t supposed to try to get a jump on the next guy.
But now, cooperation is out; competition is the virtue. Movies and the media flood us with the message that self-interest is what makes the world go around.
What better way to show your fealty to the spirit of the times than by racing down streets as if on your way to a gold rush or its contemporary equivalent, a can’t-miss dot-com stock offering. Even cabbies, who rail endlessly at slow-moving drivers, never blink at the guy who nearly runs them off the road. Do they admire in such ruthless maneuvers the single-mindedness of a Bill Gates? Fittingly, the preferred means of transportation is now the SUV, a monster fit for making war not love on other motorists.
Anyway, that’s my theory, and I hope social scientists can verify it.
Otherwise, like Yossarian I’m stuck with taking it personally. I’ll continue to be haunted by the thought that millions of other cars have been put on the road with a 007 mission: To get me.
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Tribune staff writer Ron Grossman drives a car with 167,000 miles on the odometer.
