Editor's Note
Car Culture
Nothing is more American than the automobile. Born in the creative swirl of the U.S. industrial age, nursed through infancy and adolescence by Henry Ford, and roaring into muscular maturity through the 20th century as a stanchion of the American economy, the automobile pervades our culture.
We drive our cars to work, to play, and sometimes just to drive. If we live in Los Angeles, we may spend a sizeable portion of our waking hours in a car. We repair, maintain, wash, polish, and even detail our cars with more care than some of us give to our bodies.
The automobile has come to symbolize many things in our society. Cars are power. Hemis, muscle cars, Nascar all evoke it. Al Capone’s gang screeched around corners in high-
powered Buicks in The Untouchables, and Gene Hackman, as corrupt President Allen Richmond, traveled in big black limos in Absolute Power. Macho icon James Dean drove powerful, fast cars on screen. In life, he drove his Porsche Spyder to his death. I first sensed the power of cars in high school when I dated my wife. Her father owned a Buick Wildcat with a 440 hp engine. Tromping on that accelerator, feeling my back pressed into the seat, and hearing the tires “lay rubber” was a rush that I still recall.
Cars are sex. In the ’50s and ’60s, the back seat of a car at a drive-in movie was a cultural cliché for initiation of the uninitiated. During that same era, in the TV detective series
77 Sunset Strip, heart-throb carhop Edd “Kookie” Byrnes attracted bevies of blonds with his slick looks and slicker convertibles. Whether Sean Connery’s rugged good looks, Scottish brogue, or Aston Martin were more alluring to women in the original James Bond films is a tossup.
In the United States, the land of private transportation, cars are freedom. The road trips of Steinbeck, Ginsberg, and Least Heat-Moon were legendary odysseys of discovery and revelation. Beatty and Dunaway found loot as they roamed the country in their Ford V-8 in Bonnie and Clyde; Gable and Colbert found love as they cruised the landscape in their Model T in It Happened One Night.
Yet the automobile has a dark side, especially for health, and many of the health-related complications of our automotive obsession are explored in this month’s issue. Cars can be weapons. They continue to kill thousands annually. They also foul our air and let us avoid using our muscles to walk wherever we need to go. The cultural consequences of cars are a paramount medical problem.
Some folks are waging their own personal battles against the automobile-centric society; but until the economics of pricier gas or the ecology of dirtier air press harder, I fear our relationship with our cars will continue to be symbiotic.
My wife and I recently bought a new car. We sat in the fancy ones, test-drove the affordable ones, and enjoyed the attention from personable salesmen. As we pulled away from the dealer, I relished the acceleration and inhaled the new car smell. It’s hard to take the car out of an American.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief
Dr. Meyer can be reached at
cmeyer1@fairview.org.