{"id":452184,"date":"2010-03-20T17:00:20","date_gmt":"2010-03-20T21:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=74023"},"modified":"2010-03-20T17:00:20","modified_gmt":"2010-03-20T21:00:20","slug":"fdl-book-salon-welcomes-catherine-lutz-and-anne-lutz-fernandez-carjacked-the-culture-of-the-automobile-and-its-effect-on-our-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/452184","title":{"rendered":"FDL Book Salon Welcomes Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez, Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[Welcome Catherine Lutz<\/a> and Anne Lutz Fernandez<\/a>, and Host Katie Alvord<\/a>] <\/em><\/p>\n

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book. \u00a0Please take other conversations to a previous thread.\u00a0 – bev]<\/em><\/p>\n

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOnce upon a time, the American met the automobile and fell in love,\u201d wrote John Keats in his 1964 critique of car culture, The Insolent Chariots. \u201cUnfortunately, this led him into matrimony, and so he did not live happily ever after.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearly a half-century after Keats wrote this (given the era, I\u2019ll overlook the gender bias in his wording), and more than a hundred years since the advent of cars, we\u2019re still not at happily ever after. In fact, the car continues to pose big economic, health, safety and social problems, as deftly detailed by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez in Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives.<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Carjacked<\/strong><\/a> joins a hefty body of literature critiquing our automotive transportation system, including my own work Divorce Your Car!<\/a> Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, released in 2000. Do we need another critique of car culture? My answer is a resounding yes. While such books all tell us about the problems cars cause and about better, greener, more economical and socially just approaches to transportation, what they say gets swamped by the ongoing tsunami of marketing messages that coax us to embrace automobiles. As the authors of Carjacked<\/strong><\/a> write, this relentless marketing leads us to \u201ctake the car for granted as a social good, which renders it nearly invisible as the source of a range of problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like most car critiques, Carjacked<\/strong><\/a> exposes the massive costs cars impose on society, in everything from dollars to deaths. But it also explores new territory by grounding its stories and analysis in anthropological interviews with American drivers, people who eagerly shared \u201cdelights, frustrations, and tragedies resulting from the car system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spurred by the loss of close friends and relatives in car crashes, the authors wrote this book to explore the contradictions inherent in car culture. \u201cOnce we had asked how something that we relied on so much could cause so much pain,\u201d they write, \u201cwe also found ourselves wondering how something so terribly dangerous could bring us such tremendous pleasure.\u201d So the two of them \u2013 Catherine an anthropologist from Brown University, and Anne a businessperson with extensive marketing experience \u2013 decided to research \u201chow Americans live with the car on a day-to-day basis \u2013 how it structures their lives and how they feel about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result is a book whose gist can be summed up with one look at its brilliant cover, silhouetting a man bowed under the weight of the car he carries on his shoulders. Look past the cover, and you\u2019ll find the stories and analysis that point out what a burden to us the car has really become.<\/p>\n

After a chapter summing up conditions that make us the \u201cUnited States of Automobiles,\u201d home to more vehicles than licensed drivers, Carjacked<\/strong><\/a> examines our automotive illusions. Chapter Two, \u201cDream Car,\u201d looks at movies and marketing, branding and beliefs, and how they shape an automobile mythology that largely obscures the costs and problems that come with basing transportation so heavily on cars. The book then goes on to take an in-depth look at the realities of car culture:<\/p>\n

\u2022 how aggressively cars are marketed and sold, with $18 billion per year spent by automakers on ads mostly for TV, \u201c making it impossible to channel surf without landing on an ad for a car, SUV, or truck.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 manipulation of consumers in the process of the car purchase itself: \u201cDealer tactics that are not simply unethical but baldly illegal are unfortunately not rare.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 how the dollar price we pay is actually much more than we realize: by 2003, car transport \u201cswallowed one in five dollars spent\u201d by American households.<\/p>\n

\u2022 how cars contribute to social and economic inequality: \u201cThe automobile has largely cemented and accentuated class and race divisions in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 the factors that encourage us to drive more and more: at just 16 percent of car trips, \u201ccommuting isn\u2019t the main culprit. \u2026. The numbers of other types of trips have exploded.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 how cars sicken us and our environment: cancer risks increase \u201cwithin 150 to 500 yards of major roads, although some studies find these cancer corridors can be as wide as a mile on either side.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 how \u2013 and how much \u2013 automobiles kill and maim: \u201cThe advent of SUVs has made America less safe. But even if all of our SUVs magically disappeared, cars would still be the deadliest factor in most of our environments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since writing Divorce Your Car!<\/a>, I\u2019ve hoped we would reach a tipping point at which enough people would see the ways car problems outweigh their benefits that we would renegotiate the love affair. Like a kid on a car trip, I\u2019ve been wondering, \u201cAre we there yet?\u201d And in fact, the authors of Carjacked<\/strong><\/a> think we are. The book identifies 2008 as a tipping point in our car culture. That year, gas prices shot over $4 per gallon, and it was the beginning of the end for the Hummer. Small car sales overtook SUVs. Not only gas prices but also widespread financial collapse pulled the already ailing auto companies into bailout territory. Conditions are thus ripe, Lutz and Lutz Fernandez believe, for a real change in our relationship with cars.<\/p>\n

The book concludes with a chapter advocating a two-fold approach to fostering that change, first by reducing our individual car dependence, and second, by increasing our collective alternatives, primarily transit. \u201cOur prescription does not require us to give up the real freedom that cars can provide,\u201d the authors write. \u201cIt does, however, point us toward a healthier, more balanced car culture that minimizes the manifold prices we pay for this freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

By tallying the costs of car culture and suggesting constructive ways to become less car-dependent, Carjacked<\/strong><\/a> can help us first to see and then to move out from under the burdens imposed by car culture.<\/p>\n

Tags: Anne Lutz Fernandez<\/a>, automobiles<\/a>, Brown University<\/a>, Carjacked<\/a>, Catherine Lutz<\/a>, Divorce Your Car!<\/a>, environment<\/a>, Katie Alvord<\/a>, Marketing<\/a>, transportation<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Share <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Welcome Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez, and Host Katie Alvord] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book. \u00a0Please take other conversations to a previous thread.\u00a0 – bev] Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives \u201cOnce upon a time, the American met the automobile and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6298,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-452184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6298"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}