D
Dirtylitterboxo
Guest
Interesting article on the culture of speed, and worshipping the car. Which
does affect us when we are cycling - so it isn't OT
Cheers, helen s
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1161862,00.h-
tml
"The quick and the dead
Anne Karpf Saturday March 6, 2004 The Guardian
News isn't supposed to hang around in the air like stinky
fish, but here's a piece that simply refuses to go away, no
matter how often I command it to. It's last month's story
about Heather Thompson, the mother who, boasting that she
could get her daughter and friend, both 12 years old, home,
20 miles away, in less than 20 minutes, drove at over 80mph
and killed them both. With the industrial quantities of
guilt she's for ever doomed to feeling, this surely belongs
in a Greek tragedy - how Thompson must have railed against
Fate for not doing its business and carting her off, too. By
grisly coincidence, a case came to court in Florida last
week. Mary Hill, allegedly driving at 70mph, killed her 13-year-
old daughter and 14-year-old best friend but, again,
survived herself.
At first, these stories wind you so strongly because mothers
are meant to be protectors, not killers. But then another
thought begins to thrum: just as Myra Hindley, and not Ian
Brady, became the emblem of evil, so speeding is more
heinous when done by a woman. In fact, most reckless
driving, we know, is carried out by young men. What's more,
they tend to get 10 minutes in jail for the topping of
lives, compared with those young female shoplifters
sentenced to five years for nicking a cracked Rimmel Peachy
Pink lipstick tester.
You think this journalistic hyperbole? Last week, just
before David Blunkett raised the maximum sentence for
causing death by dangerous driving from 10 to 14 years, a
30-year-old male driver who'd killed a 17-year-old walked
from the court with just six points on his licence and a
£500 fine. That's because he was done for the lesser charge
of careless driving. If he carelessly totals another
teenager, he might get the maximum fine of £2,500, and
between three and nine points on his licence. It sounds more
like a board game - Automobility? - than real life, or
rather its ending.
We've got ourselves into an awful mess here: four wheels
good, two legs bad. Courts and law-makers seem to believe
that killing, when conducted through the intervening
instrument of a car, when the murder weapon isn't held in
the hand, only controlled by it, is an altogether
different affair. It's as if it then becomes a matter of
transport rather than crime - the very language, "traffic
accident", allowing it to shelter beneath the carapace of
accidental death. Overall, it's made to seem as though the
car drives the driver, rather than the other way round.
Car accidents are crimes almost without agency, without
stigma, without a criminal.
iconoclasm, balls. We can't sanction glossy ads puffing
cars that do 0-350mph in three seconds, and then go and
pillory young men for trying to emulate them. Especially as
it's behind the wheel that these muddled young males often
try to express potency and indifference to social mores -
the car may have contributed to anomie, but it's also
touted as its antidote.
Anyway, we're a culture in love with velocity. We admiringly
call amphetamines speed, but don't approvingly name
barbiturates slow. When politicians are caught speeding -
last year Harriet Harman doing 99mph, three years earlier
Jack Straw's official car careering at 103mph - it is
indulged as the peccadillo of the hurrying harried, the
cojones of the too-busy. For while speed is commonly linked
with gender - I've just done it myself - it should more
properly be bound with class. It's the privilege of what
writer Susan George calls Fast Castes.
The radical thinker Ivan Illich showed the zero sum way in
which it operates: "Beyond a critical speed, no one can save
time without forcing another to lose
it." Speed creates places and people that are sped by,
passed over. Ask the elderly people trying to cross the
road at a traffic blackspot in Thatcham, Berkshire, who
had a princely seven seconds of pelican crossing time in
which to do it. Timed by the Pedestrians' Association, it
actually took them nine to 18 seconds. What are they
meant to do - levitate themselves over?
Last week's yes-we'll-have-them-no-we-won't on speed cameras
simply expresses our ambivalence about speed. "Drivers face
hundreds more speed cameras," blared the Sunday papers.
"Huge speed camera cuts," trumpeted the Monday ones. This is
the revenge of the accelerated. There's even a group called
Mad - or Motorists Against Detection - that goes out and
sabotages speed cameras. Naturally, they say that they're
not in favour of speeding, just against the cameras. Funny,
that's just what those waging war on speed humps claim. Both
are defending their right to velocity, perhaps the most
unequally distributed one in the world.
Information technology, it was said, would diminish the need
for speed and travel. It hasn't, and slowcoach remains a
term of abuse. Driver re-education is the new slogan:
speeders can trade docked licence points for speeding
workshops. Myself, I think we need to see David Beckham
pootering along and Thierry Henry va-va-vooming in low gear.
Until then, two contrary facts are undeniable. Speed
can intoxicate, or so it seems. But speed
simultaneously scorches the universe, ravaging it also
for those who'll never be wealthy enough to enjoy its
thrills - the speed-poor."
--This is an invalid email address to avoid spam-- to get
correct one remove dependency on fame & fortune h*$el*$$e**-
nd***$o$ts***i*$*$m**m$$o*n**s@$*$a$$o**l.c**$*$om$$
does affect us when we are cycling - so it isn't OT
Cheers, helen s
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1161862,00.h-
tml
"The quick and the dead
Anne Karpf Saturday March 6, 2004 The Guardian
News isn't supposed to hang around in the air like stinky
fish, but here's a piece that simply refuses to go away, no
matter how often I command it to. It's last month's story
about Heather Thompson, the mother who, boasting that she
could get her daughter and friend, both 12 years old, home,
20 miles away, in less than 20 minutes, drove at over 80mph
and killed them both. With the industrial quantities of
guilt she's for ever doomed to feeling, this surely belongs
in a Greek tragedy - how Thompson must have railed against
Fate for not doing its business and carting her off, too. By
grisly coincidence, a case came to court in Florida last
week. Mary Hill, allegedly driving at 70mph, killed her 13-year-
old daughter and 14-year-old best friend but, again,
survived herself.
At first, these stories wind you so strongly because mothers
are meant to be protectors, not killers. But then another
thought begins to thrum: just as Myra Hindley, and not Ian
Brady, became the emblem of evil, so speeding is more
heinous when done by a woman. In fact, most reckless
driving, we know, is carried out by young men. What's more,
they tend to get 10 minutes in jail for the topping of
lives, compared with those young female shoplifters
sentenced to five years for nicking a cracked Rimmel Peachy
Pink lipstick tester.
You think this journalistic hyperbole? Last week, just
before David Blunkett raised the maximum sentence for
causing death by dangerous driving from 10 to 14 years, a
30-year-old male driver who'd killed a 17-year-old walked
from the court with just six points on his licence and a
£500 fine. That's because he was done for the lesser charge
of careless driving. If he carelessly totals another
teenager, he might get the maximum fine of £2,500, and
between three and nine points on his licence. It sounds more
like a board game - Automobility? - than real life, or
rather its ending.
We've got ourselves into an awful mess here: four wheels
good, two legs bad. Courts and law-makers seem to believe
that killing, when conducted through the intervening
instrument of a car, when the murder weapon isn't held in
the hand, only controlled by it, is an altogether
different affair. It's as if it then becomes a matter of
transport rather than crime - the very language, "traffic
accident", allowing it to shelter beneath the carapace of
accidental death. Overall, it's made to seem as though the
car drives the driver, rather than the other way round.
Car accidents are crimes almost without agency, without
stigma, without a criminal.
iconoclasm, balls. We can't sanction glossy ads puffing
cars that do 0-350mph in three seconds, and then go and
pillory young men for trying to emulate them. Especially as
it's behind the wheel that these muddled young males often
try to express potency and indifference to social mores -
the car may have contributed to anomie, but it's also
touted as its antidote.
Anyway, we're a culture in love with velocity. We admiringly
call amphetamines speed, but don't approvingly name
barbiturates slow. When politicians are caught speeding -
last year Harriet Harman doing 99mph, three years earlier
Jack Straw's official car careering at 103mph - it is
indulged as the peccadillo of the hurrying harried, the
cojones of the too-busy. For while speed is commonly linked
with gender - I've just done it myself - it should more
properly be bound with class. It's the privilege of what
writer Susan George calls Fast Castes.
The radical thinker Ivan Illich showed the zero sum way in
which it operates: "Beyond a critical speed, no one can save
time without forcing another to lose
it." Speed creates places and people that are sped by,
passed over. Ask the elderly people trying to cross the
road at a traffic blackspot in Thatcham, Berkshire, who
had a princely seven seconds of pelican crossing time in
which to do it. Timed by the Pedestrians' Association, it
actually took them nine to 18 seconds. What are they
meant to do - levitate themselves over?
Last week's yes-we'll-have-them-no-we-won't on speed cameras
simply expresses our ambivalence about speed. "Drivers face
hundreds more speed cameras," blared the Sunday papers.
"Huge speed camera cuts," trumpeted the Monday ones. This is
the revenge of the accelerated. There's even a group called
Mad - or Motorists Against Detection - that goes out and
sabotages speed cameras. Naturally, they say that they're
not in favour of speeding, just against the cameras. Funny,
that's just what those waging war on speed humps claim. Both
are defending their right to velocity, perhaps the most
unequally distributed one in the world.
Information technology, it was said, would diminish the need
for speed and travel. It hasn't, and slowcoach remains a
term of abuse. Driver re-education is the new slogan:
speeders can trade docked licence points for speeding
workshops. Myself, I think we need to see David Beckham
pootering along and Thierry Henry va-va-vooming in low gear.
Until then, two contrary facts are undeniable. Speed
can intoxicate, or so it seems. But speed
simultaneously scorches the universe, ravaging it also
for those who'll never be wealthy enough to enjoy its
thrills - the speed-poor."
--This is an invalid email address to avoid spam-- to get
correct one remove dependency on fame & fortune h*$el*$$e**-
nd***$o$ts***i*$*$m**m$$o*n**s@$*$a$$o**l.c**$*$om$$