Biltragedien

Svært bra essay i Resilience, som er et nettsted jeg virkelig verdsetter grunnet deres uopphørlige angrep på den suburbane utopien, som gjennomsyrer det norske folk. Enga mi har blitt konsumert som et billig substitutt for den amerikanske rivieraen, hvor man bor rundt denne stakkars gamle husmannsplassen og konsumerer de rene suburbane idealer i fri natur, gjort mulig gjennom masse-realiseringen av bildrømmen for borgerklassen. Men så har da også diktet "Paddehoa og plassen min" blitt sommerens mest populære, med over 2000 sidevisninger. Det er tydelig at det er mange gamle garder rundt omkring i Norge som har lidt samme tragiske skjebne som Grythengen!

Les dette mesterlige essayet fra 1973 hos Resilience, stadig mer aktuelt, da hele Norge har blitt Kjøpesenterlandet. Og da mener jeg hele landet, fra fjellheimen til grenda mi til Fossenfeltet og Gjøvik. All kultur, alt kulturlandskap, er ødelagt. Hverken urban eller rural kultur har vi tilbake. Kun suburban, eksurban og subeksurban kvasikultur!

The Social Ideology of the Motorcar

Så kan man da undres hvorfor jeg heller vil leve i Gjøvik enn i Grythengen, hvor vi har vært i sju generasjoner, da Gjøvik er det verste suburbane bilhelvet man kan tenke seg, en by som vil bli totalt ødelagt med den nye UFOen på Hovdetoppen, en dystopi mørkere enn mine svarteste mareritt. Jo, fordi jeg elsker denne gamle husmannsplassen noe så vanvittig, en kjærlighet større og dypere enn de syv verdenshav sammenlagt, og orker ikke å se på og leve med den ubegripelige fornedrelsen som har blitt mine grønne enger til del. Enhver som har det snev av kjærlighet til denne grenda og til totenlandskapet, ville kjempet med meg inn i døden for å frigjøre denne gamle plassen min. Men selvsagt gjør ingen det, da ingen lenger etter 100 år med bilen ser annet enn den store utopien om Subeksurbania!

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips—or to squeeze the villas so tightly together—that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution—the collectivist one. And this solution is necessarily at war with the luxury of the private beach, which is a privilege that a small minority takes as their right at the expense of all.

Ja, kunne man ikke få en bit av rivieraen, tok man en bit av enga mi, fattigmannsrivieraen i Øverskreien.

Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the “others,” who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behavior, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace. (“You’ll never have socialism with that kind of people,” an East German friend told me, upset by the spectacle of Paris traffic).

The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological (“cultural”) revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).

Bilen har gjort oss til egoistiske drittsekker og ødelagt kollektivtilbudet.

This means of transportation at first seemed unattainable to the masses—it was so different from ordinary means. There was no comparison between the motorcar and the others: the cart, the train, the bicycle, or the horse-car. Exceptional beings went out in self-propelled vehicles that weighed at least a ton and whose extremely complicated mechanical organs were as mysterious as they were hidden from view. For one important aspect of the automobile myth is that for the first time people were riding in private vehicles whose operating mechanisms were completely unknown to them and whose maintenance and feeding they had to entrust to specialists. Here is the paradox of the automobile: it appears to confer on its owners limitless freedom, allowing them to travel when and where they choose at a speed equal to or greater than that of the train. But actually, this seeming independence has for its underside a radical dependency. Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.

Bilen, som liksom skulle gi oss frihet, har tatt fra oss all autonomi, sammen med pumpehuset nedenfor Grythengen. Nei, skomakeren i Holmstadengen, han som vandret rundt Totenåsen på skoene han selv hadde laget, han hadde autonomi han. Han var i besittelse av en slik autonomi at intet moderne menneske er i stand til å fatte det. Vi byttet vekk ALL autonomi med komfort!

Maybe you are saying, “But at least in this way you can escape the hell of the city once the workday is over.” There we are, now we know: “the city,” the great city which for generations was considered a marvel, the only place worth living, is now considered to be a “hell.” Everyone wants to escape from it, to live in the country. Why this reversal? For only one reason. The car has made the big city uninhabitable. It has made it stinking, noisy, suffocating, dusty, so congested that nobody wants to go out in the evening anymore. Thus, since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars.

Så, for å unnslippe bilens ødeleggelser, gi oss flere biler slik at vi kan unnslippe bilens ødeleggelser, for så til slutt å ødelegge de grønne enger i de ytterste utkanter av Toten.

The truth is, no one really has any choice. You aren’t free to have a car or not because the suburban world is designed to be a function of the car and, more and more, so is the city world. That is why the ideal revolutionary solution, which is to do away with the car in favour of the bicycle, the streetcar, the bus, and the driverless taxi, is not even applicable any longer in the big commuter cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Trappes, or even Brussels, which are built by and for the automobile. These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

Nei, bilen gjorde oss ikke frie. Vi har istedenfor blitt slaver av bilen i ethvert henseende!

Meanwhile, what is to be done to get there? Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for “living,” a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.

Slik er det, denne grenda hadde et unikt samhold og fikk oppleve de ultimate allmenninger. Her levde man et 100% integrert liv, hvor alle aspekter ved livet hadde sin plass. Hundre år etterpå har ALT forvitret, hvilket vi kan takke bilen for.

Takk bil, fordi du kvalte enga mi og tok fra meg grenda mi!

-Wikimedia.