Dick Wheels
We're not invisible inside our cars
In high school, my Spanish Literature teacher—a man prone to long, intellectual rants, whose lectures were marked by writing the ocasional word on the board behind him and every now and then circling it, then underlining it as his solliloquy circled back to his original point—had us read an essay by Octavio Paz.
In brief, this essay is about a particular word in Mexican slang. Chingar. A verb which ostensibly means “to screw”, but, as Paz points out:
En México los significados de la palabra son innumerables. Es una voz mágica. Basta un cambio de tono, una inflexión apenas, para que el sentido varíe. Hay tantos matices como entonaciones: tantos significados como sentimientos.
Or, my imperfect translation:
In Mexico, the meanings of the word are innumerable. It’s a magic voice. It needs only a shift in tone, a mere inflection for the meaning to change. There are as many hues as intonations: as many meanings as feelings.
One of the main varations is chingón, which can either be an adjective or noun. When it’s a noun it’s usually applied to a person, someone who, as Paz argues, is doing the screwing, implying that there is someone getting screwed. My rough interpretation (again, the meaning can shift with just a light breeze) of this variation of the word is that it denotes someone who is a badass, exceedingly skilled at whatever they are doing, often at the expense of others. In Mexico, and, really, the rest of the world, one longs to be a chingón.
The essay, if I recall correctly, is making a wider argument about machismo, but my memory of it, and really of the Spanish Literature class, coincides with the fact that I was learning to drive at the time. (I also particularly remember the fact that the professor’s rants—as much as I’d probably enjoy them now, and as much as I appreciated him as a person—often led me to navel-gaze (or, more accurately, window-gaze)). I was waking up to the world of the road in a way that, as a lifelong passenger up until that point, I had been somewhat blind to. Mexico City is a particularly interesting place to learn how to drive, a swirl of chaotic factors that I still believe forces one to become a better driver: traffic laws are rarely enforced, and when they do they’re often escaped from with relatively low consequences (a small cash bribe is common, but that’s a whole other essay). The lanes are narrow, the roads are pot-holed, and the other drivers are unpredictable. You have to be aware of so many things at once that it is ideal training ground; once you’ve driven there, you can drive almost anywhere. Especially a traffic simulator.
At the time, my analysis of the essay was one I thought applied particularly well to Mexico City drivers: it explained the near maniacal impulse to drive faster, cut others off, refuse others from slipping in ahead of you, all for the privilege of inching ahead in standstill traffic. This was especially confounding given the warmth and friendliness that often exuded the people in my hometown. Despite the massiveness of the city, and the idea that megalopoles are marked by a hectic pace of life, if you walk down the streets of Mexico City you see people strolling languidly at all times of day. There’s even a term for it: “dominguear.” To move at a Sunday pace. They arrive late, stay late, resist the urge to fall into the trap of rushing. Being a chingón felt somewhat antithetical to being a chilango (someone from Mexico City). I’m not entirely sure this is a conclusion of my own or if it was part of the professor’s original rant.
Now I know that the urge to be a chingón is not unique to my hometown. It occurs in most places where cars rule the road. There’s some strange alchemy of ego that happens when we’re at the wheel. We close ourselves off in our little worlds, and that layer of steel and glass and plastic (I don’t know what cars are made of) is all we need to feel like our decisions affect no one else.
The reason we speed, roll through stop signs, look at our phones, swerve in and out of lanes, drive on the shoulder to get ahead of traffic, step on the pedal to make the light, honk when someone else brakes when we feel they should be going, curse at pedestrians, park in bike lanes, inch ahead to block a path, all these little actions we do when at the wheel of the world’s foremost accidental murder-suicide machine is not necessarily because we’d like to be chingónes. It’s because we don’t realize we’re chingando those around us. Or maybe we don’t care.
At the wheel, we are the most important people in the universe. Literally closed off from others, we overrate our own driving skills while asserting others are worse. We drive a few miles over the speed limit because we’d like to shave a few minutes off our ETA. In the US, the average driver commutes 42 miles in a day. In a 21 mile journey, going 70mph rather than 60mph shaves 3 minutes, and adds a 25% fatality rate to a head on accident.
Not that we’re thinking of these graphs while people are zooming past us on the highway, or the fact that the increased fatality risk we are taking on by speeding doesn’t necessarily fall on our shoulders, but on those around us. Of course that’s not on our minds, because we are better drivers, and it won’t happen to us. We won’t harm others.
Which, of course, is the unfortunate fallacy at the root of so many other societal ills. The insistence that our actions do not have consequences on others. That we get to be chingónes without someone else getting screwed. And it’s true that that’s often the case. That we continue on with our actions because usually, there are no consequences. Especially none that we notice from the comforts of our isolated worlds behind the wheel.
A few weeks ago, I was biking along a boulevard here in Chicago. I was on the side lane that’s seperated from the main street by a large grassy section, and the streets that intersect this section of the boulevard have stop signs on them. As I approached one of the stop signs, I saw a car that noticed me, made the calculation that I was far enough away (this is me giving the driver the benefit of the doubt), and decided to roll through with minimal braking. Feeling sanctimonious (have you guessed that I feel this way often toward cars?), I called out, “Nice stop!”
Without a second’s hesitation, the driver yelled back: “Oh, shut up.”
Which, to an extent, fair enough. I was in no danger of getting hit right then. I myself didn’t come to a complete stop on my bike, and could have safely avoided her even if she didn’t see me. To an extent, I am the asshole.
But just a block later, chained to a stop sign and painted white is a bicycle commemorating someone who died at that intersection. Every day, I cross streets with my toddler, who at his height would likely be invisible to someone rolling through a stop sign. It probably doesn’t help me to sarcastically yell “nice stop!” at someone. Her behavior is unlikely to be changed by my sanctimony, nor are the several cars a day that I flash enthusiastic thumbs up to and yell “So cool!” when they roar past red lights.
We all know these things about cars. We know the statistics. But we are too chingónes to become statistics. Those are for the chingados.
And since I’m on the topic, and because I haven’t found another way to share this, here’s a fun little list to end on.
Bumper Stickers I’ve Fantasized About Designing After Witnessing Someone Being An Ass On the Road (and others)
Driving fast is for dweebs.
We are at the wheel of one of the world’s foremost murder-suicide machines. Can we all just agree to be chill?
Did that move help your ETA or just your EGO? Zing!
Baby on board. I don’t have a baby. Who put this baby in here? Why won’t it leave?
Driving on the shoulder? You are a sociopath responsible for the downfall of society. Oh, you just were taking the exit? I guess that’s okay.
IT IS BEAUTIFUL OUT, WHY ARE YOUR WINDOWS DOWN?
Look out for motorcycles! And then ask the drivers how their mothers feel about the fact that they own one.
I enjoyed your reflections. Now I will shop for a monocle.