When petrol becomes a drug

I ONCE accompanied a friend when he went to score some heroin in New York. To my surprise, the junkies formed an orderly queue at the dingy basement window from which the drug was being dispensed. To say that the panic-buyers nervously waiting to fill their jerry cans at our local petrol station last Friday precisely resembled the New York junkies would be hyperbolic.

But the looks of anxiety lest supplies run out before their turn were similar. So was the relief at having successfully "scored".

Of course, a few of the panickers will have done so not from addiction but because they genuinely needed to be sure they had petrol, like people who were nine months pregnant. BSE and the blunders of Railtrack meant people didn't believe Government reassurances about a second fuel crisis.But the panic also reflects our increasingly pathological and passionate affair with the motor car. So dependent have many of us become that we are horrified by the thought of not being able to get in and drive.

At the heart of the addiction is the feeling of autonomy and freedom it provides.

Many people report that the drive to and from work is the one time in the day when they feel in control. Opportunities for the exercise of volition, to make choices and act on them, decrease as you go down the social system. A study of 17,000 civil servants demonstrated that the lower down the hierarchy you were, the less power you had to determine your use of time and space.

Yet the people at the top are becoming increasingly powerless too. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods," intones King Lear, and, dominated by a global economy, the Prime Minister must often feel the same, adding road hauliers and Geoffrey Robinson to the wanton boys.

Whether at the top or bottom, a car journey provides hundreds of opportunities to feel efficacious. At its simplest this is finding that the car moves forward at the desired rate when the accelerator is pressed down or that the car goes in the desired direction on turning the wheel. Petty, crude rewards for crude actions, perhaps, proof of control and power none the less.

But there are more subtle ways in which the car is a vehicle for our emotions. Road rage is a genuinely new phenomenon, partly reflecting our newfound identification with the car. More and more of us are feeling depressive and aggressive. A 25-year-old today is some three to 10 times more likely to be depressed than their grandparent, and we are 40 times more violent than in 1950.

CARS are a wonderful method of excreting the huge mound of unwanted rage and self-hatred that this represents, into others. Taxi drivers, a group especially at risk of heart disease and stress, are the masters of this.

Every time they cut into your lane or brazenly block the traffic to perform a U-turn in a busy road or keep coming right at you if the road is not wide enough, they manage to transfer some of their angst into you.

Before the incident you may have been feeling relaxed or at least just averagely dysphoric. Afterwards your heart is racing, the fight- flight hormone cortisol is coursing through your veins and you are feeling absolutely furious.

You feel exactly the same as you would feel if a stranger had launched a physical attack on your person. Unconsciously, you really have been threatened with an assault because the most vital fact about us and our cars is that deep down we experience them as an actual extension of our physical body.

The exact dimensions to within an inch, backwards, forwards and to the sides is mapped in your mind as a part of your body. When you pass through a small space, how else could you judge it with such astonishing precision? No wonder you react with such intensity if someone threatens to hit your car and that nearly everyone goes ballistic at the slightest collision. Tap the chap in front's bumper and unconsciously, from his standpoint, you might just as well have slapped him on the bum.

Cars are also vehicles for the fundamental beliefs that keep us from going potty.

Undepressed people manage to stay that way by creating a bubble of positive illusions.

They believe that their friends like them more than is the case, that they are slightly more attractive than is true and that nasty things are less likely to happen to them than is actuarially the case - like car accidents.

The shell of our cars becomes the bubble of positive illusions when we are in them. We feel far more impregnable, in control and at liberty than is real. We think we will get away with speeding, that our driving is far better than it is, that we are kings of the road. Or queens, except that women don't use cars in this way as much as men.

VIRTUALLY no male students give their first car a name, whereas calling their Metro or Fiesta Daisy or Florence is de rigueur among females.

Despite decades of feminism, some women still seem to regard their car as a child or a pet. Virtually no men do so.

To them the car can be a sexual partner. The scantily clad models in car-part calendars testify to the association. It is made explicit by the ghastly metaphors employed in TV programmes about cars, riddled with tacky tosh about "firm handling" and "a smooth, sensuous ride".

But as well as being seen as partners to be ridden, cars are still, even today, a means for men to signal their status, power and wealth to women.

For the man, if not for the woman, the length of the bonnet can still be subliminally a signal about being anatomically well endowed. Given all this, is it really any surprise that Gordon Brown is so worried about upsetting the motorist? Or that panic-buying ensues when petrol stocks are threatened? You are what you drive.

Copyright 2000
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