Auto Arson Center To French Riots

by Philip J. Cunningham

(PNS) -- Why is it that the poor and put upon, the aggressive and the aggrieved turn to torching cars when tempers boil? Given the contagious rage of a crowd losing control of itself, torching a car may be an act of senseless violence. And yet the insanity of the act somehow resonates with key issues and concerns of today's auto-crazed, oil-hungry world.

One only has to turn on the evening news or flip the pages of the daily paper to see that cars are being burned and overturned across the globe in response to poorly articulated anger. Recent riots in Belfast left a litter of toasted cars and buses in their wake. China in recent months has seen a startling upswing in violence against the automobile.

In Beijing, cars are envied and resented in equal measure. They blacken the air and choke once placid thoroughfares. It's not unusual to see jaded pedestrians, sometimes alone but more often en masse, crossing streets without so much as a glance at on-coming traffic, as if daring motorists to mow them down. It's suicidal defiance, like the man in front of the tank, and it happens every day.

But n.

If there is anything to be thankful for in such an orgy of violence it's the fact that inert, empty cars, not human beings, were the target of attack. In France, the intent was plainly destructive but not murderous. A car overturned is a heap of metal and glass flipped on its head, as impotent as a beetle on its back, but without even a fraction of a beetle's soul.

Venting rage against the hot, choking metallic beasts that soil the air and roam our streets brings to mind a kind of dragon-slaying primordial hunt; man versus mammoth, David vs. Goliath. Cars threaten and kill people; in the United States alone, an annual human road-kill numbers in the tens of thousands. Yet this destruction is shrugged off as the price of automotive "freedom." For many car-owners, in fact, their automobiles are like pets, not monsters. They are lovingly washed, fed, maintained; the delusional human-car bonding furthered by personal accessorizing and bestowing of nicknames.

Fully fueled and fired up, cars ride on a kind of controlled violence -- continuous contained combustion -- that is harmful to people and other living things in ways not just cataclysmic, but also cumulative, slowly bespoiling air, water and earth with noxious gases and oil drip. Cars voraciously consume finite and rapidly depleting reserves of fossil fuel.

In sociological terms, cars are instruments of power and prestige. In poor neighborhoods and poor countries the rich ride high with impunity. But even the wealthy are victims of car discrimination. In the same way that SUVs trump sedans, someone will always have a bigger, faster, more expensive model. Car ownership is inherently undemocratic, a stark fact hard to remedy since car-owning is physically impossible to universalize. The world in the auto era will always be divided into haves and have-nots.

In political terms, cars are the definitive product of the industrialized world, the anchor of a sprawling auto-industrial complex so essential to the economy of rich nations that car production and sales are often determinants of overall economic health. Indeed, it is hard to find serious wealth outside of car-producing nations, unless one also counts the pockets of wealth built around the coveted oil wells that feed the automotive beast.

In media terms, the flash demonstrations that hit hundreds of communities around France made for gripping news that may have led to copycat actions. But whatever the reason for torching an automobile, there's an inherent irony in the way that the much-envied and resented symbol of motorized life was consumed by the very oil that feeds it. Smoke and fire make for riveting TV coverage. There are days when reporting from the war in Iraq consists of nothing more than a standup staged in front of a burning or charred vehicle. The same powerful image, for a fraction of the cost, can be staged in war-free zones such as France.

It is said that democracies don't fight other democracies, and it's probably fair to surmise that car-owners don't go around torching other people's cars -- it cuts too close to home. But for the have-nots, cars might, in a moment's madness, be taken as abstract symbols of everything they detest about the status quo.