Midday Traffic Time Collapsed and Reorganized by Color: San Diego Study #3 from Cy Kuckenbaker on Vimeo.
The attachment of the modern American to his automobile, and the symbolic role
played by his car, with its aggressive and lubric design, its useless
power, its otiose gadgetry, its consumption of fuel, which is advertised
as having almost supernatural power … this is where the study of
American mythology should begin.
Meditation on the automobile, what it is used for, what it stands for
— the automobile as weapon, as self-advertisement, as brothel, as a
means of suicide, etc. — might lead us at once right into the heart of
all contemporary American problems: race, war, the crisis of marriage,
the flight from reality into myth and fanaticism, the growing brutality
and irrationality of American mores.
– – from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, written sometime between 1956 and 1967 by Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky.
