I would not describe anti-mass sentiment in such an automatic fashion. These are deep and irrational sentiments that are far from being thought out. In John Carey's book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' (?) he describes how certain components of working class consumption summed up everything that elites despised about the mass. So, for example, many intellectuals can be read railing against tinned food - which to them seemed to be the very end of civilisation as we know it (today they would be talking about plastic wrappers ... or cars).
Similarly, in Geoffrey Pearson's book Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, Pearson pulls out a whole newspaper panic about cycling clubs in the 1890s. The Times newspaper carried editorials about working class 'scorchers' tearing around the countryside terrifying respectable folk ... on their push bikes.
A child of six could hear the anti-working class meaning of the anti-car lobby, in its language, intonations and none-too-subtle hints. Always the target is the big gas guzzler, never the little foreign car; or the sin of sins a 'Recreational Vehicle' (twenty years ago it would have been a 'pick-up truck' that signified ugly prole who should not be allowed on the roads); in Britain, it is 'Essex Man' in his Ford Cortina who is the loathed target of petit bourgeois hostility.
The most important statistic that the anti-car lobby in Britain has picked up on is the one that says that there are 30 million car users. This fact only has to be spoken to provoke hung heads and tut-tutting. But why is it so shocking? It is shocking because, in a population of 60 million, it means that the car is no longer the monopoly of the respectable middle classes, but has fallen within the price range of working families.
Car emissions have been reduced in noxiousness by more than 90 per cent over the last fifteen years, which means that you could have multiplied car ownership five times and still reduced pollution. But that fact barely registers on the discussion, because in substance this discussion is not about the pollution of the atmosphere by lead particles or CO2. On the contrary. It is a discussion about the "pollution" of the English countryside by honking Essex man in his Ford Cortina.
In message <s7e64f01.048 at mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown
<CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes
>
>>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 09/20/99 02:09PM >>
>Isn't it curious that the car has only become widely criticised at the
>point that it became cheap enough to become a working class consumption
>good, as opposed to a middle class luxury item?
>
>((((((((((
>
>Charles: Looking at this one more time, I understand your idea here to be that
>the ruling class or a section of it is behind this criticism of the car. I'm all
>for believing in bourgeois machinations against the interest of the working
>class. But what are you saying ? That one section of the bourgeoisie is trying
>to undermine another section, the car manufacturers and oil producers ( a pretty
>powerful section) ? And how does this "environmentalist" section of the
>bourgeoisie profit from undermining the car/oil industry ?
>
>CB
>
-- Jim heartfield