So, speed reading isn't really possible? Folks should slow down, savor and read every word to gain a sense of a text? Hitting a baseball or softball thrown at high school speeds of 80 and 60 mph, full-volleying a soccer ball crossed from thirty yards away, hitting a top-spin smash struck down your backhand line, much less fly fishing in a turbulent stream with a variety of fast moving fish really isn't possible because too many variables have to be assessed at too high a rate of speed? Couldn't one equally well argue that walking down the crowded sidewalk on Telegraph with its vendors, drummers, 800 pedestrians, 40 cars, 7 runners, innumerable people moving in and out of shops, 10 cyclists, 5 skateboarders, and seven kinds of music playing all at once is more overstimulating than driving at 75 mph - in traffic or not - on the radically simplified spatial terrain of 280, or 880, or the Warren Freeway? It feels to me like you're falling back on Michael's "who's generating the risk" or danger argument.
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> As for the freedom. The only time I felt free in the United States was as a teenager when I started driving. It was a very heady coky rushy feeling. Of course, when driving meant driving to work and tearing up four hundred dollars a month for the privilege....I felt anything but free. Still, I respectfully sumbit, that most Americans cling to their cars for precisely this reason: driving makes them feel masterly and free.
This is not a response to my point. The question is why do they feel freer, sometimes, when driving their cars… or why do they resent the way traffic impinges on the freedom they want/expect when driving their cars. Who are these people "Americans"? Does it include the large number of people I see driving scared, one foot on the accelerator, one constantly on the brake? You're talking about a subpopulation of drivers, associated with a subsection of roads, in a compartmentalized range of times in their lives. It feels Horkheimer and Adorno on the Culture Industry to me, there's a very good point there but it misses a great deal, seriously lacks nuance and has no sense of the generative contradictions and potential associated with the phenomena.
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> Joanna
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