I have always felt a white-hot hatred for those Harley clowns, in their clown costumes, who gratuitously rev their stone-age V-twin engines as you sit outdoors trying to have a conversation. The only proper response, I believe, would be for some good Samaritan with a baseball bat to walk up and test the efficacy of those little Nazi hats they call helmets.
The new thing is modern V8 muscle cars (Chargers, Challengers, Mustangs and Camaros) with exhaust cut-outs. They are deafening, and they are everywhere where I live in San Jose (which is not one of the genteel areas). They are also illegal, of course, but we no longer enforce laws in California. Nor, apparently, in New York. For those not satisfied with inflicting low-level hearing loss, a special Platinum Asshole feature is available on the aftermarket. It alters the engine’s spark and fuel map to deliberately induce explosive backfires that sound like a 12-gauge shotgun at close range.
Julie Aitken Schermer, a professor of psychology at Western University in Ontario, Canada, conducted a study of people who modify their cars to make them louder, using a standard inventory of psychological traits. She was expecting to find narcissism, but instead she found “links between folks with a penchant for loud exhausts and folks with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies”. “The personality profile I found with our loud mufflers are also the same personality profiles of people who illegally commit arson,” she told a reporter. These are people who have a hard time with “higher-order moral reasoning with a focus on basic rights for people”.
The New York Times has taken notice of this trend. It seems one Miles Hudson, a 20-year-old man-child, has been terrorising downtown Seattle in the wee hours, making it his special mission to disturb sleep with his Dodge Hellcat. “Entire neighbourhoods are angry and sleep deprived,” a resident wrote to their local council member. One woman claimed that she lived with PTSD and woke up in fear because the backfiring vehicle sounded like gunshots outside her building. “This is the first time in 13 years that I’ve started seriously considering moving out of downtown,” she wrote. Another wrote in after 6am, saying the tiger-striped Hellcat had been revving up and down streets for two hours. “What will it take for this to end?” the man wrote.
Mr Hudson told a reporter at The Seattle Times in March that the city needed to focus its attention on other problems. “There are way bigger issues than a black man with a nice car who makes noise occasionally,” he said. His car is indeed nice, if by nice you mean expensive. It lists from $97,000-111,000. “No disrespect, but I feel like I’m doing my thing,” he told the officer who stopped him and recorded the interaction on his body cam.
The city has been super understanding of Mr Hudson’s need to do his thing. To watch the bodycam footage of the cop who pulled him over is to get a window onto Blue America, 2024. It is like watching a Hindu farmer trying to coax a sacred cow out of a rice paddy, without laying hands on it, speaking harshly to it, or otherwise running afoul of the Brahmins who insist on the cow’s protected status. The cop is real chummy. “Remember the last time I pulled you over?” He tries to ingratiate himself with the entitled twat by informing him that he is an ASE certified master mechanic, as well as a policeman. It appears to be an attempt to establish common ground: I can appreciate your car. Essentially he offers a change of jurisdiction, from that of the public authority to that of a shared subculture.
But this gesture is lost on our sacred cow, who can only repeat that he has 700,000 Instagram followers for his exploits. The cop tries to cajole him into perhaps taking his car to a race track. “I’m just saying… Just consider it, bro,” the policeman says. The cop’s deference is nauseating. At no point does he rise to the occasion and speak with authority on behalf of the common good. It turns out you don’t need to defund the police, you just need to delegitimise the idea of law itself, if by “law” you mean rules of civilised behaviour that apply to all.
The French writer Renaud Camus, known for his controversial “Great Replacement” theory, also coined the term nocence to capture what is going on here. Removing the negative “in-” from “innocence”, he left a word that meant nuisance or harm. He went so far as to form an “anti-nuisance” political party called In-nocence, making explicit what we all know: that the fabric of the world is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space. This can have an unfortunate resemblance to conquest.
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