HELL ON WHEELS

...the Reader's Digest has been making a good living off this particular preachment for twenty-five years...

...I did, for years and years and years, and then, two years ago, a friendly enemy gave me a car...

...After dodging the Fifth Commandment for thirty years —lest it occur to a parishioner that he should not kill Germans or Russians—the parsons arc pulling all the stops on it in an effort to persuade the parishioners that they should love their neighbors as themselves...

...Tell him to drive and he'll fly...

...When you are driving an automobile, you are supposed to keep your mind on the road...

...Who's the '"er" that they're letting go...

...Or he stayed in a poker game, or lost an election or a job or a child—or a golf ball...

...but something tells him, drunk or sober, that the whole world he lives in is managing that much power, more than it can manage, and it hasn't gone off yet, so why shouldn't he...

...Love seeketh not her own...

...Where will I get the thousand dollars a year to own a car...

...Do you want me to drive, dear...

...I'm like that before breakfast...

...And the fellow who has got the kind of mind that can be kept on the road isn't the kind of fellow who carried the day at Auster-litz or discovered penicillin...

...In spite of the traffic congestion in metropolitan areas, their injury and fatality rates are inconsequential...

...The answer is probably, "Probably not—but neither does he want very badly to live...

...We seek thy infinite understanding and mercy...

...There they can use the horsepower they have been sold by those merchants of death and sellers of deadly weapons, Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors...

...He wants to get away from it all...

...Hop up a man, with or without liquor, and he'll think he can do what he can't—which is what he wants to think all the time...

...What he can't do is drive cautiously, carefully, slowly, because Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors have put in his hands an amount of power appropriate to his present, drunken, and illusory command of power...

...But this is not an important activity, in our time, and the church is willing to take on anything else that needs to be taken on in its place, such as reminding the communicants not to drive while they are drunk...

...Those who survived went to church on Sunday, drove home slowly, and went back to making bomb-fuses on Monday morning...

...The four causes, perfectly well established, are (1) happy-go-luckiness, with or without a skinful...

...E's the Old Adam, hell bent on doing what comes unnaturally, converting himself from the slob that he is, weak, worthless, and woebegone, into a god...

...Jading, in this country, begins at 16 or 17...

...and guide us . . ." "Come, take up the cross, and follow me...

...She says it like that because it's so seldom you're happy that she, whose very existence induces unhappiness in you, does not want to remind you too forcibly of her very existence...

...I speak, ol course, of the churches...

...Neither can it be preached, with any success, to people so steeped in halucination that they call virtue vice, and vice virtue...

...I can, and so can you...

...Rocky knows he's a menace, so he isn't much of a menace...

...You can do anything better than anyone, beginning with brilliant conversation...

...What do I need a set of fangs for, or a bottle of strychnine...

...Beginning last September, the pastors of Greenwich, always willing to come out four-square, rock-ribbed, and copper-sheathed for anything non-controversial, came out five Sundays in a row with sermons on Sale Driving...

...not that I don't want to kill or be killed...

...It barely runs, but I hate it, the way any slave hates his master, and one of these days I'm going to get into it to get a letter to the airport (how did I ever get letters to the airport before, or did I?), and that will be the last of me, hoist by my own petard...

...on the highways today . . ." "Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction...

...they never have...

...When you have got to go home, or, better yet, go somewhere else, your wife says, "Do you want me to drive, dear...

...and (1) hiiny...

...On the assumption that the prayer is not copyrighted, I publish it here, in italic type, with a kind of antiphonal chant, or congregational response, that I have worked up to go with it: "Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we humbly beseech thee to look down upon us . . ." "We know not what we should pray for...

...and with thy help . . ." "They have turned their back unto me, and not their face: but in the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and save us...

...we 7>iay lessen the loss of life by accident . . ." "Naught shelter thee, ye who wilt not shelter me...

...He wants to have a good time...

...So the churches, instead of preaching Christ crucified, are preaching the speed limit...

...Does he want to kill...

...He can't manage that much power...

...By the time the lad is 18 or 19 he's no longer coiled to spring with happy-go-luckiness...

...I didn't want it as a gift...

...Thus, since automobile accidents needed to be reduced, we turned to the public schools, which were not doing anything important, and instructed them to teach the children how not to have automobile accidents...

...We're all like that, before or after something...

...By the time he's 40 or 50, the bang is nothing but a wet firecracker, but it's better than nothing...

...Booze produces the zing of adolescence in sixty-minute form...

...The only way is not to drive...

...He has got to take a swing at somebody or something...

...Friend, you can't live in California—Connecticut, Illinois—without a car...

...Imagine asking you—when you've never been better—if you're all right...

...He's tried everything but death for a thrill...

...HELL ON WHEELS by MILTON MAYER WHENEVER there is something that needs to be done, the thing to do, if you're busy, is to find somebody who isn't busy (or who isn't busy at anything important) and have him do it...

...The schools responded democratically to the taxpayers and substituted Driver Education for English, History, and Algebra, and the children all learned how to drive an automobile and how to want one...

...Tell him to walk and he'll run...

...A man, or a whole people, bent upon self-destruction is not to be balked of its sovereign desire by the parsons of Greenwich, who, instead of trying to wean them from temporal death, should be winning them to eternal life...

...lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed...

...Traffic deaths dropped 11.7 per cent, from 324 in 1955 to 286 in 1956...

...He's mad...

...3) preoccupation...

...Years ago, before the inflation, a fellow proved to me that it cost a thousand dollars a year to own a car...

...for our fellow men . . ." "I was a stranger, and ye took me in...

...Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire begins with the words: "In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind...

...Then it declined and fell...

...Now we have turned to another institution which, like the schools, is not doing anything important and is willing to do whatever the taxpayers want...

...Monday morning they went to work, making bomb-fuses to blow the heads off Chinese babies, or, if they were financiers, and not retired, stealing the widow's cottage, and by Friday at 5 P.M., Greenwich time, they were fit to tie one on and go out for a spin...

...The killers—good citizens all—kill one another on the open highways...

...the horrors of the times, beginning with conscription, are already upon him...

...But I couldn't say no to Mommy, who didn't want it, but needed it to do the shopping and haul the kids to the dentist in town...

...We'd know if we had an advance rundown on the 40,000 who ran each other down in 1956...

...Safe driving is irrelevant to driver education—poor drivers are, as a matter of fact, safer drivers—because unsafe driving is the consequence of causes that have nothing to do with operating a machine...

...Automobile accidents did not decline in or around Greenwich, or would not have had it not been for the decision of the governor of Connecticut that there is no use preaching to sinners while the rod is handy...

...So I get the driving over with as fast as I can, so that I can walk...

...So the governor put through a law providing that speeders have their driving licenses lifted...

...They preach temperance to the rich the way they preach it to the poor...

...You could drive an intercontinental missile right now...

...from the slave of the laws, always more of them imposed on his un-protesting spirit by the war-and-wel-fare state, into a law unto himself...

...Or make him unhappy...

...Neither can it be enforced—for long—on sin h a people by law, because they will rise up against the law and rebel and insist that, in a democracy, they get what they want, which, in this case, is a great big bang out of life—and into death...

...The churches, like the schools, are supposed to be doing something else, namely, dinning the good news of salvation into the ears of the communicants, and reminding them that he who would save life eternal must lose it here...

...The more effortless the cars are to drive, and the throughways to drive them on, the more reason there is for a man who has anything else at all to think about to think about anything else at all...

...I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink...

...But it takes a moron to keep his mind on the road, and the man who says, "I enjoy driving," and means it, has, I think, just a little something wrong with his belfry...

...There, on always bigger and faster highways, and more of them as fast as the federal and state governments can shake the money out of the people's pockets, the suicide pilots can "let 'er go...

...He's fighting drunk, with or without liquor...

...This fantasy seems to have begun last summer in Greenwich, Connecticut, where a retired financier, who is chairman of the Greenwich Safety Council, has given $75,000 to the National Safety Council to be used "to assist churches in their efforts to influence their members to practice safety as a moral obligation and as practical religion...

...The girls coil him up...

...For years my non-ownership of a car was my most dependable source of income—a thousand dollars a year not spent...

...And the minute he does, he's dead or killing...

...Amen...

...I enjoy walking...

...Trying death—without quite being caught—like the high-wire walker...

...2) its opposite, unhappy go-luckiness...

...But by the time he is 25 or 30, unless he's got somebody else's wife to coil up with him, he gets his bang from the bottle...

...Our Rock, who is 15, has it, but because it's indigenous and he knows he's happy-go-lucky, he drives so carefully and nervously, with Pop in the seat beside him, that his little brother, Dicken, and Dicken's dog, Lucy, in the back seat whimper and whine, respectively, until we let them out...

...Does he want to die...

...In my own case, I hurry because I don't enjoy driving...

...When it quits on us, will we walk again...

...I simply don't enjoy driving, and when I have to do it I'm dangerous...

...may follow thy light . . ." "The light shined in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not...

...Driving can be taught, but not safe driving, because safe driving requires temperance, and temperance is a moral virtue, and moral virtue can not be taught...

...Did the parsons of Greenwich tell them to quit making bomb-fuses and stealing cottages so that, by 5 P.M...

...I'm an unsafe driver, so I don't drive...

...The answer is probably, "Probably—but not enough to risk his life in order to do it, or he'd join the army...

...Seventy-five thousand leaves of crisp lettuce, enough to feed several thousand Hungarian or Egyptian war victims for a year, all to be used to persuade that practical religionist, the parson, to persuade the sots to go right on eating the apple, and surely not die, providing they don't lap up the apple juice...

...I suppose you can hear it now in all the better cathedrals, not, of course, in the backward parts of Africa and Asia, but wherever, as in the Roman Empire of the second century of the Christian era, the people are civilized and have just bought a car that goes a hundred miles an hour with fingertip control...

...and consideration . . ." "I hungered, and ye gave me meat...

...The sober citizens—this is Sunday morning—all drove home slowly and carefully after the sermon...

...He wants to "let 'er go...

...That wife of his—whose existence is really the only obstacle to their having a happy marriage—has given him one of those beatings that a miserable wife knows how to administer in almost any room of the house except the kitchen...

...All right?—Boy, you're not all right, you're great...

...Or won't we be able to remember that it was possible, only a few years ago, to live in Missouri, Montana, Georgia, without a car, just as all the rest of the people all over the world live (and die...

...safely . . ." "Take no thought for your life . . . But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness...

...Actually, it's 'e, not 'er...

...The thinking fellow may not call a Yellow, but he won't drive a car...

...I wasn't there, myself, but I venture that the parsons did not...

...he feels the first faint impulse to recover, from outside sources, the waning zing of adolescence...

...Friday, they wouldn't have to purge themselves with liquid fire...

...But the accident rate continued to rise, because how not to have accidents is (unlike how to drive an automobile) unteachable...

...Or the boss or his neighbor has beaten him...

...What's that—not to drive...

...Instill in us thy spirit of love . . ." "Love your enemies...

...Preoccupation—with something other than driving—is the very best reason I know for unsafe driving...

...Instead of praying for forgiveness for die mass murder he committed in Hiroshima—and is prepared to commit in Moscow—the worshipper asks God to let him go right on mass murdering and never come after him and require his soul...

...He's out for blood, and bloodshot already...

...What does he want...

...Hurry itself has a variety of causes, none of them defensible except getting your wife to a hospital...

...And the power to try it on others...

...Genuine happy-go-luckiness is indigenous to early adolescence...

...And when, as of yore, the hypocrite asks who his neighbor is, the parson, instead of giving the answer given of yore, tells him that his neighbor is the man in the two-tone convertible...

...Since the car I own was given to me, and I've only spent thirty-five dollars on it, and I never use it, it probably costs me five hundred inflated dollars a year to own...

...she says, or, "Are you sure you're all right, sweetheart...

...And the total traffic deaths in 1956, the country over, were the highest in history, just like the national budget, the national production, the national income, the national cost of living, and everything else...

...Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes...

...The parsons of Greenwich have worked up a prayer for safe driving, reprinted, in dead seriousness, in The Christian Century...

...the inebriate is not to be relieved of the cause of his inebriation, namely, excessive poverty or excessive wealth, but to go right on as he is, only without the inebriation that alone enables him to go right on as he is...

...And when we're all like that, or in just the opposite state, that of home-brewed happy-go-luckiness, we won't drive safely because we can't...

...He gets in his car—and he's got a club worthy of the giant that his wife, or his boss, or his neighbor just proved to him that he isn't...

...Brother, what it's like to sit sober and listen to the talk at a drunken party...

...so that our actions . . ." "They are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge...