David Stairs

Driving back from three weeks out west I was struck by how hysterical the society we’ve built for ourselves has become. This was my 28th continental crossing. I moved to Michigan thirty years ago, and have made an annual pilgrimage back to Oregon to see family and check on property there ever since. But driving in the bumper-to-bumper mass of frenzied motorists and eighteen-wheelers along I-80 in Chicago made me feel like a crazed lunatic in a nation of madmen.

Many of my trips have been made by driving. This is a stressful undertaking. America designed the best road system in the world in the mid-twentieth century, but the American political system largely defers maintenance responsibility to the states. Although there is a large fund underwritten by gasoline taxes, not all states do a good job caring for their roads. Some sparsely populated states, like Wyoming, should be barred from sharing road-tax funds based upon the pathetic condition of their Interstate. Nowhere did I drive over more “dips” or poorly matched bridges to roadbeds, and nowhere in over 4400 miles of highway were construction diversions and exits more poorly marked.

Road maintenance is only one facet of America’s libertarian streak. American drivers take their NASCAR roots seriously. They are aggressive tailgaters, pushy high-speed drivers, impatient and rude to a fault. But this should not surprise me. As a people we have always felt self-righteous and privileged. From earliest colonial times, white Americans have considered themselves the crown of creation, destined to hold dominion over the world not just the road, and this exceptionalism has only grown stronger with the passage of centuries.

Americans have recently elected the vilest, least progressive, most navel-gazing government in their history, and that’s saying a lot given how self-obsessed Americans have always been. With the world teetering on the brink of environmental catastrophe, our unenlightened leadership flaunts its self-congratulatory return to the “drill baby drill” petroleum economy as a victory rather than the impending disaster it actually represents.

The bullying economic tendencies of the Trump administration, its obsession with tariffs for instance, is just an extension of the way Americans have conducted themselves since 1945. For a people who have single-handedly contaminated the planet’s atmosphere, our deep sense of chagrin is ludicrous. When we can’t dominate economically we throw our military weight around until everyone else gets tired of our tantrums. Our foreign policy has always been carrot and stick diplomacy, with embarrassing votes in the UN where we alone among the nations of the earth refuse to be a signatory of international agreements, arguing that they impinge our “sovereignty,” a euphemism for the freedom to do as we like and damned be all.

The civilization we have developed is based upon convenience, expedience, and distraction. While the rest of the world either starves, or burns, Americans are most concerned about the fate of the exceptionally foolish cast members of 90-Day Fiancé, or have trouble deciding whether they should order a matcha or a latte at the drive-up window. In his recent book, Waste Wars, Alexander Clapp documents the way we have tricked the world to follow our lead into what Vance Packard called “forced consumption,” the noxious idea that more waste means more profit promoted by our single-use non-returnable society. This notion, championed by so many of our Fortune 500 corporations, has led the us into a world wide trash crisis.

When I go to the grocery store it is increasingly difficult to find foods packaged in anything other than plastic. We’ve all heard about the North Pacific Garbage Gyre; articles about the hazards of microplastics are published daily, but no one seems concerned enough to force legislation banning single-use non-recyclable packaging. And this is to say nothing about the international trade in the off-shoring of toxic waste to the global south, Love Canal x 1000.

Do Americans care? The answer apparently is “No, not really.” As they blast along their dilapidated freeways with 90mph impunity in their tinted-window air-conditioned gas-guzzling SUVs the reason is simple: they don’t have to because they are exceptional (the President has told them so).

Exceptional assholes.

David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.