“Certainly, my dear!” said Oliver, in such a droll matter-of-fact tone that we all laughed quite spontaneously. “And now shall we talk of something else? Or do you wish me to telephone to the Infant that their mother has been anxiously expecting them for at least five minutes?”
“No, don’t telephone,” Cornelia protested. “It’s really only just after one. I’m sure they will be here in plenty of time for the train. And please don’t change the subject. I heard what you were saying. You were talking about automobiles and automobile accidents. That is what made me so ‘jumpy,’ I suppose. I’ll not be silly any more. What were you going to say about automobiles when I interrupted?”
“It would be hard,” I said, “to avoid ‘improving the occasion’ a little. Heaven knows I didn’t get up the accident to illustrate my argument—and there’s no reason to suppose that it does illustrate my argument exactly. These people may all have been perfectly sober. But if this thing, just now, had happened in a story, like that, we should have felt that it was contrived and artificial—I don’t recall just where I stopped, but what I was about to say was—the gist of it was, that you can make a live argument based on our automobiling civilization, with almost anybody in the United States, because almost everybody in the United States has some sort of vital interest in a car; and so the argument, as we say, comes home to him.”
“That is sound enough,” said Oliver.
“Yes,” I said, “the things that people have in common are the things that hold them together and enable them to act together. Cars are a much more expensive cultural and social amalgam than, say, abstract fraternity, or a belief in the Apostolic Church, or even than an old family Bible. But the fact remains that cars are at present far more widely diffused and almost infinitely more used among our fellow countrymen than any of the older and less expensive amalgams. I doubt whether there is any other subject whatever upon which our people possess so large a fund of common knowledge and experience. Consider: we have fifteen million cars. That means that perhaps one out of every six or seven men, women, children, and babies in this country actually drives a car. That’s what I call practical belief in an article of the popular religion. And you see—if you think—that it’s the garage and the filling-station that crowd out the saloon, at every few blocks in the city, in every town and village, at every crossroads from Florida to Montana. It’s one—just one, mind you—of the expensive new clubs of the plain people, of the average man.”
“Yes,” said Oliver, “there’s something in that.”
“There’s a good deal in that,” I persisted, “both for economic necessitarians like you and me, and for religious enthusiasts like Willys. For Willys, you remember, the essence of religion is a kind of dangerous and exciting Bacchic escape from humdrum into a few hours of heightened consciousness and mystical fellowship—through the national drink. Well, Willys, when the half gods go, the true gods arrive. The national car does everything that you ask of the Holy Grail: it provides the average American with an emotional discharge; it provides him with danger, excitement, the intoxication of speed, heightened consciousness, and a mystical sense of fellowship with the owner of both the Rolls-Royce and the Ford roadster; and it provides these things not on Saturday night only but every day in the year. As you will concede, there is a ‘kick’, the possibility of a kick—especially in our national car—for every day in the year. And there’s one more thing about the religion and ritual of the car.”
“Oh at least that!” said Oliver. “But what is it, Professor?”
“It’s a thing,” I said, “that knocks into a cocked hat His Excellency’s private argument for privately nullifying the Eighteenth Amendment. Of course His Excellency didn’t invent the argument—I mean that hoary old bore about personal liberty and private conscience and so forth. All the ‘wet’ newspapers pull it out of the Pyramid of Cheops seven times a week. All the ‘wet’ city newspapers count the German and Italian and Slavic noses in their constituencies and then get off that tedious drip about the ‘puritan minority’ and its attempt to bully these honest European consciences, which, being European, are free from sanctimonious scruples against befuddling their wits with liquor.”
“Quo me rapis, tui plenum—where, O Mid-Western Bacchus,” cried Oliver, “where dost thou drag me at the tail of thy car? I feel the thong going through my heels and the rope running up to the axle of your Ford. Crank up! Drag on!”