emergent ink

Over the past week I have conducted extensive observations over thousands of miles of open road tests (I don’t send text messages while driving like you do). Based on this study, I can tell you that people tend to drive five to fifteen miles faster than the posted speed limit.

Most of the tests were conducted on two-lane interstate highways up and down the east coast including I-4, I-75, I-77, I-81, I-84 and I-95.

Speed limits were anywhere from 50 to 70 MPH, tending towards the high end south of the Mason-Dixon line where NASCAR reigns.

Almost nobody drives below sixty. Next time you’re on a highway pay attention to how few cars drive slower than that. There are two reasons for this. The first is that we are notoriously bad at math.

Because there are sixty minutes in an hour, most of us can figure out that when we drive sixty miles per hour we are going one mile a minute, and can estimate how long it will take to get somewhere. Having to calculate this for any other speed, in our heads, while driving, causes us to break into a sweat. The only thing we know for sure is that anything faster than 60 MPH is at least a mile a minute.

That makes it a good deal. We’re getting wherever we are going just a little bit quicker. Anything slower than sixty makes us worry that we’ll end up getting there late. We just don’t know how late. And let’s face it: we left a little later than we should have.

The other reason that we drive so fast is that we love our freedom. We look at speed limits as suggestions. Whatever the limit is, you can be sure that only a small percentage of cars on the road are moving at or below that speed. Especially when there are no cops around.

That’s the American way.

We were founded, remember, by people looking for a place where they could escape religious persecution. This way they could be free to follow their own beliefs, which often included the persecution of those who didn’t follow their beliefs.

Hundreds of years later this spirit manifests itself on our two-lane interstates, where the only thing more annoying than the driver who comes up fast in the left lane, only to lose the nerve to pass me when he pulls alongside my left rear bumper forcing me to slam on my brakes as I come up on the slow-moving truck in front of me, is the driver who decides at the last second that he doesn’t want me to go ahead of him and pulls into the left lane in front of me, thereby imposing his maximum speed on me and limiting my freedom to move at my own pace.

Then, when I tailgate him, he decides to teach me a lesson about obeying the speed limit, and slows down some more.

I hate thy holier-than-thou attitude.

The same weakness with math leads us to think that a gallon of gas that costs $2.99 and nine-tenths only costs $2.99. We round that nine-tenths of a penny down. But when we buy ten gallons of gas we don’t save ten cents; we save a penny.

I have no idea why the price of gas is calculated to a tenth of a penny, other than that it is one more way we deceive ourselves about the real cost of automobiles in our lives.

On I-75 in Florida I passed a car with a bumper sticker that read:

I’ll keep my guns, my freedom, and my money – you can keep the “Change”!

The guy with the bumper sticker probably hasn’t finished paying for his car yet. He has to pay for car insurance, and his registration, and his driver’s license. He’s probably running a hefty credit card balance and might also have a mortgage.

The website fueleconomy.gov reports that passenger cars are most fuel-efficient at 60 MPH. Every five miles you drive over 60 MPH is like paying an additional twenty-four cents per gallon of gas.

The quickest, most pain-free way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil is to slow down.

But that’s not the American way.

That guy really doesn’t have the freedom he thinks he has. And he really isn’t holding on to his money. Not at the speed he was going.

Just in case the guy already knew that he doesn’t have two of the things he values most, but still had the third thing, I did not tailgate him.

The stretch of I-4 around Orlando, Florida is loaded with theme parks, but the one that caught my eye was called Holy Land Experience.

Florida is a strange place.

Most of the roads are very straight and flat, something that a New Englander has a hard time comprehending. This may be to make things easier for all of the old people who live there, or for the minivans full of families heading to and from the theme parks. Straight roads make it easy for drivers to break up fights between siblings in the third row without slowing down.

There are a lot of churches in Florida. Most of the churches have names like First Unity Church. I didn’t see many Second or Third churches, though I did see a Mary, Queen of the Universe Church (also on I-4). This has nothing to do with the extreme flatness of Florida, or with the Holy Land Experience theme park, which looked like it belonged in Las Vegas.

I confess that my first thought on seeing the Holy Land Experience sign (besides ‘wow, that looks like a casino!’) was yes, but whose Holy Land? Which seems to make the Holy Land Experience theme park the real deal.

But then I became distracted thinking about what went on inside the place. Were there rides? Was there a water park (perhaps it was called Noah’s Water Park?) Was there a wave pool that simulated Moses parting the Red Sea?

Then two of my kids started fighting over some toy in the third row of the minivan, and I threatened that I would take it and throw it out the window. This got me thinking about the Holy Land Experience again, and whether Jews and Christians and Moslems might stop fighting over it if they were presented with a choice like the one Solomon gave the two mothers in the bible story, when he threatened to cut the baby each one claimed in half to satisfy both of them.

Then I had to pass another truck.

Over the past couple of weeks Congress failed to pass a bill that would have extended unemployment assistance for 1.2 million Americans whose benefits were running out at the end of June.

The stock market goes up and down like a stack of chips on a blackjack table, but the economy is not getting better. There are around 15 million Americans who are out of work. The Department of Labor puts the unemployment rate at 9.7%. The real numbers are larger but let’s stick to the official statistics and not count people who are underemployed or who have given up looking for work.

Congress is more worried about the deficit and the threat of inflation than the problem of these 15 million Americans without jobs. But interest rates remain historically low. And the deficit gets worse when you can’t collect income taxes from people who are not working.

The economy can’t grow until those millions of Americans start working. If this keeps up they’ll start to lose their homes. That will reverse any recovery in home prices. Eventually they’ll need some form of help, unless the unspoken plan to lower unemployment involves starvation instead of jobs.

As we start to count this recession’s age in years (it’s a toddler now), the surprising thing is that there hasn’t been more of a fuss made about the jobless.

It’s been talked about by the politicians and by the news media as a problem to be solved, or at least something to argue about and point fingers over. But we have not yet heard the voice of those who actually care about this issue. Not in the way it might be heard if this keeps up.

In the 1930s joblessness led quickly to homelessness and settlements were formed on empty land. These tents and shacks were known as Hoovervilles “in honor of” President Hoover. Tens of thousands of Americans lived in those shantytowns.

In 1932 Hoover and the Republican majority in Congress opposed the payment of bonuses to military veterans (mostly from World War One) because the payments would be (just like today’s unemployment benefits) too much for the Federal budget.

A “Bonus Army” consisting of tens of thousands of veterans and their families, many of whom were out of work, marched on Washington D.C. and demanded their cash payments. They set up camp in a Hooverville by the Anacostia River in mid June and hoped to (peacefully) convince Congress to grant the benefits.

In late July General Douglas MacArthur ordered the army to evict the protesting veterans. The shantytown was destroyed. Accounts of the incident vary: some said hundreds were injured and several killed. Other eyewitnesses reported very few injuries. Some said Hoover ordered the action, others claimed that MacArthur acted on his own. Whatever really happened, it turned into a public relations nightmare for Hoover.

Bonus Army shacks on the Anacostia flats, Washington, D.C., burning after the battle with the military. The Capitol in the background. 1932.

Hoovervilles are appearing again in different parts on the country. There hasn’t yet been anything like a Bonus Army demanding attention from the government. But President Obama and too many congressmen are repeating the mistakes of the past. They are worried too much about the deficit and they are not worried enough about the unemployed. We are suffering from deficit attention disorder.

Most of us know someone who has been hurt by the current economic crisis, someone struggling every day to make ends meet and turn things around. Everyone is trying to ride this out, and the hope is that it ends soon. But there have been very few signs of a real recovery.

And maybe some of us aren’t paying enough attention. After all, there are more important things going on.

If Andy Warhol were alive today, he’d talk about how everyone would be famous for ten minutes.

He’d tweet it, not talk about it.

That Bonus Army would get itself a Facebook page, and instead of walking to Washington and living in a Hooverville, it would hold a virtual march and we could all become fans of the page.

That is, if we weren’t too busy playing FarmVille, Café World, or Mafia Wars.

There are 64 million Americans actively playing FarmVille, the popular Facebook game where you pretend to grow your own food. Millions more are pretending to run their own business or start their own crime syndicate. All this virtual entrepreneurship does not lead to anything real.

Some of our politicians have suggested that when we cut off the unemployment benefits, people will get up and go get jobs. I don’t think the jobs are there. It’s no wonder that 9am Facebook status messages (“Today I’m getting serious about getting work”) turn into this by 11am: “Sam found some fuel and wants to share it with you in FarmVille!”

I do not think people are so addicted to FarmVille that they are forgetting to look for a real job, but it may be another distraction that is keeping us from dealing with our real problems.

It’s hard to imagine another stimulus bill after the first one didn’t turn everything around the way everyone hoped it would. (My feeling is that things would probably be far worse if we didn’t do what we did, but we could have done it better.)

We could spend our way out of this if we spend on the right things. A massive government program that invests in private enterprise to develop alternative energy sources would create jobs and rebuild our economy for the long term.

The last stimulus package was heavy with road improvement projects that only serve as bridges to the twentieth century. It’s time to look ahead instead of back.

But new technology is not the only answer. We should start by modernizing our underused and badly maintained rail network, rather than dumping billions into smaller high-speed rail experiments that may never provide real benefits.

Word of the day: anosognosia is a condition in which (to paraphrase Wikipedia) a person who suffers disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. This may include unawareness of impairments like blindness or paralysis. Filmmaker Errol Morris explored this condition in a series in the NY Times this past June. Introducing the phrase social anosognosia, he asked: “Can a group of people, perhaps even society at large, devolve into a state of destructive cluelessness?”

That’s a very good question.