Who would have thought? The three big Detroit automakers (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) and European carmakers are on the brink and need billions of dollars and euros to stay afloat. The debate in America and Europe is massive and divisive. There are as many people who think these companies should be rescued as those who think it is a bad idea to bail them out. The numbers mobilized for or against these arguments are so big that they (numbers) are barely comprehensible. The number of workers who would be made redundant is talked about in millions (of people). The money that would be required to keep them afloat is talked about in billions (of dollars). Yet, the automobile is so entrenched in global culture that it is impossible to measure the impact of what’s happening in quantitative terms alone.

Model T Ford.
[image by me'nthedogs, some rights reserved]

Between the time when Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 and Jack Kerouac wrote his classic On the Road in 1951 (published in 1957) the automobile became the most ubiquitous technology that affected every aspect of American and European cultures in the twentieth century. While the computer and Internet generation may not see it that way, the automobile is the technology that had the biggest impact on the twentieth century. (Perhaps nuclear fission and the moving image are the other two.) Again, the numbers that one can cite about this impact are mind numbing: annual road deaths (thousands), average commute times (hours), carbon dioxide emissions (tonnes), suburban sprawl (acres), oil dependency (barrels), and social isolation (priceless). The automobile has altered the character of the city in the twentieth century like no other technology and like no other time. The walkable city has now either disappeared or is consigned to the central areas of a few cities with outrageous house prices (since there is so little left of it) that persist despite the credit crunch. As both Steffen Böhm and Brian Ladd argue in their recently published books even for those who’d rather not drive to work there is very little choice left. Has this all been worth it?

I think not. The automobile has been amongst the most destructive technologies deployed to remake the modern city and its countryside. There was nothing inexorable about the rise of the automobile and the way in which it destroyed the city. Automakers aggressively pushed train companies out the market and bullied governments into building roads rather than investing in green public transportation systems. Generations of people have been saying these things since at least the 1920s with much more eloquence and knowledge than I can here. But automakers (just like tobacco companies) have invested billions of dollars in marketing and advertising to seduce people into thinking that the automobile and driving are ‘cool’ and ‘fun’. By changing the city and countryside so radically the automakers made the automobile necessary — at an enourmous cost.

Perhaps we should shed no tears for automakers (at least no more than we shed for bankers) if not for the workers and their families. Could we not find a way to employ all those workers in productive (rather than destructive) industries? Can we not invest all those bailout billions in rebuilding cities and creating new public transportation systems? It is conceivable that one day automakers (if they survive) will be treated like tobacco companies. If there is a clever lawyer out there who wants to get the ball rolling with a class-action lawsuit against all automakers (for all the destruction they have caused), I am sure there are people who are ready to sign up. Given that oil production has reached its peak, the break in oil prices is only fleeting and is estimated to dramatically increase. Will we then see the automobile off the road?

Find out More

• Against Automobility. By Steffen Böhm. Published by Blackwell.
• Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. By Brian Ladd. Published by University of Chicago Press.
• Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. By Cotton Seiler. Published by University of Chicago Press.
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). By Tom Vanderbilt. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.

About the author

Engin F Isin is professor in politics and international studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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In the last month or so I’ve become intrigued by the spectacle of the Republican ‘pick’ of Sarah Palin for the vice presidential candidate. I say spectacle because Palin is everywhere in US news bulletins and in the ‘blogosphere’, alternately spoofed, lampooned and applauded as ‘everymom’, and even turned into an action doll range wearing a school girl uniform with a red bra and a gun holster.

Once upon a time, two white male candidates would have been apparently able, quite unproblematically, to ‘represent’ all Americans including women and non-whites. I’m not saying that the absence up to now of non-white and non-male candidates for high political office was a ‘good thing’. I’m saying that the campaigns for non-white and non-male candidates in these US election campaigns have strongly veered towards a position where the capacity of candidates to represent something beyond their own interests or personal identity is now radically in doubt.

If you think back to Margaret Thatcher, there was little sense in which anyone expected her to ‘represent feminism’, just because she was female, and rightly so in fact, although it was a bitter pill for many to swallow. She was first of all a Conservative. She was also tellingly represented as a female masquerading as a male, but that kind of sexism notwithstanding, one lesson many (including feminists) learned from the Thatcher episode was that anatomy is not destiny. Thatcher showed many woment that you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

Thatcher showed you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

So, to return to the US elections: one black candidate (Obama) and one female candidate (Clinton), followed by one female VP nomination on the Republican side, has blown the universalism of the old days out of the water. Obama’s burden of representation is: can he, as an educated black man, represent all peoples, not just non-whites, not just the middle classes? Clinton’s was: could she overcome the difficulty powerful women have in the public domain, of being likeable as well as being authoritative? Could she attract more than just the feminist vote?

In the midst of these struggles over the Democratic nomination, a textbook semiotic situation , John McCain was looking old, white and male, just because there were these other candidates who could be contrasted to him. McCain invoked himself as ‘the American president Americans have been waiting for’ (as opposed to Obama, he meant, whose Americanness was implicitly in question). But his problem as Republicans perceived it, was that against Obama and Clinton he appeared to be more like Bush, whereas he needed to put clear water between his own brand of Republican politics and the track record of the Bush administration.

Sarah Palin.
[image by Sskennel, some rights reserved]

Once Obama failed to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate, the door was open to McCain to look like the progressive and agent of change by choosing a woman. So then the Republican party, picks Sarah Palin, a politically inexperienced self-styled ‘hockey mum’ from small town Alaska. She is often thus described, but this description is not my sexist inflection, it is exactly how she represents herself, and it is why the Republicans selected her. Palin was selected entirely for her gender and her entire pitch has been about folksy political illiteracy. Had she been a man, she would not have been picked for VP.

As I’ve pointed out, this American election is to a very great extent fought on the turf of identity politics, brought about by a mostly ‘happy’ collusion between political parties who seek to use identity politics and media institutions that for the most part are bent on the personalisation of politics.

Identity-exploiting candidates such as Palin use whatever connection to a community they have to appeal to voters' sense of cultural familiarity, which serves to obscure the candidates' competence or fitness for office.

Republican political machinery have been active in pushing Palin’s identity profile, with conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham enthusing that ‘A lot of women are calling in excited…The women of America will see that she might be the first woman vice president.’ Palin’s identity-based advantages go beyond gender, in Ingraham’s view: ‘Palin has an Eskimo husband, a Down’s Syndrome son, an Iraq-bound son.’ Of course she has traditional Republican political strengths: anti-abortion, anti-gun control, creationism, pro-oil drilling in Alaska, aggressive foreign policy inclinations and so on. But these are the default positions of  many a Republican candidate. But, only a woman could have been billed a ‘gun-toting, moose-hunting mother of five’ and have used a campaign image showing her sitting in the bloodstained snow, gun in hand, alongside the carcass of a large animal killed by her own fair hand. A mix of femininity and killer aggressiveness – an image of political woman based on the compromises necessary for women in Republican politics, combining a frontierswoman self-reliance with the sexual allure of a beauty contest winner.

Republican strategists...hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters

Republican strategists have been open in the hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, who believe that they had a right to a woman in the White House. It’s an extraordinary thought, that Palin was picked because it was considered that her anatomy could buy her Clinton’s votes, despite the fact she wears Republican clothes. Shades of  the Thatcher experience then, to any deluded voters thinking that she is a feminist ticket.

Indeed, feminist overtures and apple pie ‘mom’ was the balancing trick that Palin offered in her first rally in Ohio as VP nominee. She began by drawing on a hackneyed feminist metaphor, and directly echoing a speech of Clinton’s: ‘It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.’ In fashioning Palin’s affirmative action candidacy, the McCain campaign has gleefully adopted liberal feminist tactics and grievances that conservative Republicans have so long derided. No matter that Palin chastised Clinton for whining when she complained of sexism during the primary, or that McCain laughed approvingly when one of his supporters called Clinton a ‘bitch’.

However, lest she came over as an aggressive feminist (and given that conservatives traditionally scoff at the idea that American society systematically blocks women from advancement), the main theme of her speeches have been her own personal story, spliced with sentimental guff such as ‘Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys…I’m just one of many mums who will say an extra prayer each night for our sons and daughters going into harm’s way’.

Palin’s popularity reflects, in great part, a cultural mistrust of expertise and intellectual rigour. Her inexperience as a former mayor of a tiny town and governor of a small, idiosyncratic state for less than two years, her confident ignorance about the economy and international relations, her ditzy delivery and religious zeal, all add up to the sense of a special kind of feminine ignorance catapulted onto the world stage.

At the televised debate last week between the VPs, Palin played all flickering eyelashes and flirty folksiness, at one point actually winking at the camera. As one typical political commentator said, ‘She lit up the screen at times with her smile and occasional winks’. In recent days, though, we have had less ‘lipstick’ and more ‘pitbull’, as an increasingly desperate McCain-Palin ticket exploits the anger of Republican extremists about Obama, stirring up mob-like behaviour in the ranks. As the Republicans move into the territory of assassinating Obama on racial grounds (Palin said he is someone ‘who doesn't see America as we do’), they move further into frivolity. Ignorance doesn’t have to be a woman, and ignorance may not secure votes in the long run, but only a woman could build her political credibility on the appeal of ignorance.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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May and I were in the US for our research project to interview policy makers in Washington DC. The last time I was there was 20 years ago when I was an impoverished backpacker able only to wander the streets and visit the wonderful Smithsonian Museums, which are free to enter. This time, we had a cosy hotel near Dupont Circle and - given that we were interviewing ex-ambassadors - I had a suit and tie.

Obviously I knew Washington was a political city, but I hadn’t prepared myself for the pervasiveness of politics. Everywhere we lingered people on either side of us were discussing politics. Clearly the Democratic primaries were on many peoples’ lips, but I heard excited interns discussing health policy, a campaigner extolling to his colleague about Burma, and someone who had returned from Afghanistan. 

Then there were the Democratic campaign teams rushing around with clipboards and a student protest outside the White House to raise awareness of Darfur. Although the speakers at the latter event gave a balanced assessment of the Darfur crisis, not surprisingly the Chinese role I discussed in my earlier blog was high on the agenda. It was good to see students so fired up about world issues even if the White House’s occupant may not have been so impressed.

The research interviews went well and we will be positing edited versions of these on the website soon. We wanted to find out what the policy community in Washington thought about China’s role in Africa and what moves, if any, the US were making to respond to this. 

One commentator has described Washington as divided between ‘Panda huggers’ who welcome China’s role in the world and the ‘China hawks’ who see it as a direct threat to US interests. The media has tended to pick up on the hawkish pronouncements and so May and I were prepared for strong anti-China sentiments from the people we interviewed in the World Bank, IMF and various think-tanks. 

But while these respondents weren’t exactly panda huggers they were interested in a considered engagement with the Chinese rather than the knee-jerk containment of the hawks. In the main they see China as a legitimate world player and most of what it is doing in Africa is not much different from what other countries are doing there. They all seek the oil and minerals, but China has a slightly different way of winning hearts and minds in Africa, which disturbs some rival policy makers in the west. Not, I would argue, because they care deeply about Africans, but because China is winning markets they would like to capture. 

And talking of market access, we've recently witnessed a Chinese ship with weapons destined for Zimbabwe being refused entry into various ports in Southern Africa. Given the electoral problems in Zimbabwe, and the more general political crisis, the various countries denying entry are at last making some kind of stand against the Mugabe regime. So far these countries have been wary of condemning him and have let the western powers do all the sabre-rattling. Which, paradoxically, has only added fuel to Mugabe’s claims about a western conspiracy against him. The Angolan government said they’d let the arms be unloaded there. Not only is Angola a close ally of Mugabe, but the Chinese are huge investors in Angolan oil. So, it appears that in the rush to gain Chinese investment and appease neighbouring countries the Angolans will accommodate the ship. It seems we’re all making accommodations for a piece of the Chinese pie.

About the author

Dr Giles Mohan is a Reader in the Politics of International Development at the Open University. His research has examined politics in Africa, particularly ways in which rural communities access the government as well the role of diasporas in national politics.

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