Status Updates From Car Crash Culture

Reading Chapter 16, by Pamela Brown.

Car crashes involving royal or celebrity classes attract an enormous amount of attention because they allow the public to indulge two parallel impulses. The first of these is the need for communal grief over the loss of a culture's "best and brightest"; the second is an equally compelling desire to see the powerful and privileged brought down by their own incestuous foibles in a cleansing and apocalyptic comeuppance.

In the relentless cacophony that soundtracks the nightmare of modern civilization, the scream of cars in collision is mixed high. And for the most part, unless we're directly involved we ignore these thousands of crashes taking place all around us every day, simply accepting that road accidents happen all the time in a culture so heavily reliant on the automobile. But right now, somewhere on earth, a car is crashing.

Much of the United States was constructed with the automobile in mind (...) If the automobile signifies wealth, movement, progress, and all that is venerated in America, then vehicular death embodies its counterpart - that violent rage toward destruction that lies beneath the surface of the proverbial "pioneer spirit." If the car is the symbol of America, then the car wreck is the nation's bloodstained sarcophagus.

It is important to understand that most crash injuries are caused not by the first collision (between the car and an external object), nor by the second collision (between the victim's body and the interior of the vehide), but by the third collision: between the internal organs and the walls of the body.