Laying It On Thick

The way to teach "The Modern Moloch"-- a phenomenal episode of 99% Invisible about the mostly unknown story of how automobile lobbyists and auto club enthusiasts destroyed the modern American city with car-centric infrastructure, blaming pedestrians for reckless walking and removing them from the streets instead of shaping the road system around the idea of autonomous walking, vibrant street life, and public transportation (we link this source to another great essay on this topic, Rebecca Solnit's "Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche") is to make the cartoons from the 1920's about sacrificing children to the Ammonite god Moloch-- as there was a great deal of hatred towards cars during this time period, hatred that has been glossed over by the Trump-like revisionist history that portrays America as always having a love affair with the automobile, a narrative that is written by the winners and just not true-- but the reason we can't have nice things is the bad guys won . . . and seem to be still winning, as Trump is now promising to "terminate" congestion pricing in New York City-- and the orange dicktater will probably succeed because Eric Adams is in his thrall-- anyway, the way to get this stuff across to high school kids is to begin the lesson reciting a list of all the people I've known that have died in car crashes and then go on a very depressing field trip to visit the Emily Fredericks bench in the lobby, Fredericks was an excellent student of mine back in the day, and she was biking to work in Philadelphia and in the bike lane when she was struck by a distracted garbage truck driver (earbuds in, looking at paperwork) and killed-- a sacrifice to Moloch and so that we can have our wide and fast city roads and unprotected bike lanes . . . and of course, nothing happened to the guy who hit her, all charges dropped because like Eric Adams is in Trump's thrall, we are in the thrall of the automobile . . . and the lightbulbs were starting to go off over the heads of these subruban students, as they recognized the problems with Route 18 and the Ryder's Lane-- the hodge-podge of zoning, the fact that a giant new condiminium complex is being built but it is completely disconnected from all the surrounding shops and stores except by roads, so it won't even be possible to walk to Starbucks and the traffic will get even worse and it will be even harder to cross the street . . . what have we wrought?