I'm a bit ashamed to say that i used to listen to Larry King on the radio back in the 1980s. It was just for company, for noise in the background and it usually annoyed me a lot. I often agreed with his politics, but i didn't like how abusive he was, especially to people who disagreed with him.
One evening someone called up to scold him. "You always talk about playing Baseball in the street.", he shouted. It's true, Larry talked about baseball all the time and frequently talked fondly about the street baseball he played as a kid in Brooklyn in the 1940s.
Well, this guy wanted to abuse Larry and he said, "i know you're lying because you would've been killed if you'd been in the middle of the street."
Larry responded, but not very well. What the caller was completely ignorant of was that until the 1960s & 70s, streets were for PEOPLE. Before WWII there just weren't enough cars to make traffic jams and almost all residential streets, in cities or small towns, were PUBLIC SPACE. But the car-think is so strong that logic and education and all sense of perspective goes out the window. This guy must have thought cars and the massive publicly subsidized car infrastructure were hundreds of years old.
It's easy to make fun of him, but i worry more about the people who are less obnoxious but still making the same assumptions about the appropriateness and inevitability of car dominance. We all know it was decisions that people made that created the car culture, but so much of what we think, say and do is unconsciously controlled by that car-think. That is dangerous.
