Loud exhausts and the sadistic personality

Nuisance can be an instrument of conquest

I have always felt a white-hot hatred for those Harley clowns, in their clown costumes, who run straight pipes (i.e., no muffler) and gratuitously rev their stone-age V-twins as you sit outdoors trying to have a conversation. The only proper response, I believe, would be for some good Samaritan with a baseball bat to walk up and test the efficacy of those little Nazi hats they call helmets.

The new thing is modern V8 muscle cars (Chargers, Challengers, Mustangs and Camaros) with exhaust cut-outs. They are deafening, and they are everywhere where I live in San Jose (which is not one of the genteel areas). They are also illegal, of course, but we no longer enforce laws in California. Nor, apparently, in New York. For those not satisfied with inflicting low-level hearing loss, a special Platinum Asshole feature is available on the aftermarket. It alters the engine’s spark and fuel map to deliberately induce explosive backfires that sound like a 12-guage shotgun at close range.

Julie Aitken Schermer is a professor of psychology, at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She conducted a study of people who modify their cars to make them louder (n=529), using a standard inventory of psychological traits. She was expecting to find narcissism, but what she found instead was “links between folks with a penchant for loud exhausts and folks with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.”

"The personality profile I found with our loud mufflers are also the same personality profiles of people who illegally commit arson," she told a reporter. These are people who have a hard time with “higher-order moral reasoning with a focus on basic rights for people.”

The New York Times has taken notice of this trend. It seems one Miles Hudson, a 20-year-old man-child, has been terrorizing downtown Seattle in the wee hours, making it his special mission to stop sleep with his Dodge Hellcat.

Even people used to the ruckus of urban living jolt awake, fearful and then furious.

Complaints have flooded in for months to city leaders and the police…

But apparently this is one of those unsolvable problems of urban life.

“Entire neighborhoods are angry and sleep deprived,” one resident wrote their local council member

… complaints were pouring in to city officials. One woman wrote that she lived with P.T.S.D. and woke up in fear because the backfiring vehicle sounded like gunshots outside her building. “This is the first time in 13 years that I’ve started seriously considering moving out of downtown,” she wrote. Another wrote in after 6 a.m. saying the tiger-striped Hellcat had been revving up and down streets for two hours. “What will it take for this to end?” the man wrote.

Mr. Hudson told a reporter at The Seattle Times in March that the city needed to focus its attention on other problems. “There are way bigger issues than a Black man with a nice car who makes noise occasionally,” he said.

His car is indeed nice, if by nice you mean expensive. It lists from $97k to $111k, depending on options. “No disrespect, but I feel like I’m doing my thing,” he told the officer who stopped him and recorded the interaction on his body cam. (The video is available at the NYT link.)

The city has been super understanding of Mr. Hudson’s need to do his thing. To watch the bodycam footage of the cop who pulled him over is get a window onto Blue America, 2024. It is like watching a Hindu farmer trying to coax a sacred cow out of a rice paddy it has been trampling underfoot without laying hands on the cow, speaking harshly to it, or otherwise running afoul of the Brahmins who insist on its protected status.

The cop is real chummy. “Remember the last time I pulled you over?” He tries to ingratiate himself with the entitled twat by informing him that he is an ASE certified master mechanic, as well as a policeman. It appears to be an attempt to establish common ground: I can appreciate your car. Essentially he offers a change of jurisdiction, from that of the public authority to that of a shared subculture.

But this gesture is lost on our sacred cow, who can only repeat that he has 700k Instagram followers for his exploits. The cop tries to cajole him into perhaps taking his car to a race track? It’s fun!  And maybe better than downtown streets for going 107 mph (as he has, in a zone with a 25 mph speed limit). “I’m just saying… Just consider it, bro,” the policeman says. The cop suggests he would have so many more followers if he took his act to the track. But that is not what Mr. Hudson’s Internet audience wants. So, no. Afraid not. With all due respect.

The cop’s deference is nauseating. At no point does he rise to the occasion and speak with authority on behalf of the common good. It turns out you don’t need to defund the police, you just need to delegitimize the idea of law itself, if by “law” you mean rules of civilized behavior that apply to all.

The French writer Renaud Camus coined the term “nocence” to capture what is going on here. He took the word “innocence” and removed the negating “in-“, leaving a word that means essentially nuisance or harm. He went so far as to form a political party called In-nocence, with an anti-nuisance platform. It will never win any elections in France, but presumably the point is to make explicit what we all know: that the fabric of the world is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space.

This can have an unfortunate resemblance to conquest, if those making a nuisance of themselves recognize one another as like beings, bound up in a common fate, and notice also that the space vacated by those sufficiently annoyed or intimidated is now theirs, collectively.

The remainder of this post (75 percent of it) is for paying subscribers. I go on to consider the interplay of nocence and simmering contests over “owned space,” drawing comparisons between France and the Bay Area. I make use of French writers who draw attention to a seldom-acknowledged rivalry in masculinity between different communities, and consider how this French perspective may shed light on what I see locally. I interpret the machismo of those who favor loud muscle cars in San Jose as having a collective meaning for them. If this interests you, become a paid subscriber and continue reading. If not, but you enjoyed it thus far, please hit the heart-shaped “like” button at the top. As always, thanks for reading. — Matt