711
edits
Changes
no edit summary
In extreme cases car deprivation may drive a young man to steal or temporarily 'take' a vehicle. A glance at international figures on this shows how frequently such deprivation gets to the pitch of inducing an adolescent to break the law:
More than a quarter of a million vehicles were 'taken' in the USA in 1959 (288,937 to be precise). Just over 39,000 people were arrested for the 'takings' and of these 64% were under 18. According to a 1962 German police report more than 80% of illegal takers of cars in the Federal Republic were adolescents.
It is not only criminologists and psychiatrists who see car deprivation as the root of joy-riding. Some policemen have come round to the same view, albeit in this case a French one; the Interpol chief, Henri Feraud wrote in 1966:
Joy-riders and car thieves are people who feel car deprivation so acutely, either consciously or not, that they are willing to brave the sanctions of the law to prove themselves. The joy-riders are the extreme fringe of the adolescent males suffering from car deprivation. Many of their contemporaries compensate for temporary car deprivation by hitch-hiking. Clearly this is a more ambiguous device than taking a car and driving off with it, but it has the practical advantage, in the British case, of being legally permitted and infinitely indulgeable in.
The hitcher who is compensating for car deprivation is in a curious state of mind. Basically he assumes the 'right to a lift', not to a personal lift from a particular car owner but the right to a lift from car owners in general. If you questioned him directly on this, he would almost inevitably deny the existence of such a right. The phenomenon usually only comes to the surface of consciousness when an apparently normal hitch-hiker is baulked of a lift for what he feels is an unreasonable length of time. Then he may well explode into open, violent expressions of envy and anger towards all drivers who go past him. In All the Time in the World Hugo Williams describes just such a situation in Northern Australia:
Fascinating to see how Williams gives a straight account of his explosion of anger and envy against men who won't stop, and then somehow has to produce a gloss on it. The gloss is quite inaccurate: one gets to think it is every car's duty to stop. The deprivation compensatory mechanism makes the unconscious assumption of the right to a lift; the assumption is there all the time, but it only surfaces at a moment of stress like this.
A technical college student, who wouldn't for one second posit a 'right to lifts' and consciously dislikes arrogance in hitch-hikers, gave this description of what happens inside him when people fail to stop:
The hitcher just quoted is unusual in that his feeling of a 'right to lifts' is so comparatively near the surface of consciousness that it only takes a twenty minute wait to bring it to light.
Sometimes the compensatory mechanism drives the hitch-hiker to choose only large expensive cars. He feels he has been unfairly done out of having a car. So when he hitches he is only going to accept the best. Johnny Speight author of the Alf Carnett TV series, one day stopped his vintage Bentley to pick a tramp up:
:''' 'I prefer Bentleys,' said the tramp, 'a little Anglia offered me a lift a while ago, but I wouldn't take it. I mean, you meet a better class of person in a Bentley.' '''
That story may or may not be true but there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the Exeter Express and Echo's motoring correspondent when he quotes the AA (26.8.66):
The boy in the report was clearly suffering Jaguar, not fish lorry, deprivation.
The hitcher may subconsciously want to share the speed and effortless power of a luxurious car. He may be like this 15 year old London boy, still too young to get a scooter or motorbike licence himself, but prepared to have his speed through others:
One of the most interesting studies on joy-riders, by T.V. Gibbens, shows that teenage boys often pinch cars to prove themselves as men and to achieve a feeling of power. Gibbens writes:
Now clearly the boy who copes with feelings of car deprivation through hitching does not directly experience manual control of the car. What he does experience is the control of the car through a certain psychological control he has over the driver. He makes a small gesture and at his command a car comes skidding to a halt, its nearside door opens and he is asked where he is bound for. Quite a number of hitchers are aware of the psychological power they are wielding when they stop a car. One girl says she prefers to hitch-hike alone because then she feels in total control of the situation:
As some thumbers see it, their power over the motorist is one of foreknowledge; they feel they can look at an on-coming stream of traffic and spot the car that is likely to pick them up:
Other hitchers adopt a definite strategy for getting a driver to stop:
All these three people are very conscious of their power over the motorist. Apart from hitch-hikers the only external forces that stop motorists usually are policemen, traffic signals, jams or accidents. The last hitcher quoted, a Cambridge student, has an almost predatory attitude to the motorist. Perhaps 'predatory' is too strong a word -- he doesn't so much hunt the driver, he angles him, tickles him, fishes him. But the object is identical: to catch him.
The notion of the hitch-hiker mentally dominating the driver and compelling him to stop is one of the key ideas re hitch-hiking in Georges Limbour's book La Chasse au Merou. He goes into some detail over the importance of the psychological message transmitted by the visual action of thumbing. He says that success for the hitcher depends on:
It is awareness of the inevitable self-assertion in the act of thumbing that makes hitch-hiking distasteful to people who are timid, withdrawn or particularly sensitive. It is precisely the same thing that satisfies car deprived teenagers, who by dominating a driver into stopping achieve a kind of vicarious, temporary, fantasy possession of his vehicle. One can hardly avoid agreeing with the student who said to me in a discussion on the out-lawing of hitch-hiking:
__NOTOC__ __NOEDITSECTION__
[[Category:Books]]
[[Category:Hitch-Hiking_by_Mario_Rinvolucri]]