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The fantasies are shaped not only by the comforts of the cars but by their sheer tonnage as well. The organization man of the 1950s might have been satisfied with a workadaddy DeSoto; in the 1970s the aspiring hipster could relieve his mid-life crisis with an Italian sports car the size of a Shriner go-cart. Affluent Americans of the 1990s--so responsible at home, so productive in the workplace--want a car designed for war. With its four-wheel drive and tons of torque and booster-rocket horsepower, today's sports-utility vehicle would have come in handy at the Battle of the Bulge. On the road its driver faces no obstacle more menacing than a pothole, but he knows that if he wants, he can swing off the highway and climb a sand dune, ford a raging river, grind deep into a trackless wilderness. Of course, he never does. He has to drive the kids to soccer practice. But the unused capacity hums beneath the pedals at his feet and feeds the fantasy. Watch him roar past you on the road, and see the set of his jaw and the squint of his eye. This is not some corporate paper pusher at the wheel; this is no sensitive dad who does the laundry. This is Patton leading the Third Army. This is Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. Disrupt his fantasy at your peril. "There is a real illusion of anonymity combined with potency because you have a machine you can command," says Jack Levin, a sociologist at Northeastern University's Program for the Study of Violence. "Top it off with the stress of work and people perhaps feeling insecure there, or with troubles at home, and it can make for a dangerous combination."
Road-rage experts have come up with various solutions to the anarchy of our streets and highways. We could legislate it (lower speed limits, build more roads to relieve congestion), adjudicate it (more highway cops, stiffer penalties), regulate it (more elaborate licensing procedures) or educate it away (mandatory driver's ed). Others suggest an option perhaps more typical of America circa 1998: therapize it.
"The road-rage habit can be unlearned," says James of the University of Hawaii, "but it takes more than conventional driver's ed." He advocates teaching "emotional intelligence" as part of any thorough driver training: how to "deal with hostility expressed by drivers" and "how to be accepting of diversity and how to accommodate it." He calls for a new driver's ed program from kindergarten on--to teach "a spirit of cooperation rather than competition"--and grass-roots organizations called Quality Driving Circles. These, he told a radio station, would be "small groups of people meeting regularly together to discuss their driving problems and help one another do driving-personality makeovers."