Free In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik

like “Sound Quake” and “Thunder on Wheels,” sponsored by car-audio manufacturers looking to promote their “Ground-pounder” products, helped galvanize the fever, and open the wallets, of fledgling boomers like Eddie Lopez. Though it originated in Southern California, it quickly moved east—and almost immediately became subject to hefty fines in multiple states. From the start, boom cars drove people crazy.
    But people driving boom cars may have been reacting to a frustration of their own. It was also in the 1980s, according to the Texas Center for Policy Studies and Environmental Defense, that America’s urban traffic came definitively to exceed roadway capacity. In the years roughly corresponding to the rise of the boom car, from the early 1980s to 2003, driving delays in twenty-six major American cities surged by an astounding 655 percent. I read that number and can’t help thinking of Theodor Lessing’s idea that when people feel caged up, they get loud. Boom-carfever corresponds with the period in which traffic around the country began grinding to a halt.
    That doesn’t change the sense of being under siege experienced by people at home when the boom cars quake by.
    For several months, I’d been reading posts on the Listserv of Noise Free America, an antinoise-pollution organization, where boom cars are considered absolute evil. Every few days, Noise Free sends out an e-mail blast linking to a story involving the arrest of someone for assaulting a person who has complained about the noise of his car; or an article about an attack on a police officer who stopped a vehicle for loud music; or the announcement of a new link between boom cars and drug dealers; or details on the discovery of guns inside a boom car. In the accompanying comment threads, boom-car owners are invariably referred to as THUGs or Boom THUGs—and the posts often drip with a bile typified by one that went up the week before I traveled to Tampa. “These criminals are the sort of human garbage that are the life’s blood of the boom-car pestilence,” it read. “Unfortunately, it’s not legal to shoot them all and feed their rotting corpses to wolves. The wolves could use the food, and we could use the peace and quiet.” Okay … Unquestionably, the assault by four individuals on one woman is abhorrent. But were the “human garbage” who perpetrated the crime really the “life’s blood of the boom-car pestilence”? I didn’t like the noise of boom cars in my own neighborhood the least little bit. I hate the way my windows rattle when they thump by. By now I’d read droves of articles that led me to empathize with the far more severe suffering that boom-car noise sometimes inflicted on others.But still I couldn’t help being disturbed by the off-the-road rage I encountered in the echo chamber of the Listserv.

    By contrast, the forums of the boom-car enthusiasts were relatively quiet. Indignation was certainly expressed on FloridaSPL about antinoise legislative efforts, but their biggest complaint was the way all boom-car owners were lumped together. There were even occasional surprising metaphysical disquisitions on the site, such as a posting under the “Rants” category by CalusaCustom-Concepts titled “Who Cares About Words?” which began, “Do words have any meaning? Are the words we use important? What are words anyway? Aren’t words the translation of the concepts we imagine? If words are concepts translated into sounds with assigned meanings, then words are expressed ideas.”
    How could I not be intrigued? I made contact with Casey Sullivan, the site manager of FloridaSPL, in an effort to hear their side of the story. Sullivan presented the Memorial Day event at Explosive Sound and Audio as an ideal fact-finding opportunity. He also arranged for me to get “drive arounds” with several forum members on the night before the contest so that I could experience the boom cars in their natural cruising habitat.
    And