Racing in the Street: A Man’s Freedom

Since the originating days of the American Revolution, Americans have sought what philosophers call “negative freedom.” We want freedom from political constraint on our actions and beliefs—we want to be free to choose our religious beliefs, we want to be free to speak our minds, and we want to be free to hang out with whomever we wish. Just read “The Declaration of Independence” and the “Bill of Rights.” The condition of being free to do these things is a fundamental freedom from constraint. This is the freedom of Jefferson, of Andy Jackson, of Andrew Carnegie, of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, of Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and philosopher Robert Nozick. It is the freedom of modernity and the Enlightenment—negative freedom.

Springsteen’s nose for the desire of negative freedom is exceedingly accurate: “Hey, what else can we do now / roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair / Well the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere.” ²⁴ The promised land for Springsteen’s heroes, as for Chuck Berry’s, is no particular place to go. It is “anywhere,” sheer open possibility, and the point is that in this promised land we are unconstrained, uncontrolled; we can in fact go anywhere. No self-respecting American male in his heart can deny the lure of Springsteen’s call of the wild. Even—or especially—those of us walled up in our ordinary experiences and daily routines recognize that when the time is right we would love to go racing in the street. The throb of Springsteen’s Fender, as the throb of the engines in his imaginary fast cars, takes us into ourselves and back out into imaginary streets of freedom, of roads going “anywhere.”

The call of negative freedom, after all, has a cash value for our lifestyles. We call it variously personal freedom, autonomy, independence, or being “left alone.” It’s all about seeing the world as a horizon of possibility. Henry Thoreau (1817–1862) gave it its best name; he called it “wildness” and suggested that somehow this wildness would preserve the world. If we can achieve wildness, we can learn to be alive and not among the living dead or the quietly desperate. We all recognize the “need” to work, to get a job, to earn a living, to make a wage—but at the same time we are experientially sensitive to the oppressive weight this “need” brings to our lives. Springsteen’s hero confronts us with two options: we can come home from work and die “little by little, piece by piece” or we can “wash up, and go racing in the street” (p. 342). Racing puts us back in the game of negative freedom making inroads on the world of duty and responsibility. If we are any good at it, we can compete; we blow off the competition in the first heat, we set them up and then we shut them down, and on good nights we blow ’em right out of their seats (pp. 339–341).

The move to racing opens us to a possibility, to a competition for the ownership of wildness and possibility, to be awake and alive. This is the American male’s way—as Gilman points out, we American men make even education a competitive enterprise—scoring grades to score money, to score negative freedom where no one can tell us what to do. The hero of “Racing in the Street,” together with his partner Sonny, wins; he only runs for the money and he cashes in. He beats the “dude from L.A.” and drives off with his “little girl” as a prize. The hero and Sonny make enough to travel freely, and like the mythic pool shark, they seem to live without work; they ride from town to town with no strings attached.

Springsteen’s hero, like Thoreau’s, in achieving the pinnacle of negative freedom has achieved the ultimate status of outlawry. As Thoreau notes, his ordinary townsmen finally achieve a sense of freedom and elevation when they recall their youthful wildness and have a “reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.”²⁵ Why else would we American males make heroes out of Hell’s Angels? Why would we aging doctors, lawyers, and accountants ignore the reality of Altamont and spend fifty to a hundred thousand dollars on Harleys and go riding in the streets? We laud and envy the outlaw for his freedom. After all, Springsteen’s hero could easily have gone to race driving school and worked his way up the circuit to become a multi-millionaire salesman–race driver for Nextel, Anheuser-Busch, or Sprint. But the hero of negative freedom would then be told what to do—he would have to speak properly in television interviews and wear the appropriate sponsor’s hat in the winner’s circle—he would be owned. The hero of negative freedom must race in the streets—anywhere from back roads to interstates.

The curious and dark thing about male freedom is that often, when it is achieved, the hero doesn’t know what to do with it. This is at least one reading of a “rebel without a cause.” This was precisely Margaret Fuller’s complaint about men in the 1840s. She didn’t want men to help women earn their freedom because they had for the most part squandered their own. The “man” of the nineteenth century, she says, exercises his “freedom” to enslave others and “to pamper his appetites and his indolence through the misery of his fellow beings.”²⁶ Men get free from their external constraints and then become aimless; they buy boats, guitars, televisions, video games, and fast cars—things for the most part undesirable to women.

“Fast Car”: A Woman’s Freedom

Gilman argued that women’s brains had been socially damaged by years of domination in educational systems constructed and run by men. Martha Nussbaum agrees in general and pushes a bit further. Like Gilman, she sees in women tremendous abilities for learning, creating, producing, governing, and so forth. But by way of our political construction of the “family” as male dominated, we have routinely repressed and constrained these abilities. ²⁷ Women, recognizing the suppression of their abilities, thus begin to see freedom in a different light than do men—they think of it as enabling them to bring their abilities to bear on the world around them. They think of it as genuinely flourishing as a human being, according to Nussbaum.

To be clear, this is not to say that women who agree with Fuller, Gilman, and Nussbaum reject negative freedom; they understand that to exercise their capabilities they must be free from external constraints, especially those induced by a “man’s world.” However, their vision of freedom does not end with being “free from”—they see before them a positive freedom, the possibility of bringing their own identities to life. They want to show that they can be great poets, teachers, CEOs, race car drivers, and so forth. Like Spinoza, they see that working in league with their environment—not living in isolation from it—is the road to forming an identity. In absence of constraint, they can empower themselves to flourish—they can “be someone.”

Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” reveals this difference between men and women in the U.S. As a woman, the song’s protagonist begins with “nothing to lose” and, at the same time, with “nothing to prove.” The latter claim could be misleading. It’s not that she doesn’t want to “be someone,” as we find out later in the song. Rather, she’s pointing out that she is not driven by an insecure ego, and in claiming to have “nothing to prove” she is establishing this difference between herself and the insecure “fast car” man of the song. The car, having it and driving it fast, is his attempt to “be someone”—as the hero of Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” points out: “all the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood.” Chapman’s heroine, recognizing that it’s a man’s world, sees the fast car as a way out of nowhere. “Maybe we can make a deal,” she says, “maybe together we can get somewhere.” ²⁸ She’s the one offering redemption. The game isn’t love, it’s the road to freedom. The heroine reveals her ideal to be just the inverse of Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street” hero. Her “plan” is that they will cross the border into the city—not to the open road—to find freedom in order to become someone. It’s a place to find work and to begin to show her abilities.

Chapman’s heroine gives us the background of “starting from zero.” She tells the familiar family story that Nussbaum routinely documents. Her “old man’s got a problem.” He’s an alcoholic who is unwilling to work and who has let his body get old before its time. Her mother has left, and now she has quit school, feeling the traditional pressure for a woman to “help” her shiftless father. Underwriting her story is a systematic family structure in which women must care for the men. When the mother “fails” and leaves, the burden of care falls to the daughter. This inheritance leads to the occlusion of her abilities; she recognizes the trap but doesn’t fully see the next trap that is set for her. Like the woman in “Racing in the Street,” who switches from the Camaro from L.A. to our hero’s car, Chapman’s heroine sees her boyfriend’s fast car as a way to her own freedom. The male spin on this is that it’s “her choice.” But this misses the point to which Fuller, Gilman, and Nussbaum direct us—we men have created and maintained a social structure in which women are often directed to find themselves through a man. It’s a dead end but most other options are simply not available. And what Springsteen and Chapman both reveal is that despite changes, this structure remains substantially in place in American culture in the twenty-first century. Misogyny is no stranger in contemporary music and film.

Chapman’s heroine recalls the feeling that enticed Mary in “Thunder Road” and Wendy in “Born to Run.” She remembers the fast car with “speed so fast I felt like I was drunk,” and she remembers the feeling of his arm around her shoulder providing the comfort to believe she “could be someone.” But, as Nussbaum argues, failure was built into the structure of the solution. The boyfriend and his fast car want to be free from drudgery, responsibility, and constraint—he seeks only negative freedom. When the fast car fails to deliver, there is always a bottle to replace it as the locus of freedom. The heroine must come to realize, as she does, that she seeks a different kind of freedom and that seeking this freedom through men and fast cars is a dead end. Even when she gets a job and he does not, she hopes “things will get better / You’ll find work and I’ll get promoted.” But like Springsteen’s power drive hero, the boyfriend hangs with his friends more than with his kids, and like her father he stays out drinking. As soon as she sees this, Chapman’s heroine shifts gears.

Like Fuller, Gilman, and Nussbaum, Chapman’s heroine finally awakens; ironically her freedom does come through a man, but only by way of rejecting him. She feels the constraint and oppression, and her first genuine act on her own behalf is to send her fast car man on his way. She leaves him to his own aimless freedom: “So take your fast car and keep on driving.” She even threatens the ultimate end of the Dixie Chicks’s famous “Earl”: “You leave tonight or live and die this way.” She recognizes the need to be free from the constraints placed on her by the man’s ineptitude and attitude, but she sees beyond negative freedom to her own empowerment. When she’s free from him, she will not dead end—she will find a way to put her abilities to work to be someone. She will find a meaning for her own identity, her own way of being.

A Fork in the Road

In both songs we see not only the two visions of American freedom but also the very apparent collateral damage that attends the male’s negative freedom. Think of the few lines given over to the woman (“my baby”) in “Racing in the Street.” As with Chapman’s heroine, she is trying to find her way to herself through an alpha male whose most important aim in life is racing in the street. Treated clearly as a commodity—a prize—she moves to the cars of the “winners” enacting a bizarre form of upward social mobility. It’s difficult to tell this story occurs in 1970 instead of in the world of The Iliad—a world in which Helen of Troy is treated openly as a commodity and in which Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter for his own success. Springsteen’s heroine next appears while crying on her daddy’s front porch, another casualty of the family structure Nussbaum describes. The racing hero, we suspect, thinks she’s crying because he is off racing. But she’s angry and acts as if she wished she hadn’t been born—this sounds more like the frustration of being locked into her oppressed life than it does a concern over the hero. Moreover, as the hero begins to acknowledge his age and his sins, he notices, seemingly for the first time, the “wrinkles around [his] baby’s eyes”; he also notices that she cries herself to sleep at night. Again, because she asks “Baby, did you make it all right?” he supposes she’s worried about him. But the perfunctory question again veils another pos-sibility—the questions she’s asking about her own life that she does not, or dares not, raise with him. What are her possibilities hanging out with an aging street racer?

Apparently motivated by these recognitions, the hero, again apparently without consultation, decides he and his “baby” will “ride to the sea” to relinquish their sins and seek some form of redemption. One must wonder about her attitude as she sits in the passenger side awaiting his version of salvation. But even as he drives toward redemption, he cannot get over his quest for negative freedom, because “summer’s here and the time is right for racing in the street.”

Springsteen and Chapman confront us with an interesting existential question: which freedom is more valuable, and which should we pursue? In our American circumstances, the man’s negative freedom is clearly and persistently dialectically coupled with the oppression of women. From a straightforward consideration of justice, Nussbaum and Chapman seem right: something must be done to curtail and, ultimately, to end the collateral damage. The call for justice must trump the call of the wild.

If Fuller is right, however, the damage of negative freedom is not limited to women. It’s one thing to see Springsteen’s own life as an outcome of the drive to man’s freedom; it’s another to consider the lives of the majority of us who just manage to get along or who end up drunk, desolate, lonely, and with a sense of cultural alienation that stays with us to the end. Springsteen is no street racing hero. So we are led to question the value of negative freedom as an end in itself; unless it is instrumental to some positive form of freedom that can engender self-worth through the exercise of our abilities, it hardly seems worth pursuing. The woman’s account of freedom seems to make a good deal more sense than its alternative.

Yet perhaps the freedom question is not so easily answered. If our histories and cultural habits have led women to pursue their version of positive freedom, it seems relevant to suggest that the same habits and histories have led ordinary men to search for their negative freedom. That is, there is something about our lives in America that drives the call of the wild. Choosing to race in the street to keep alive is not just a random decision. It is a response to unsatisfying experiences and conditions. In short, “being someone” may not be all it’s cracked up to be. The collateral damage for women is underwritten by other damages in men’s lives. I don’t offer this as a Marxist or Freudian story of excuse, but, given the causal case we make on one side, we must be careful not to ignore men’s experiences—they too should be felt, heard, and addressed. Doing this is, in part, the basis of the power of Springsteen’s work. Perhaps it’s better, then, to think of the two freedom stories together; it may be that addressing the inadequacies of “being someone” as a man who is born in the U.S.A. is a prerequisite for bringing the collateral damage to an end so that women may more easily be able to achieve an empowering freedom.

Some feminists might be able to accept this conclusion—Fuller, for instance, certainly hints at the economic and social conditions of men’s failures. And Gilman clearly argues that the dependence of women on men built into our cultural habits is as harmful to men as it is to women. But acknowledging this possibility will not alter the primacy of positive freedom, especially for someone like Tracy Chapman. Until one has experienced the freedom to be someone, it does not make sense to ask her to question whether “being someone” is worth it. I suspect Chapman is suggesting to all of us “freedom seekers,” whatever our romantic attachments, that we must seek it in something other than fast cars. Or, at the least, we must demand that our fast cars bring with them local aims and purposes that can give genuine meaning to life.