Keep Your Head Down

My car was towed the other day. From the street. In front of my house. The precise circumstances remain murky, despite my best efforts to ascertain the series of events leading to the tow. Several years ago, PA decoupled auto registration from auto safety and emission inspection requirements, and although my registration was current, I'd forgotten to get it inspected. Oops, my bad. You'd expect a ticket, right? Instead, I walked out of my house and found that my car was missing. I called the few people who occasionally borrow it, even though I doubted any ever would without asking first. I called the police and reported it stolen. Filled out a report. Etc. They called me back several hours later. Your car, they said, has been repossessed.

Impossible. I own the car outright, I said. There aren't even payments to miss.

Well, not exactly repossessed, he said. Towed as an abandoned vehicle.

But, I said, why didn't it show up as having been towed to the city impound when I made the report.

Private tow, they told me. Wasn't in the database.

Who reported it as abandoned?

We can't tell you. It was parked in the same place for 48 hours. Besides, you got a certified letter.

No, I said, I didn't. Besides, I said, in 48 hours? Not likely.

I tracked the car to a tow lot in McKeesport, PA, about 40 minutes from my house, drove down, and paid a couple hundred bucks to get it back. This was the cost of towing and storage, and although I raised a little fuss, in the end the guy was just a tow truck driver for a firm that contracts with the city, and to the best of his knowledge was just serving a legitimate work order. There was no ticket. The city stole my car, and they didn't even profit by fining me. I talked to my family's attorney. I could write a letter, he said, but to be honest the time and effort of recovering the fees you paid isn't really worth it.

I found the entire experience both an hilarious example of municipal ineptitude--right hand not knowing what the left is doing and all that--and a minor but profoundly dislocating demonstration of just how little control we have over our own property in a system which consistently preaches the sacrosanctity of property rights.

More disturbing, though, was the general attitude I discovered when I did some cursory digging to find out if the tow had even been legal (answer: uh, possibly maybe). A number of similar stories had been posted to various boards and forums, and they were met with near-universal lack of sympathy. Worse: with mockery, followed by advice for the proper attitude of acquiescence. Never do such-and-such to a cop was a popular admonition. Cops don't like this. Never ask a cop that. It's your own fault for failing to comply.

Most of the folks making the initial inquiries were, by their own accounts, like me guilty of an oversight, and most, like me, expressed self-similar attitudes: if they'd just issued a citation, we'd have grumbled, paid it, gotten the car inspected at the nearest opportunity.

Well, maybe the tow company and lot pay a kickback to the city. Maybe that's why there wasn't a ticket. No one seems to know.

But I keep circling back to the sheer volume of derision directed at people for their minor violations of the vehicular codes. There was a kind of fury at them for even inquiring after the validity of the actions of the police. There was a palpable anger at the perception of disobedience. And I can't help but generalize from the experience: we seem, as a society, to have developed a serious disorder when it comes to authority, to have internalized submissiveness, to have sighed, resigned ourselves to the petty unfairness and injustice of it all, and to have grown consequently hateful of those who through minor infractions are somehow presumed to have ruined it for the rest.