A review of being yelled at by a guy whose defaced Tesla you were just seen photographing

I didn’t say anything back to the guy who had just gotten out of his parked car and cursed at me; in my memory, raised my hands, palm-up, in a kind of IRL ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ though with, perhaps, probably, less of a smile. I raised my eyebrows, in my memory, as if to say “look, man, don’t blame me.”

I didn’t say that, because I didn’t say anything. I was surprised to have been seen, and in the moment, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think I was taking a picture of a person; I thought I was taking a picture of a car.

In this picture, you can’t see him watching me take it while I did, perhaps already twisted around in the driver’s seat of his street-parked Tesla that someone had tagged with the word “Nazi.” He must have been excruciatingly aware that he was being seen, that he was sitting in a car that someone had tagged as such, and that he was being seen as the driver of the car (even if he wasn’t, until he got out of it). Perhaps it had just happened. Perhaps he had just returned to his car, on a random street in Berkeley, California, and had just discovered that someone had called him a Nazi for owning it, and that he would now need to drive home in it, with that word on his car. Perhaps he was trying to figure out what to do, maybe googling something like “how to remove paint from tesla” on his phone, when he saw me walk by, take me phone out, and take a picture. If I had I seen him, and had I known that he would see me—if I’m being completely honest—I probably wouldn’t have taken the picture.

“Don’t be taking pictures of my stuff!” is what he said, or something close to that. Or maybe “my shit?” And then “I’m mad enough about it already,” and he repeated the first sentence. There might be a word or two off there, but I think that’s it. He may have said “fucking,” too. The energy with which he moved was the kind of unsettling where you aren’t convinced you aren’t about to be attacked, which makes it hard to reconstruct exactly what words were used. When I described the scene later, I said the paint had been green (as you can see, it is purple). We kept walking past him, and away, feeling our backs exposed, hoping he didn’t come at us, or smash our car. (He didn’t.)

I wonder how he remembers that moment in time. I bet he felt provoked, by my seeing him. It looked like an older Tesla. It was not, for example, a Cybertruck that he would have to have bought well after whatever the clear point in time was, in which Elon Musk’s noxiousness had become so overwhelmingly apparent as to dissuade even the sort of person who might have purchased a Tesla a few years ago, back when it was just a status object, just a nice car, even a virtuous part of the green revolution, a car that you could be a good liberal and be proud to own. Was there such a time? I can imagine good Democrat-voting Berkeley liberal being now quite unhappy that a choice which once might have seemed morally neutral, at worst, has now come to represent something like the sieg heil of Tesla’s CEO and primary shareholder.

(It was an old enough car that it might not have come with “Sentry Mode,” which would have meant that, in a sense, his car was taking pictures of me before I ever took out my phone.)

If I am feeling empathetic, I think about how “I am mad enough already” doesn’t say what he’s mad enough alreadyat, and at the excess implied by that word, by the appeal of it, to me, the way he might be indicating that I shouldn’t take a picture because he’s already mad. I think about how he called it his stuff (or even his “shit”?), not his “my car”; his shame, not his pride. I wonder if he was, perhaps, inviting me to be mad with him, instead, at the Nazi who has made his nice car into a sieg heil; in my most charitable reading, I wonder if he was trying, in his shame-converted-to-anger, at me, at a person to take the place of the person who painted him, to indicate that the unfairness of being tagged a Nazi was precisely that his anger at having his nice car turned into a swasticar was already directed at Musk, and Trump (who he was statistically unlikely to have voted for).

I project this onto him, because I have known a few people who purchased Teslas a few years ago, who I thought of and think of as “good liberals” of this type. It’s probably why the specifics of the guy who screamed at me yesterday has faded from my memory, and been replaced by the way I think about those people: as basically good people, who bought Teslas at a time when they didn’t think that owning that vehicle made them Nazis, and have been confronted with a public that thinks otherwise, or might, and are probably not handling that well.

Nothing in “We asked 41 Tesla drivers what they think of Elon Musk” is surprising. You can probably guess the sorts of things that Bay Area Tesla owners and drivers say about what their vehicle means to them, or doesn’t. One or two of them support Musk, or are even lukewarm on him. The rest say they either hate the association—but are stuck with it, for reasons—or deny that there is an association. It’s just a car, those people want to say; it is a car, and I am a person, and the two are very different; that the car was made by a Nazi does not make me a Nazi, because I am not a Nazi. And so forth. There is nothing surprising about a Tesla owner insisting that the things they own or do with their money have no social consequence or meaning. None of them suggest that if you are at gathering with Nazis, and you don’t leave, you are a Nazi; none of them cite the proverbial wisdom that if you sit down at a table with ten people and a Nazi, you are now sitting at a table with twelve Nazis. Certainly, they do not believe that money is speech. Most of them observe that if you buy a Tesla, and then sell it, you will have lost a lot of money in the deal, a thing which, obviously, cannot be allowed to happen. I wonder if they think that people protesting at Tesla dealerships are—by their association with the type of person who vandalizes cars—complicit in that crime. I wonder if they think that people who take pictures of their vandalized cars are the source of their pain.

I looked for the guy’s Tesla at the same spot, the next morning. It was not there. I wonder if he’s found a way to clean it off without injuring the paint job and reducing the resale value of his vehicle.

And then, after posting this, the owner of the car got in touch. The specifics of the conversation we had are not as important as the fact that we had a conversation about it, and that what they said was more than enough to make me feel that any personal animus I might have had was washed away. They told me why they had bought the car, and what it had meant to them, as an object, a story that had nothing to do with Elon Musk or Trump or all that that object has come to represent. They made it exceedingly clear that if there were a way to go back in time and un-purchase it, they would have. They asked me to take the photo down, and all of that was more than enough for such a mild request, so, I have.