Witnessing a nervous breakdown is disturbing. When it spills over to an entire political movement, it is hilarious, the right word to describe the attack on SUVs in a recent issue of The New Republic by environmental writer Gregg Easterbrook. The breakdown runs on for well over 10,000 words, in effect a long session on the couch, with ample time to disclose deep hostility to others, an obsessive fixation and self-loathing.
This long-winded primal scream commences at a suburban DC school where Easterbrook is dropping off his kids. While sitting in his car, he accuses fellow parents of being aggressive because they drive SUVs, the very emblem of contemporary selfishnessGodzillas that are instruments of death for non-SUV-driving motorists. And that's just for starters, before the conspiracy theories dominate the ensuing monologue.
The contriving culprits include oil companies, Saddam Hussein, car-makers, the United Auto Workers, politicians (local, because they want the assembly plants and national, because of tariff agreements), automotive writers, the mass media, railroads, the National Research Council and, of course, his sociopathic fellow citizens who choose to buy the behemoths and conspire to rape the environment and murder other Americans.
Easterbrooks ally in this rant is Keith Bradsher, author of High and Mighty: SUVsThe Worlds Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, who is referred to in what can only be called latent sexual terms. Bradshers book is called variously, dazzling, a masterpiece of its kind, splendidly combining reporting, analysis, and indignation. It belongs on the same shelf as Ralph Naders Unsafe at any Speed and Ida Tarbells The History of Standard Oil and such like, until the reader is embarrassed to go on.
But go on I did, and things deteriorated even further with Easterbrook dementedly attacking, of all people, Leonardo DiCaprio because he drives a Chevrolet Tahoe and who demands that everyone else sacrifice to prevent an artificial greenhouse effect. He gets a 0 on a scale of 10 for environmental responsibility. The fixation on a celebrity like DiCaprio can be forgiven given Easterbrooks delusional grandiloquence, but its not as if the toy boy actor is tearing around LA like James Dean in a gas-guzzling priapic Maserati. Leonardo probably thinks he is being sensible driving his SUV. As I am sure neither he nor his entourage read The New Republic, he will be spared the pain of this unfair accusation.
BLASPHEMER
As Easterbrook falls apart in front of his readers, he meanders into the political sacred ground venerated and fiercely protected by the high priests of the Left: minorities, immigrants and Spaceship Earth. He begins with an inconsistency by admitting that SUVs are driven by the safest motorists in the cult of cars, 30- to 50-year-old professionals who mostly drive carefully. This only frustrates him, causing his rhetoric to become even more shrill and abusive (his PC comrades must be appalled at this point) because he can't get the highway deaths to meet his paranoid projections. So, like all schizoids, he invents scenarios, this time envisioning apocalypse when the current group of courteous drivers trade in their anti-social instruments of death that are in turn purchased by immigrants, the lower middle class and the poor (read black) who generally speed, run lights, drive drunk and crash more often than the prosperous classes.
He then contradicts his entire career as a guardian of the environment by adding some real truth to his polemic by including the telling statistic that the nations self-sabotaging unofficial moratorium on road-building further contributes to this culture of anger. In the last 30 years, vehicle-miles driven on US roads have increased by 143 percent, while road miles have risen by a mere five percent.
Aha! There is the smoking gun. Easterbrook confesses that he and his crowd have worked to stop road construction to force mass transit on society and instead they get SUVs. Its enough, to well, drive him crazy.
Easterbrooks blasphemy is also directed at the allegedly oppressed and the anti-automobile environmental cabalthe revered constituency of Easterbrooks fellow-traveling socially aware friendsand could have him made the object of an interdict (and banished from luncheons at the Brookings Institution). But it pales compared to the below-the-belt punches, piling on and invective that has welled up in him against his own professional class. Quoting heavily from his adored Bradsher, he characterizes SUV drivers as people with sexual inadequacies, unhappy marriages and serious psychological problems They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors.
This indictment allegedly comes from research conducted by automakers who say SUV drivers want to look as menacing as possible, leading Easterbrook to chime in that somebody finally made a class of vehicles designed to bring out the worst in them.
Well then, SUV drivers are de facto anti-social and their chosen mode of transportation is an extension of their hostility, which, according to the deranged Easterbrook, is the underlying cause of road rage. He then adds confidently: In some infuriating way, moreover, the SUV and the cellular phone are evil twinsand the conjunction of cell phone use and road rage cannot be overlooked. Then he confirms he is ready for a strait-jacket, by adding: Safety advances such as airbags and anti-lock brakes have moderately backfired in this regard, as they engender a false sense of security, making the cell phone-SUV crowd think it can barrel distractedly down the road without risk.
Greggs shrink (or at least an editor who cared enough for him to prevent this self-immolation of his credibility) needed to help here by saying, well Gregg, SUVs are the fastest growing segment in auto sales so are you saying all these people are crazy and you are sane? Could it be they like the protection and the ability to stand up to the truckers and recreational leviathans that have taken over and endangered our highways? Perhaps SUV owners like the ease in loading groceries, dry cleaning and children, or the comfort of the interior where the view is broad and wide and the amenities soothing when making a safari to the mall or an expedition out of town? But mostly they believe they are safer while you seek to prove they are not. Is your marriage OK? Are you afraid of parenthood? Are you sexually inadequate?
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
To its credit, however, The New Republic disproved that the recent attacks on fast food and the dangers of being overweight emanate from false scientific data. Turns out skinny people die sooner than fat people and that the only true indicators for longevity are fitness and type of diet. Go to www.thenewrepuliconline.com to see for yourself. When will the diehard do-gooders quit attacking our citizens with fake science in order to make us all conform to their idealistic conception?
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Old Doug Macarthur is biting the stem of his corncob pipe. He conquered North Korea in 1951 after their invasion of South Korea but President Truman fell under the influence of pro-Soviet types in the State Department and refused to allow him to act against the Russian-sponsored Chinese Army forming along the Yalu River that eventually ran the UN/US forces back to the 38th Parallel, sealing off the wretched North Korean communist dictatorship that has survived the fall of the Soviet Union only to rattle its nuclear arsenal and threaten the world over 50 years later. And in closing a tip of the hat to Progress Energy and Time Warner Cable for the Herculean achievement of getting us up and going after the December ice storm.
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I was pleased to see that the majority of citizens in the state in a recent poll agreed with me that pin-up boy US Senator John Edwards has insulted us by running for President.
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I feel the same way about the third-rate boors at Blue Cross/Blue Shield who want to line their pockets by converting from a nonprofit health-care provider to a private corporation. Its fun to see political strategists Carter Wrenn (a big brain in the old Congressional Club that elected Jesse Helms to the US Senate) and Gary Pearce (the man behind Jim Hunts Huey Long-like reign as governor) team up to fight the conversion.
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Sad to see the Triangle Transit Authority received a license to move ahead in its tragic insistence on unilaterally forcing mass transit on communities who don't need it and, mark my words, will be sorry when they get it and have to pay for it down the road after it has altered forever the pattern of our lives.