The Breakfast of Champions?
From the mouth of a man who has been around and has seen a lot, Kurt Vonnegut:
When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there wont be any more of those. Cold turkey.
Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isnt like TV news, is it?
Heres what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what were hooked on.
His recent essay, Cold Turkey, is long, rambling, and dead-on. At 81 years old, he is still kicking ass.
Reading between the lines
Today’s Post-Gazette had a lot (seven, by my count) of interesting articles about roads, transit, gas prices, and bicycling. Reading them all is an instructive lesson in the general mindset of our car-centered society.
The story that got me most worked up was the one about the long-time-coming expressway that is supposed to connect Pittsburgh to points south. It’s a multi-billion dollar debacle that, when it is completed, will only hasten the demise of the city of Pittsburgh as well as the countryside surrounding it.
It’s a ridiculous notion, spending a couple of billion dollars for 70 miles of roads just so some poor schmuck who lives in a town far removed from the city can turn his thankless three-hours per day commute into just a little over two.
Cities have houses in them for a reason. Back in the day before subsidized road construction and government-supported exodus to the suburbs, people used to live in the cities they worked in, or at least within a reasonable distance. Huge highways were unnecessary because people had other alternatives when faced with the question of how to best get to jobs, stores, and entertainment. Now, however, we are so single-mindedly obsessed with making the automobile the de facto standard that little opportunity exists for any other type of mobility.
Building this road won’t do a whit of good. It’s a proven fact that traffic grows to occupy whatever space it is given. So tear through the hills and cut down the trees. Pave the world over. And bask in this gloriously ugly landscape of concrete, smog, and cheap architecture. Just know that when all is said and done, the roads will be just as filled as before, the city will be even emptier, our air will be dirtier, our pocketbooks lighter, and we as a society will be none the richer for it.
Going up, up, up
All of this talk of $2 per gallon gas has got me all worked up. As much as I’m glad to see the issue of gas prices and, on a larger scale, oil dependency, getting some attention, I still think that the kind of attention it is getting is all wrong.
Take for example the “stick it to them” email that has been circulating. Snopes has throughly discredited the effectiveness of the meme, but I wish to examine it further, because it’s a signifier of the mentality that pervades the flock of America. Besides being a ridiculous way, economically, to mount a protest, it’s also guilty of a greater sin — ignoring the source of the problem.
If one does not understand why we are in this kind of situation, what’s to keep someone from going out the day after the boycott and pumping a few gallons without further thought to their little act of civil disobedience? Problems like this aren’t going to get solved by these little actions. They may never be solved in a manner that is satisfactory to the millions of car-dependent citizens. In fact, I hope that’s the case. Higher prices mean more realistic prices, which may actually cause some people to consider the true cost of driving and decide it’s not worth it.
This issue has also brought out a side of John Kerry that I wish he would change. By calling on Bush to pressure OPEC nations to produce more oil, he is just fanning the flames of the problem while simultaneously contradicting several of his environmental platform issues. Bush, I feel, is in the right for not releasing oil from the nation’s petroleum reserves. We’re not in a state of national emergency just because it costs Mr. and Mrs. Hummer $6.00 to go and buy a tube of toothpaste from their “neighborhood” Wal-Mart. The real emergency is the fact that we’ve let our communities degrade to the point where driving is the only way to get around.
