sfgate.com/columnists/morford -> www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
Resolutions For The Damned - A new year, a Bush-gutted, storm-ra... More like a calm and conscious denial in the face of a staggering stack of overwhelming facts that if you looked at for even one minute would pr ove that land tanks are some of the most overrated and silly and harmful and utterly pointless vehicles on the planet. Because there really is no other explanation for the still-roaring succes s of the land tank.
according to the Census Bureau and despite C alifornia's legendary rep for organics and environmentalism and concerns of health and body and air, our fine and heavily Schwarzeneggered state leads the nation in new registrations for SUVs. Registrations for the huge lumps of bulbous steel jumped 39 percent between 1997 and 2002, from 19 million to 275 million, and ov erall there's been a whopping 56 percent jump in sales of the beasts in a mere eight years across the country, totaling nearly 25 million of the ugly tanks now lumbering across the American landscape and hogging all the parking and burning up most of the oil and sneering in the face of a ir quality and all rational thought and flipping over and bursting into flame after hitting a pinecone at 80 mph. You can see it in the eyes of most every new SUV buyer as they stare, wid e eyed and overwhelmed, at the massive vehicles in the showroom: some so rt of veil drops over their eyes, some sort of weird opiate pumps into t heir brains and they lose all sense of reason or common sense or environ mental concern and their ego balloons and their testosterone kicks up th ree notches and they go into some sort of spasm of denial about how purc hasing one of these things will, in fact, contribute quite heartily to t he overall ill health of their own bodies and the planet as a whole, not to mention the very reason we are so desperately, violently at war. And the salesman sees that look and just smiles and licks his chops and p oints out how this 4-ton hunk of environmental devastation can seat nine and tow a large tractor or maybe 15 head of cattle, plus it has 27 cup holders and three DVD players and a built-in sense of false superiority, and the vaguely depressed regularly emasculated suburban dad or the gum -snapping Marina girl with way too much of her parents' money and way to o little self-defined taste takes one look and goes, oooh. Most people know these facts to be true, but buy the tanks anyway in a mad collusion of wishful thinking and raw den ial and false advertising, absolutely convinced the beasts are somehow s afer and sturdier (they're neither) and that they absolutely must have 3 7 cubic feet of cargo space to haul their grocery bags and 4-wheel-drive traction to get over those little concrete barriers in the mall parking lot and just ignore the fact that the thing rides like a brick and hand les like a block of lead and is about as attractive and beautifully desi gned as a jar of rocks. Fact is, most Americans consider themselves environmentally conscious and claim to care deeply about protecting nat ural resources and don't really want war and suffering or the insane Bus hCo-brand oil dependence that causes both.
energy and pollutio n and reducing reliance on foreign oil and getting us out from under the massive hypocritical terrorist-supportin' Saudi thumb, they'd buy small er or more efficient vehicles. Step in the right direction, truly, though of course improved gas mileage and re duced emissions do nothing to allay the fact that SUVs still roll and st ill can't maneuver to avoid accidents and still hog parking and still as sault the eye and tread as lightly on the planet as Arnold Schwarzenegge r in ski boots. Hell, ugly ol' minivans have far more storage and headroom, as do most sport wagons, PT Cruisers -- even larg e hatchbacks have more than enough overall storage (and often better hea droom) for any but the largest of families and oh my God even this is a moot point because you well know that 97 percent of all SUVs on the road are single occupant and the only "cargo" is their purse or their gym ba g, while the other 36 square feet is taken up by, well, ego and attitude and air.
ac tually have more accidents, actually cause more accidents than passenger cars because they can't maneuver in emergency situations and can't stop in rain or snow and tend to flip over easier than Paris Hilton after a dozen Bacardi shooters. And then you hear that, according to the US National Highway Traffic Sa fety Administration, minivans are 10 times safer than SUVs in a crash. Truth is, small, nimble passenger cars may not survive a head-on collisio n with a Freightliner quite as well as your bigass Navigator, dude, but they do a hell of a lot better avoiding it in the first place. Which is why rates of serious accidents and incidents of death are actually lower for smaller cars than almost any lurching monster truck on the road. And sure you can be cheered slightly at the news that SUV sales are sligh tly sluggish lately, down 2 percent, and that Hummer sales are way off a nd Prius sales are way up and there's still a three-month waiting list f or Mini Coopers. Until you realize that 2 percent ain't much of nuthin' and until you read how the US consumes 20 million barrels of oil each day, with passenge r vehicles burning up three quarters of the total -- and SUVs alone burn half the total for all passenger cars, far more than their fair share a nd more petroleum than our entire country produces in a year. And then you learn how that little pip-squeak tyrant Saddam was sitting o n 10 percent of the world's oil reserves and that he might have once tho ught about threatening the nearby 60 percent owned by our buddies the te rrorist-lovin', women-slappin' Saudis, and you realize that anyone who t hinks we're in Iraq for democracy or humanity's sake is absolutely full of Rumsfeld. I know that they know , deep down, that most of those arguments hold little sway and most are rather hollow and the result of slick marketing and just a little bit of fear. And I know there is no accounting for taste and that a big part of the sa d American ideology is a willful separation of cause and effect, a gener al ignorance of how our choices affect the world, and that there are wor se atrocities in the world than owning a shiny black knobby-tired 5-ton Ford Expedition that never sees anything more rugged than a pothole in t he Krispy Kreme drive-thru. But, really, we have to just admit it: the SUV is hypocrisy incarnate. It is the perfect emblem for the American view, for our position in the wo rld: gluttonous, vain, dangerous to almost everyone else on the road, mo stly useless (over 85 percent of SUVs never see a dirt road, much less n eed 4-wheel drive), ugly as hell and as graceful or practical as a schoo l bus on an ice-skating rink. Maybe a tiny confession of guilt will put us back on the right track. After all, admission of the problem is t he first step toward recovery, right? That, and placing your order now f or the badass new VW GTI.
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