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ONE FOR THE ROAD
OCTOBER 21, 1997NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT |
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Essayist Anne Taylor Fleming considers changes on the road.
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Until fairly recently most people seemed to be driving fairly normal automobiles; that is, ones of normal size. My child rearing friends had segwayed into the requisite Volvo station wagons or the occasional mini-van, but essentially the suburban roads around where I live in West Los Angeles were full of nice, normal cars, both domestic and imported.
Yes, there was the occasional showy Porsche or Rolls Royce, but for years the fuel-efficient, small, though luxurious BMW was the politically correct car of chic choice. Then something happened. From one day of the next it seemed everyone went mad for big so-called sport utility vehicles. It started with those boxy jeeps and just exploded into even meatier Ford Explorers and Toyota Land Cruisers and Chevrolet Suburbans. Suddenly, the market and mall parking lots were full of these behemoths, the soccer moms and briefcase dads running around in these mammoth, four-wheel drive vehicles. They aren't using them to navigate rugged terrain. Only 1/4 of these vehicles are ever used off-road.
This isn't about that. This is about size and road swagger, the new self-image. Clearly, some sort of road machismo has taken over, everybody riding high in the saddle, living some Wild West fantasy life behind the wheel. Riding along in my lowly compact I feel timid and dwarfed, as if the schoolyard bully had suddenly strutted into view, and my fears are not misplaced. In any collision between one of these five thousand pound brutes and a regular old car like mine at thirty-three hundred pounds the passengers in the car are four times more likely to be killed: meaning, I'd be outgunned in a New York minute. Add to that the gas these so-called light trucks use--they average only about 14 miles a gallon--and they put 20 percent more pollutants--make that gunk--into the air--than a regular car. But that doesn't stop anyone here in my showbiz capital or anywhere else in the country either. The sales of these vehicles went up 77 percent last year. Clearly, the country is feeling its economic oats, strutting its stuff on the highway, and thumbing its nose at the memory of gasoline lines. We're riding high on the hog.
I look around my neighborhood, and, indeed, everything seems to be inflated. The new houses are bigger. Mansions go up cheek by jowl, each bigger than the one next to it, each with a kitchen fit for a hotel--no doubt to warm up the already prepared food we buy on the way home from work--and each with a front door big enough for a giant. Does anyone need a door that big? Never mind--bigger is better. Every new gambling joint in Vegas is bigger and more garish than the last. On Wall Street companies are gobbling each other up, and even Ted Turner, making a monstrously generous donation of $1 billion to the United Nations, wanted to make sure it was the biggest such bequest on record. Bigger is everything. Bigger is the measure of the man--or woman. I suppose we can say that we Americans are never very good at concealing our economic bravado. We're inclined to flaunt it if we've got it, and that's exactly what we're doing now. Just take a drive, and you'll see this full tilt, four-wheel flaunt. But if you're not in one yourself, drive very, very carefully.
I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.
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