When you ride ALONE you ride with bin Laden | 1, 2, 3

Slaves to Our Freedom

VOLUTION IS ABOUT SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, adapting to adversity, immunizing one's self from that which poses a threat. And as we begin to recognize our oil dependence as an Achilles heel, well, then I would say it was time for us to do a little evolving.

After World War II, Americans started treating gasoline as if it were a necessary element for sustaining life, like air and water and television. We preach about capitalism and the beauty of unfettered market forces determining price -- but not when it comes to gas. When it comes to gas, we need it cheap, and the president had better get it for us, or else, and we don't care how. If it takes a hundred thousand dead Iraqi "soldiers" to keep gas below two bucks a gallon -- when the rest of the world pays five and up -- then that's what it takes! That's the "price" of gasoline. Just look what happens when gasoline prices go up by even a few cents. Americans throw an embarrassingly juvenile tantrum, outraged that they have to think twice before taking the couch-mobile to Wal-Mart for a bucket of Rocky Road and a lawn bag full of potato chips.

We should stop worrying so much about the price of gasoline and start considering its cost. You really want to be patriotic? Don't change your car by putting a flag on it, change the car. Improving our overall fuel efficiency by just 2.7 miles per gallon would completely eliminate our need for oil from the Persian Gulf -- you know, where the troublemakers come from.

And until we can wean ourselves off the good, imported stuff altogether -- and we'll have to someday -- conservation is our only sound recourse. Oh sure, there's our domestic supply, that private bottle we keep in a desk drawer, but even if we drilled in every wildlife refuge and put oilrigs on all our coasts, we'd still only be tapping about 2% of the world's reserves, barely enough to continue producing Astroglide.

And for what? For big, garish wagons that we want to make us powerful, but of course cannot. Stop calling SUVs SUVs, because it stands for "sport utility," and soccer moms and football dads are not using these leviathans for sports or utilities. Unlike in the commercials, few people use them to cross the Rockies (because, you know, wherever Lewis and Clark went ditto the Navigator). In the commercials, every model is "a totally new driving experience." Please -- a totally new driving experience would be a car with wings. Does this car fly? Otherwise, everything is still basically a Chevy.

So let's cut the crap: we're driving school bus-sized urban assault vehicles around town -- and that's just the women. The men want to be rebels. Oh, yeah, you're a sexy, off-road radical because you're in a Pontiac. You're not one of the masses! Hey, wouldn't it be great to go to a PTA meeting in a tank?! Wouldn't that be the coolest? That's not something everybody could do! Perish the thought of something available to everyone -- members only, baby.

And by the way, Selfish Utility drivers: I personally don't want other motorists sitting high enough to see what's going on in my lap.

The irony is what we love most about our cars -- the feeling of freedom they provide -- has made us slaves. Slaves to cheap oil which has corrupted our politics, threatened our environment, funded our enemies and had us doing the dirty work for a lot of royalist dirt bags in the Middle East for a long time. It's time we took a good, hard look at our driving, and this is something we have to do for ourselves, because our leaders aren't going to help. They're like the lush on the next barstool who drinks more than you do. Faced with our addiction to oil, what does our leadership say? Get more of it!

Strange when you consider their answer to drug dependence is to cut off the supply.

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