"Cyclists have a right to the road too, you noisy, polluting, inconsiderate maniacs! I hope gas goes up to eight bucks a gallon!"
-- Calvin's Dad, responding to Calvin's request for traffic safety poster ideas
"Four dollars for a gallon of gasoline! Driving to another town and waiting in a dozen-car-long queue because the local station was out! Unreasonable!" This is the battle cry of a hundred million Joans of Arco AM/PM. But at best, we've created a mixed message, if any message at all. We directed our disgust not at a lack of a meaningful government response to tragedy (or for that matter, a lack of any response to the cause), nor at people who took potshots at Red Cross and National Guard rescuers with low-powered hunting rifles, nor the unthinkable fact that there could be thirty thousand refugees within our own borders, welled up inside the Superdome without potable water or sewage services.
No... we were angry at the petroleum companies because they were price gouging! Never mind that we lined up to consume at whatever price petrol was being sold for, it clearly was not ourselves to blame. No, of course not. And the petrol of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge is our birthright.
The fact is our fossil fuel consumption habit isn't stemmed from our infrastructure and rapidly expanding suburbs, nor the lack of user friendly public transportation methods, nor the politicians who are receiving the equivalent of their public servant salaries several times over from the auto makers and oil companies (although all of these certainly don't help). The real problem is our zeitgeist. Nobody forced us to pull into the local petrol station and fill that fifty-five gallon drum of a gas tank. You know that sinking feeling you get when you pull up to the pump?
America, meet your collective conscience. Conscience, meet America. Oh, you've already met? Yes, it's been a while, hasn't it?
Responsibility, n.
A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's Neighbor. In the days of astrology, it was customary to unload it upon a star.
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
It seems though that most Americans become incredulous as they are confronted with the reality that liability for the situation can't be delegated to a convenient scapegoat or ignored until it goes away. "Show us the proof," we demand. The proof is the advertising that targets each and every one of us. I submit this simple conjecture: advertising reflects the values of the target audience. If it didn't, then the audience would not respond. And if the audience doesn't respond, then the money purchasing the advertising goes away, leading the advertisers to change their advertisements until the message again reflects the audience's values. So turn on your television and what will you discover? Every penny of advertising is optimized to appeal to the 'merkin principles of independence, adventure, affluence, and success.
If you think I'm exaggerating, think of the most recent car commercials you've seen. What values, goals, and dreams do they think you have?
- The new Volvos that are as powerful as Saturn V rockets and can take Richard Branson to the moon.
- Saabs- with the turn of your ignition key- transform into fighter jets.
- How about Cadillacs that go from zero to sixty miles per hour in fractions of a second because they're garaged in the barrel of a .38 magnum?
- BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes swoop through clear city streets, giving you an instant adrenaline rush as though you were not driving a fifty thousand dollar sub-compact hatchback... you're driving a World Rallye Car through the well paved streets of a Mediterranean nation whilst backbeat-laden electronica pulses in your premium six speaker sound system.
- A Hummer is the George Patton of the auto world, capable of subjugating Iceland's remote, delicate, unspoiled interior without any sort of assistance, including a gas station. Just look at those 30 inch, studded truck tires conquer hazardous terrain such as patches of delicate glacial alpine flowers!
- Chevrolets make you as tough as an NFL linebacker.
- Fords are designed to lift 18-wheel trucks from five strategically placed Ford Tough™ quarter-inch threaded bolts.
- Toyotas will withstand a comet impact, attacks from sea monsters, and the flame-throwing Tyrannosaurus Rex monster truck without so much as even the airbags deploying.
- Jeeps now have special dispensation to drive on everything in our National Parks except the paved road.
- You should enter your Hyundai via a base jump from your front door straight into the driver side door.
- How about that new Lexus sedan that reaches escape velocity in eighth gear?
- And best yet, if this Holiday Season you
buy lease any of these cars with your Manhattanite-doctor-to-the-ridiculously-wealthy salary and park it in your driveway with a big red ribbon on the roof, your wife will love it, and for the next three thousand miles, she's your fille de joie.
Fundamentally, the advertisers think that you think you're
Tom Cruise in
Top Gun,
Days of Thunder,
Mission: Impossible,
Eyes Wide Shut, or maybe all of the above. Your choice.
Yet even more than outrageous expectations, I think this decade will be remembered as the decade of lowered expectations. Two manufacturers have really outdone themselves in this regard: Subaru and Volkswagen. Subaru has been advertising that its Outback wagon is a model of fuel efficiency: "SUV performance without SUV gas mileage!" proclaim the television spots. But take a close look at the tag on the dealer's lot. Twenty measly miles per gallon are your not-so-SUV like numbers. My parents' 1984 Ford LTD Crown Victoria station wagon got twenty four miles per gallon, and this was in the age before the 1990's Clean Air Act, catalytic converters and using dynamometer trials to establish a fuel efficiency that is unrealistically high for the stop-and-go of our clogged streets. Must be all that added armored side-plating and the massive, over-reinforced engine block that goes into making modern Subarus the "safest cars on the road". And you wondered why our troops couldn't get armor for their Humvees...
Meanwhile Volkswagen, under pressure from several European environmental advocacy groups has adopted a new faux-green image. Rather than use "Wolfgang", their genius German engineer-cum-spokesperson and his ungodly hot, miniskirted, Teutonic lab assistant to perfect some new technology to attain high performance at low environmental cost, they've launched a new "zero ego-emissions" campaign. Feel bad about the twenty pounds of carbon per gallon of petroleum that you spew into the atmosphere every time you start your car? Don't fret: because you drive a turbo-diesel Touareg, you give the impression of humility, like you actually care about your neighbors!
"Americans are a broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him."
--Art Buchwald
While writing this, I imagined an advertisement that Volkswagen (or for that matter, any other auto maker) would never show you. And then it happened. The perfect car commercial. A commercial almost identical to mine! It was as though the planets aligned, and in a divine moment of ironic syzygy, Land Rover's advertising agency mocked themselves in a way that not even I could achieve. In every way, it is a perfect analogy for the daily drive. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Land Rover's latest commercial for their Range Rover Sport SUV:
Cue an artist. He has buckets of brightly colored paint: red, yellow, blue. He proceeds to pour the paint over his canvas... which happens to be the entire room. Then he rolls in the paint, as though he were finger painting, only his entire body is the finger. He smears, slides, and whirls like he had a break dancer for a lobotomy donor. The paint flies everywhere, and soon, he is not left with the vivid primary colors, but a dull, fecal brown mess. Then he exhales a long, winded breath. Is he exhausted, or exhilarated?
Cut to the same artist, now driving deliberately through city streets. He smears his car across three lanes at high speeds as he makes a left turn across traffic. He slides across lanes and the centerline to set up for the apex of the next turn. His engine whirls like a mad dervish as he down shifts into first gear to maximize torque and acceleration, even though he's traveling at least forty and should be in third or fourth gear. Then he exhales a long, winded breath. Is he exhausted or exhilarated?
You might falsely posit the tag line would suggest that he is exhilarated, but don't mistakenly believe that Land Rover think you're a dupe like the rest of the manufacturers. His exhausted exhaling? It's an analogy for the fact that one in four urban children in the United States is diagnosed with asthma due to the nearly one million tons of pollutants our diesel cycles and otto cycles exhaust into the atmosphere every day. His erratic driving is a reference to those of us who have selective amnesia towards drivers' education class and accelerate into red lights so as to prevent merging, slam on the brakes, rap our fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, then jackrabbit out of the intersection. The fecal brown, toilet-explosion-slash-splatter-painting? It's a reminder that we're making a mess, left for someone else to clean. Only we're acting like this slop is our chef-d'oeuvre for our children to hang on their refrigerator alongside this generation's other pièces de résistance such as Vietnamization and the Conservative Contract.
It's brilliant. Land Rover, I salute you.
"Is it not time we stopped riding our bikes and began to drive them? Similarly, who ever drove a car? We ride them. Words matter."
-- Andrew Shrimpton
When the tobacco companies started using cartoon characters to target our youth, we outlawed that sort of advertising. We all knew that it was a thinly packaged sham, so we made it illegal to propagate it. How then are the corporations of Detroit any different than the corporations of Durham and Richmond? Why do we let them lie to us? Why do we let them lower our expectations of corporate and civic duty?
A recent Greenpeace commercial depicts a man in a cubicle office who receives the brunt of his fellow employees' hate. They spit in his coffee, trip him, sabotage his work, sit away from him at lunch, and place "kick me" signs on his suit. Nevertheless, at the end of the workday, he cheerfully grabs his Superman keychain, heads into the empty parking garage and starts up his full-sized SUV. The commercial ends with the question "what does your car say about you?" and we discover his dirty rear windshield displays a traced message of wanker.
The environmental lobby would have you to believe that the problem is that Australia and the United States won't ratify the Kyoto Protocol, that the energy industries and automotive industries have their hands in virtually every elected official's trouser pockets, and that the automotive industry won't research, prototype and produce extremely efficient, low emissions vehicles. But their commercial unwittingly points a finger at the real problem, just like the car commercials: Americans don't actually think that owners of oversized, overpowered autos are, in fact, wankers. They think they're successful, to be emulated or envied.
The average American thinks bigger is better. The average American thinks their children deserve to survive any accident... even if it means ravishing the backseat passengers of the compact car that was stopped at the red light ahead. The average American thinks the right lane is the new left lane. The average American thinks that the best way to avoid road hazards is to have massive amounts of excess power and the full-time four wheel drive to deliver it. The average American thinks the best way to show wealth is to fritter it away at the gas pump in front of their neighbors.
The average American is content channeling Tom Cruise. What about you?