Ellen Goodman: When we politicize what we drive

[question everything]

This is a syndicated column but my link does not require registration, yet ;-)


ELLEN GOODMAN THE BOSTON GLOBE


July 10, 2004

(snip)

We hybrid owners – a mere 50,000 in a sea of 17 million cars sold last year – are being typecast as granola-crunching, tree-hugging enviro-snobs. Not only did a New York Times writer sneeringly call our vehicles "hip," another mocked us as "virtuous." A third suggested that we were driving with moral superiority, "the automotive equivalent of corrective shoes."

(snip)

Every time I pulled up to a gas station in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001,
I started thinking about our Middle Eastern "friends" and the Madrassa schools they support with my gas-guzzling dollars. Then too, there was global warming, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the fact of Americans using 10 times more gasoline than the global norm, the bright pink Victoria's Secret Hummer parked outside my office and – well, you get the idea.

If the car is to the environment as the cigarette is to the body, if I'm not about to go cold turkey – or cold bike – why not go hybrid? A New Yorker cartoon said all we needed to know about the technology: "It runs on its conventional gasoline-powered engine until it senses guilt, at which point it switches over to battery power."

(snip)

If you follow the religious line of moral values you get inscribed in The Bill Bennett "Book of Virtues." If you follow the line of environmental values, you get mocked as "virtuous." If you eat cheeseburgers, you're one of the guys. If you buy organic greens, you're looking down on one of the guys.

This time, the image remakers may be on the wrong side of the highway, since hybrids are wait-listed and Hummers are discounted. Arnold Schwarzenegger himself has talked of turning one of his Hummers green – though a hybrid Hummer is a little like a low-carb Krispy Kreme. But I am sure there's a conventional automaker somewhere with a book called: "Real Men Don't Drive Hybrids."

(snip)

Goodman can be reached via e-mail at [e-mail].


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040710/news_1e10goodman.html