Decarceration SitRep

Living without a car is doable, so far. I find that

• I walk more
• depend more on others
• consume less
• eat less junk food
• feel more restricted
• consolidate trips
• use my wife's car more
• buy gas for her car
• save on car insurance
• try to avoid self-righteousness over this condition

meditation on de-automation

On Tuesday, November 3, 2009, Election Day, I elected to become decarcerated, de-automobiled, vehicularly divested, unincarnated, car blanche, carnally challenged.

You get the picture.

Unwilling (and pretty darn incapable!) to pay $1,100 to $1,400 or more to repair the timing belt and valve(s), I chose to hand the car, a 1999 Ford Contour (I believe it was made in Mexico) over to the repair shop for fifty dollars U.S. currency plus credit for the limited time spent trying to repair it or discern the need for repairs.

I am free.

After emptying the car of its Detroit detritus (sitting in a box on the porch) and depositing the check, I later walked home, from Freedom of Espresso, about 2.6 miles to Tipperary. "It's a long way to Tipperary . . . "

All kidding aside, I did feel a degree of liberation, a lightness anchored in humbling dependency, fewer responsibilities, simpler choices.

It's back to the future. As with most of us in the Fifties and early Sixties, we now are a one-car family.

We are only partially incarcerated.

I am driven, learning the passive voice.

F (as in Foolish)-150

Tonight ABC News aired a feature about "America's best-selling car." Um, except it's not a car.

And that's the problem.

Mitt Romney and John McCain and Mike Huckabee are traversing Michigan talking jobs, tring to coax votes in tomorrow's Republican presidential primary. (That's funny: millionaire, starched-shirt Republicans talking to laid-off workers.). So, ABC figured they'd take us to the assembly line of "America's best-selling car." The bit, linked above as a video clip, depicts hard-working folks, and smart technology. I have no problem with any of that. (ABC News's "24" segments are a good approach, in theory.) Both of my parents worked in factories, and they had to quit school after eighth grade during the Great Depression. I don't belittle or demean the workers or what they do. I myself have worked in a factory. Tough stuff. Or unbearably tedious. Or dangerous (my mother got her arm ripped in a machine the plant was trying out; human guinea pigs. They docked her pay for going to the doctor's. Really. This was not 1898, the Age of the Robber Barons. This was a shop with a union in the early 1980s, for God's sake!).

My whole problem is what the story did not say. Why is Ford now trailing Toyota? Why are people losing jobs? Why are politicians lying when they promise they can redeem Detroit from its woes? Why was none of this asked?

How long does everyone think a TRUCK will remain Ford's best-selling vehicle? And why should a truck be America's best-selling vehicle?

I don't get it. Oh sure. Some people have a real need for this vehicle and its strength and power and gas-guzzlingness and its fortresslike protection and its virile potency. But most people don't. And our politicians (except for Bill Richardson, who has dropped out of the race) pander to the public by decrying so-called soaring gas prices (soaring compared to what? based on what value? still cheap compared to thrifty Europe), a mythos perpetuated by the word choices of newscasters and news writers.

My neighbor across the street loves his beautiful F-150. Loves it.

But I certainly don't see him hauling timber or cinder blocks every weekend.

It's all about a John Wayne fantasy of manliness (many women want to partake of the same fantasy), and Manifest Destiny and power and strength and indomitable force and We Are Number One and Who Are You to Suggest Otherwise, It's My Right, Title, and Heir.

Illusion. Illusion. Illusion. Illusions blessed and endorsed by our politicians and entertainment barons (it ain't news, really). They dare not offend our fantasies or break the spell of our collective psychosis.

So, it isn't what the so-called news says, as much as what it doesn't say or how it says it.

And to think, people think there's a liberal media bias. The media is too lazy to have a bias (or for some traditional grammarians: "The media are...").

There. I feel better. But only slightly. Because nothing was accomplished by this. Nothing at all.

(For the record, I own a 1999 Ford Contour with 93,700 miles and my car before that was a Ford Escort station wagon and my son owns a 2006 Ford Focus.)