BeingBeing
The Adventures of a smallish,
1979 Honda Civic (CVCC)
"BUSTER in SUV-LAND"
Earlier in my life of 54 earthly years,
I was a captive (as are most males under the age
of 35) of that nameless youthful male 'force formidable' that
combines equal parts of reckless abandon, fancied immortality, testosterone, and cerebral
myopia. This same force is that which drives young men in the thousands and millions
towards ownership of hot, sporty automobiles that possess way too much power and speed
potential to ever be driven at even a mere tenth of their capacity on any city street or
highway. Although I was too poor to seriously envision the financial sacrifices required
by 'old Porsche' possession (by this I mean the only TRUE old Porsche worthy of that term,
the 356, although I have always thought the Porsche 914-6 was pretty slick, too), I went
through my sportscar phase thoroughly 
contented to be in the driver's seat of a 1972 Datsun 240Z, a 1976
Fiat X1-9, a 1973 Saab Sonnett, and later a 1976 VolksPorsche 914-4 (2 liter).
Unlike most young men, however, I had for most of my life been a captive held at
equidistant points between two diametrically polar opposite worldviews: one mandating the
minimalist, non-materialist perspective and the other enthusiastically promulgating the haute-tech,
scientific gizmo fixation.
The
former personae demanded satisfaction through expression of modest transportation
needs with something like a 1962 Citroen 2CV, a 1956 VW panel van, or an 1962 VW
convertible (this was before they became trendy and expensive--we're talking 1966 here),
while the latter couldn't be happy with anything less than a Lotus (later Caterham)
Super-7, a Porsche Speedster, or an Abarth Dino. Concurrent with this dichotomy in
personal outlook on life, I was concerned (and still am) with the continued development of
the morbid, spiritually empty secular consumerism that has seized America in its
relentless talons.
Much of this deficit in awareness of the economy of
scale in the United States stems directly--naturally enough--from the very nature of
America's wide-open spaces and the heretofore unalloyed availability of space, resources,
and wherewithal . This contrasts severely with an acute awareness of limitations that has
always characterised countries like France, for instance (a nation that absolutely
cherishes cher 'smallness'), and which has prompted a perspective on life that is
tied directly to finite limitations of all sorts: national, political, social,
technological, and cultural.
At any rate, even while I was still
undergoing the somewhat recent tortures of what an author once astutely described as
'sportscar menopause', I was well aware of the need to conserve. Or at least to embrace
the school of thought that recognizes the need to conserve resources as the 
world continues to fill up with people; most particularly in the face
of continuing, rampant usurpation of the world's resources by Western (read: American)
culture. This conflict came to a head in the late 80s when my wife and I acquired a small,
simple, utilitarian, and eminently practical vehicle to use around town. My wife had just
lost her Toyota Camry to an accident (not of her doing) and my VolksPorsche 914-4 was too
precious to expose to the hazards of ordinary, daily street use. We ended up spotting a
1979 Honda Civic station wagon for sale in the local paper that was reasonably priced
(about $1000) and in excellent condition; it was being sold by the original owners--an
older couple who were moving up to a bigger, splashier American road-yacht (probably out
of fear of being creamed on the highway by some testosterone-crazed youth in a vintage
Camaro).
This was the car that came to be known too
us simply as "The Buster", after the turn of the century cartoon strip
of the same name. Originally painted a dull shade of metallic blue, the first thing on my
agenda was to have it repainted in high-viz. CALTrans orange. Looking not unlike an
elongated, mutant Florida orange, the Buster could certainly be seen by any fool on the
street with his eyes even half-open. Thus, I thought, it would be a safer vehicle to
drive. Was I ever WRONG, in the denouement!
However, over the years, the Buster has
increasingly become more and more a part of my life, to the point where I finally sold my
lovely little VolksPorsche and 
decided to keep the Honda in perpetuity. It is such a dandy little,
all-purpose vehicle that there seems nothing it either cannot do or has not done in its 21
years of road service. With a roof rack that holds just about anything too large to fit
into the roomy rear cargo space (with rear seat folded down), it is low enough to the
ground that just about anything of awkward size or weight may be levered into it without
much trouble. The rear space, when not being used for utility tasks, is perfect for
carrying our two Siberian Huskies (Deejay & Laika--pronounced like
the hoity-toity German wunderkamera 'Leica'), who feel perfectly at home in it,
heads pointing eagerly into whatever breeze is blowing past the rear windows on both
sides.
The aft section of Buster is festooned with a few gizmos that reflect my whacko sense of Dadaesque humor (a Buddha 'fish' symbol--like that ubiquitous Christian icon of similar appearance that has 'JESUS' within its outlines--and a few other small but droll eyecatchers such as the legend "Two thirds of BMW is BM..."), as well as a special high-point stoplight/taillight augmentation of the rear lighting system for enhanced visibility (fitted to the rear of the roof-rack) and twin European spec rear fog lamps.
On the whole, however, the Buster is an eminently practical all-purpose, small vehicle.
The engine has been replaced and most of the mechanicals have been refurbished and
restored to better than new. With a 'Hondamatic' transmission and a 1.5 liter engine, it
is no SCCA 'G Production' contender, but it provides a reasonably snappy level of
performance for most situations within the conventional civic venue.
On the highway, however, it is another story. With a self-imposed highway cruising speed of 65 mph, the Buster is always within a mere hair's breadth of being either run down by a semi-truck/trailer rig, edged rudely off the road by red-neck pick-up trucks (you know the kind...4WD, 10 feet high, perched on ridiculously oversized tires, with enough accessory lights to illuminate a small airport landing strip...), or perpetually threatened with an SUV enema at any moment. In fact, the orange paint, intended to allow the Buster to be seen, in combination with the car's small, humble size, actually appears to create an antagonistic response in some of these drivers not unlike that which I imagine a red cape stimulates in a charging bull.
HEREIN lies the story. As gas prices continue to climb skyward, the
American auto industry appears to be relentlessly pushing the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV)
fad off on an unfortunately empty-minded consumer awareness, that has its murky origins in
the traditional American obsession with the axiom "Bigger is better!". This
craze is now so common that seemingly everywhere you look you see these huge, lumbering
primordial vehicular beasts, bearing down on you from some quarter or another. Ironically
(and amusingly, if you can still see the humor in nearly being crushed by one of
these things), you can invariably make out the driver behind those vast arrays of
intimidating 'black-out' glass (that confer a sort of 'safe' and sanitized impersonality
and anonymity) as some little house-mouse of a wife, driving her kids to school,
hell-bent for election, and completely heedless (clueless?) of the need for maintaining
safe and prudent speeds where limits are posted (is there actually a 'non-posted'
roadway?).
Truthfully, behind the wheel of the Buster, close encounters with
these hulking SUV things scare the hell out of me (and the Buster, too, I am sure). Of
course, Ms. Working Mother of Two probably could care less that she has nearly
run me off the road in her haste to get her kids to school, since she is safely sheathed
in 4 tons of impervious, personal 4-wheeled armor.
I suppose what really hurts me in a deeper, philosophical sense is that recognition of the abdication of responsibility for personal reflective intelligence that ownership of these behemoths telegraphs like a fluorescent warning light. SUV ownership certainly indicates, if nothing deeper, that the driver is just another brain-dead American consumer who has been conned by the motor-vehicle industry in this country into buying into the latest motor industry hype.
Surely, there are a still a few around
who recognize this obsession with monstrous, gas guzzling, environment-polluting 4WD
vehicles for what it is: non-cogitative complicity in a 
never-ending corporate campaign to perpetually drain your pockets of
money, not unlike a vampire sucking the life out of its victims in installments, rather
than all at once? And yet, there is now an SUV for all consumer spending levels,
starting with the imported econo-toy SUVs (RAV-4) and ending with the new,
stratospherically priced wretched excess Mercedes and Lexus SUVs (anyone who
thinks Mercedes is a luxury or high-status brand should be forced to visit OTHER
nations around the world, such as Saudi Arabia, where even the garbage trucks and water
trucks are Mercedes-manufactured).
Meanwhile, a distinctly clear message continues to beam out from
these excessively speeding beasts whose progress humble Buster just happens to be impeding
(on their maddened rush to nowhere), that small, economical, practical cars such as a meek
little 1979 Honda Civic have no legitimate place on the roadway--not even in the far
right-hand 'slow lane' where public law mandates slower traffic must keep to.
There is just enough of the old Berkeley radical reactionary in me left to regard this collective, social assault on our rights ( speaking as a prudent, thoughtful, and safe-driving motorist, piloting a perfectly functional and lifestyle-appropriate vehicle) as something akin to the British landing in Boston Harbor at the onset of the American Revolution. It remains one of my favorite disgruntlements (and when you hit 54, you are entitled to nurse a few, let's be fair)....enough of a disgruntlement that I shall probably keep the Buster until it finally melts into an amorphously indistinct mass of oxidation (or until Buster collapses from a massive, surprise SUV enema).
Meanwhile,
to rashly persist in driving a small, economical, highly-practical, and user-friendly
machine like an old 1979 Honda Civic, for transportation or utility purposes, appears to
require a resolution of moral fortitude of no small degree, as today's mindless road-rage
escalates to the next higher level all around us. But I'm just enough of a stubborn old
reactionary to persist in this as long as the Buster is able to crank over the next
morning. Finally, I can't help but take some GREAT measure of personal satisfaction
in knowing that, while the Buster was paid off nearly 18 years ago, probably half of the
SUVs on the road today are so outrageously priced as to be only leasable,
while the other half will keep their new owners in the figurative poor-house with car
payments until old age comes knocking (surprise, dudes and dudettes...it
will eventually happen!) on the door!
(Vraiment, je m'en fous de ce que tu en penses!....voila!)
For those who are even more left of center than I and may be of the opinion that ALL 'infernally combusted' 4 wheeled vehicles should be banned from the Earth (as the greatest unnatural techno-disaster ever to afflict the human race), please be aware of a unique group that calls itself "CAR-Busters". Formerly located in the USA, but now situated in the Czech Republic, this group is an ultra-environmental awareness entity that believes in taking people out of cars and putting them on foot, bicycle, horse-drawn locomotion--anything but automobiles, trucks, SUVs, and petrol-fueled what-have-yous. They publish an excellent little magazine of the same name ("Car Busters"). Their website is: http://www.carbusters.org , and email address is: carbusters@ecn.cz . Snail mail address is: Car Busters, Kratka 26, 100 00, Praha 10, Czeska Republika (Czech Republic). The group functions similar to the Canada-based "AD-Busters" cultural/social awareness group ( http://www.adbusters.org/home/ ) and are well worth tuning in!
TRULY A YELLOW BRICK ROAD
(on television auto advertising, truth, and corporate deceit)
Ever stopped to reflect a moment on those television advertisements for automobiles that appear on commercial (non-cable) US programming? I'm sure you know the ones I refer to. They typically depict the latest model automobile (usually an SUV, these days) careening through the panoramic landscape backdrop with reckless abandon. If it isn't a 'black-out glass' VW Jetta swooping along a highway, carving obscene swaths through natural areas that would rival the best the Canadian Rockies have to offer, it is a monster SUV smashing madly through streams, ploughing wildly down rugged mountain trails that you'd normally expect only a hiker to be seen on, or something similar...and not at normal speed, but in fast-motion, high-speed panning action.
The liminal message is inevitably an encouragement to "Let your wild side show", "Thrill to the surge of adrenaline that driving the new BLAH-BLAH-BLAH produces when you take the wheel...", or "Feel the rush...". The subliminal substrate message simply underscores the obvious and explicit exhortation, which is that it is OK to drive like a maniac, all the time, in all places, regardless of the setting, regardless of all else....
"Ah," you say, "but no one takes that seriously. It's just an advertising pitch." WRONG! Rather, it is ample and very disturbing evidence of an advertising industry that has gone seriously insane in our country, a nation in which the formerly well-delineated bounds of reality have now been so conveniently merged and fused with fantasy that we are being blatantly told on a daily basis that white is black, wrong is right, good is bad, and irresponsibility is socially cool and chic, etc. Furthermore, it is irrefutable evidence that automobile manufacturers wish to take no leading role in becoming advocates of safe driving attitudes, or the fostering of responsible driving techniques.
Most of the consequent damage is done when these deceit-filled and horrifically deceptive ad pitches are processed by immature minds which are not yet fully prepared to exercise the requisite critical reflective powers of discernment that enable us to tell the 'real apples' from the 'road apples' we stumble across in the conduct of our daily lives. These are the idiots we encounter each day on our roadways, who unthinkingly fall for the cheap advertising lures, become sold on buying high performance cars they really cannot afford, and end up threatening each of us with their rude 'attitudes' and frightening lack of basic regard for the safety and well-being of other drivers.
One interesting analogue becomes crystal clear in considering this status quo: the past relationship between the cigarette manufacturers and their millions of nicotine-addicted victims distinctly parallels that which exists between the automobile manufacturers and the driving public hooked on speed and cheap thrills. The difference between these two analogous paradigms is that the American public appears finally to have caught on that cigarettes are a health hazard, while the awareness that cars are a surrogate loaded gun in the hands of the reckless and socially irresponsible person (who spends almost as much time in the car today as in the bed) has yet to sink in. One of the chief problems is that while cigarettes are intrinsically 'neutral' objects that may be more easily demythologised, the strong parallels advertising has drawn between powerful cars and sex appeal, youthful energy and driving, and with the unrestrained expression of supremely solipsistic, egotistic urges expressed through operation of a car makes them appear grossly desirable. This, in turn, makes them far less easily rendered impotent and more difficult to dispel by several orders or magnitude.
HELLO!....wake up and smell the auto exhaust, folks. Have you ever wondered why the cars that we are shown speeding through the beautiful wilderness at breakneck speed in TV ads all have black-out glass (that obscures one's being able to see a driver inside the vehicle)? Could it be that it's deliberately done to create a sense of anonymous impersonality and communicate then messaged that you are 'given' permission to throw normal concerns to the winds when you step behind the wheel of that new 2000 Whatziz? The non-verbal language clearly states "It's OK to act like an idiot behind the wheel of our new model because no one will be able to identify you when you drive like one." Or, even more sinisterly, "It isn't your responsibility....it's the car's...and you are safely shielded inside it...not just from normal cautions, but from the wrath of others whose lives you may threaten in yielding to your reckless urges." Sound like a familiar refrain we associate with the NRA, with regard to guns? ("Guns don't kill people, people kill people..."). While true enough (that cars are just another tool in the hands of human beings to abuse or use wisely...like guns), this does not excuse or obfuscate the need for us to focus acutely on the real and ugly core of these commercial 'messages' that promise us 'cheap and dirty' relief from the very real need to constantly exercise responsibility in our daily interactions with others.
Thus, while the problem is admittedly complex, it should not be overlooked that this is only yet ANOTHER example of the truly insidious and dangerous control we are according commercial corporate concerns by not reacting loudly and positively to these execrable distortions of truth and wisdom on the part of corporate manufacturers and their media/advertising codependent cohorts. Regrettably, each time we fail to react (by whatever means necessary to get the message across, whether it takes the form of letters, political process, action groups, mass movements campaigns, etc.), this simply communicates to the profiteering corporate masters of deceit that we are all little more than a bunch of plump turkeys, ready for processing into cash returns (financial exploitation). Does it have any impact on you to know that you are essentially regarded as little more than a herd of prize cows, to be turned into unconscionable profit at the behest of some corporate board of directors whose overriding motivation is solely to make as money as possible out of your gullibility?
Next time you watch another tedious, juvenile, 'youth-tinged' commercial exhortation by auto manufacturers urging you to drive like a maniac through the natural beauties of a pristine wilderness (or a crowded city street, for that matter), pause and ask yourself why you are allowing corporations who produce these 4-wheeled beasts to lie so guilelessly and shamelessly to us in this manner. Ask yourself what terrible changes have taken place in modern American economic culture that we now sedately sit there and allow ourselves to be treated like brain-dead idiots, whose brains have been washed so many times that there's no longer any functioning cerebral cortex left to lave? In the short term, if you find yourself as outraged as I am at such moments, at least grab the remote and hit the MUTE switch to actively 'cut' off the youthful stream of music & psycho-babble that accompanies these ads. It then becomes almost fun to watch these ads without their soundtrack 'pitches', because then the 'Alice-in-Wonderland' essence of such bizarre imagery comes through far more distinctly. Critical thought and reflective intelligence at least then stand a chance in the face of such onslaughts. Try it some time.
Doubtlessly, George Orwell's fictional 'Big Brother' would be mortified by the commonplace distortions of truth and wisdom that are now the accepted norm in today's American society, so grossly obvious and shame-faced are the lies that are routinely passed off with beguiling blandishments on TV advertisements. Put this figurative fuel-additive in your (think) tank and ponder it for a while, fellow consumer of mass-quantities. Meanwhile, chill and be well, citizens!
It is still remotely possible that with just the tiniest bit of effort on our part to exercise critical intelligence in the living of our lives, there may yet be some small hope for the short-term continuity of the human race. [Personally, I maintain the same attitude reflected by the 'agents' of the MATRIX (in the recent movie of the same name), that we human beings are really an insidious form of dangerous virus---that the planet would be FAR better off without.] Regardless of how your opinion may vary from mine, it is clear that truth, wisdom, and rationally exercised intelligence are all entries on the aesthetic 'endangered concepts' list.
