Two/Ideology and the Right Brain (part three)

With nothing left to destroy, the U.S. auto industry began to cannibalize itself. Caught without anything remotely resembling fuel efficiency, Chevy quickly threw together the Vega, and Ford followed with the Pinto. Chrysler, finding itself drowning in a sea of unsold muscle cars the size of small yachts, simply turned to the Japanese and slapped Dodge and Plymouth badges on Mitsubishi cars. Toyota and Datsun (Nissan) products trickled steadily into American garages and parking lots while aluminum Vega engine blocks melted, Pinto gas tanks exploded, GM pickup trucks burst into flames, and Chrysler slid into the bankruptcy that would require a government bailout by the end of the decade. GM found a way to protect its side-saddle fuel tanks with a steel shield, but decided not to install the shields "because it would influence, in the public's mind, a lack of security of the fuel tank. It would give them the wrong impression."18 At Ford, the accounting people ran a cost comparison and found it would be cheaper to settle lawsuits over burned customers than to change the Pinto's fuel system design.19 (Later in the decade, GM similarly chose to let its Chevy Malibu owners burn rather than invest $8.59 per vehicle in the needed fix.)20 Chevy's little Vega didn't burn, it just sort of melted—if the aluminum radiator overheated, the aluminum engine block warped, and like the Pinto, the Vega's body was so poorly and quickly designed that its panels filled with water that had no drain holes as exit points. The fenders were being eaten by rust even as the window sticker was being scraped off.

As the industry imploded, it made damn sure that it had company in its misery. Plants closed and took whole neighborhoods with them. Other industries fell, especially steel. Unemployment claims soared; the state of Michigan staggered under the financial weight. By the beginning of the next decade, the governor was forced to raise income taxes by 38% 21 to pay for the party, and auto-producing towns, especially Detroit and Flint, were decimated. "The D" lost nearly a million people by 2000, making Flint's loss of 30,000 seem something to be grateful for. Knowing that Motown was desperate, GM offered to save everyone by building a new Cadillac plant smack in the middle of "Poletown," a thriving neighborhood of more than 4,000 people. With the help of City Hall and the wonders of Eminent Domain law, GM won and the Poletown community lost. Today, the area is mostly parking lot, and the GM factory employs half the number of workers the company promised to deliver.22

Now think about the barrage of automotive images that flash past us as part of the roughly 4,000 (yes, four thousand) advertisements our eyes and brains process each day.23 Happy families in minivans; happy SUV campers in pristine wildernesses; happy speed freaks in shiny red cars slaloming around corners; happy happy happy until the car becomes one with happiness, and the internal combustion engine is inseparable from the human smile. The two ideas are stitched together so tightly and broadcast so relentlessly that it (no longer "they") becomes true. It just is. It just always has been. There has never been a time when the automobile was not our friend, our enabler for a "better life," our freedom to travel, our core identity. "You drive that?" can either inflate us with pride or deflate us with shame, depending on what that is. And even if that is a total piece of shit, it still beats riding the bus.

But all of this suturing and conflating of one idea with another is an intentional act to create—and then reinforce, promote, and defend—an ideology. The truth is far from the ideology. Cars are not our friends. Sure, it might be nice to live an hour away from work, but if the drive there takes three hours because those wonderful GM-promoted highways are now choked with cars sitting at idle, then you know, a nice high-speed train ride would be magnificent. As cars idle in traffic jams around the world, they work like little space heaters. Several million space heaters combined work like blast furnaces. But the technology of these furnaces is different; they don't heat with heat, but rather by spewing carbon in monoxide and dioxide forms, because oil contains carbon. When carbon is removed from the ground and put into the atmosphere, it changes the chemistry of the atmosphere and becomes a greenhouse gas. Oil is not our friend. Sure, it makes great stuff out of plastic, but plastic never goes away, and out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right now, is a floating continent, twice the size of Texas, that's made of bottles, bags, baskets, dolls, combs, toys, milk crates, shoes, lawn furniture, lunch boxes, garden hoses, lighters, pens, food containers, baby rattles, disposable razors, one-time cameras, fishing line—every kind of plastic item that can float into an ocean from a nation's shore or be tossed overboard by a freighter or cruise ship. This floating continent weighs several million tons and is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.24 When sea birds eat the garbage, their insides look like this:

No, I haven't drifted off point here. The point is that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so huge, so overwhelming, every scientist consulted about it admits that nothing can ever be done about it. It can never be cleaned up; no economy in the world is sufficient to pay for the labor and resources that would be needed. So the only thing we can hope for is a reduction in the amount of plastic crap ending up in the gigantic swirling gyre. No technology will come along to magically fix this problem.

And cars will continue to burn us. The carbon in their exhausts will keep heating the atmosphere, and we'll think that it's more cost effective to settle the big challenges later rather than invest in alternatives now, and the car companies will do as they've always done—which, you have to admit, has been pretty damned scary so far—and the problem will get bigger as more CO2 joins what's already in the massive swirling airborne gyre, and no technology will come along to magically fix this problem, either. The only hope is a massive and immediate reduction in what we put out there. And that's a very tough idea to wrap our brains around.

But if we shift thinking from left brain to right brain, and from wrong to right, then ideology can shatter as thoroughly as the countless cities devastated by the automobile and the planet being destroyed by its fuel.

====SOURCES====

18 Langdon & Emison, Attorneys at Law. "GM Side Saddle Pickups." Practice Areas/Fuel-Fed Fires. PDF Presentation.

19 Mark Dowie, "Pinto Madness." Mother Jones Sept./Oct. 1977.

20 Richard Alexander, "Gas Tank Fires: The $4.9 Billion Verdict Against General Motors for the Explosion of 1979 Chevrolet Malibu." Findlaw Library, Aug. 1, 1999. Findlaw.com.

21 "Michigan Governor Signs 38% Income Tax Increase." New York Times Mar. 30, 1983.

22 University of Michigan, Flint. "Overview of Land Use Patterns in Michigan." www.geneseelandnetwork.org; Jenny Nolan, "Auto Plant vs. Neighborhood: The Poletown Battle." Detroit News January 27, 2000; Gail Gibson, "A Neighborhood Torn Down." Baltimore Sun Feb. 20, 2005; Brian McKenna, "We All Live In Poletown Now." Counterpunch March 9, 2006.

23 "Fevered Pitch: What Advertising Has In Store for All of Us." Adbusters 71, May/June 2007.

24 Google returns a quarter of a million sources for this. They all confirm the phenomenon.