Reimagining ideology - a case study as case study

Quite a while back, before the world economy melted down, and GM and Chrysler went bankrupt, and my head exploded from trying to maintain my original argument with many of its basic premises crumbling and disappearing by the hour, I wrote this:

When I was 17, I let a blue Plymouth Roadrunner 383 slip out of my hands, and for the next 32 years, I vowed to replace it one day. There wasn't a week, over those three decades, that I didn't think about my lost love at least once.

The day to replace it has finally come.

And I will not be getting the car.

This is an ideological shift that physically hurts, because my heart is broken, and I've been in mourning for half a year. I deserve this car, my left brain screams. I've worked hard for it. I've been patient, and I've let all of the more important aspects of a responsible adult life come first—children, jobs, mortgages, insurance, retirement fund, maturity, boredom. Hundreds of thousands of other guys have classic cruisers in their garages, so why shouldn't I have what they have?

I'll tell you why: because when I look at the two cars in my driveway now, one built in 2001 and the other in 2007, I see two wretched machines representing unforgivably antiquated old tech. The best of the two gets a respectable 37 miles per gallon, but it's still the same basic contraption that my great-great grandfather used to get himself around town more than a century ago. His didn't have as many options, but it still had a big, heavy chunk of iron under its hood where gasoline exploded and made parts go up and down and around.

I don't play my music on 78s, I don't keep my food cold with a huge block of ice, I don't wash my clothes with lye on a ribbed board—but I transport myself from one place to another in a piece of centenarian technology that has long outlived its usefulness.

There was more, but the basic point here is that I'd managed to physically wrestle a mental conglomeration of desire, patience, and ideology out of its place where it'd lived for more than 30 years, and to bury it. Having done that, I felt... not too bad. It was more interesting to have actually felt the ideological landslide taking place in my head. Until this point, I'd never known that ideologies could do that.

And I was confident that my rationale was sound for jettisoning a 30-year pursuit from my life landscape — until 15 months later when I happened to catch an opinion piece in the Detroit News about the "cash for clunkers" program. In it, author John McCormick writes:

"The real target of the government initiative is not the tiny percentage of the overall vehicle fleet that comprises genuine classic cars. Though these vehicles do pollute the air far worse than today's cars, they are driven so rarely that their emissions impact is statistically irrelevant.... What the program aims to accomplish, beyond a general stimulation of the stagnant new car market, is to take the real clunkers -- the stinking, out of tune, poorly maintained machines from '80s and even the '90s off the road."

And for the second time in my life, I felt a physical shift take place in my brain, and the first cracked ideology from 15 months ago suddenly uncracked, healed itself, and retook its former place of daily obsession. Cars in and of themselves are not evil. It's how they're used that's the problem.

Realizing that, two words slammed suddenly and forcefully into place; two words that had been chanted daily for more than 30 years but then were put on cold storage for 15 months.

Plymouth Roadrunner.


Owning a car that leaves the garage ten or twelve days a year and drives no more than 50 miles if it's lucky — that is the very definition of responsible, eco-friendly motoring. Do the other cars still need to go? Does the highway still need to be replaced by the railway? Absolutely; none of that changes.

But in the meantime, there's no need for martyrdom. A happy road warrior is an effective one.

Beep Beep.

The way it should be, the way it is

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Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is a master of The Rant — and the clear successor to the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson in the "gonzo journalism" department. But his latest eruption of molten opinion, "The Great American Bubble Machine," in the current issue of RS has some major blind spots.

The piece is lengthy attack on Goldman Sachs, and on Barack Obama for staffing the White House with a number of key Goldman characters who, according to Taibbi, are manipulating this President just as they did the last one, engineering legislation that, while claiming to be good for the country and good for the world, will first and foremost be good for Goldman Sachs. Everyone else comes fifth.

It's at the end of the attack, when Taibbi addresses Goldman's role in "helping" to combat global warming through supporting cap and trade limits on carbon emissions, that he goes blind, writing:

"If cap and trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap and trade, as envisioned by Goldman Sachs, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax collection scheme."

I hate to take the side of those "swine" in any argument, but in this case, we need to face facts. First, the "unclean energy producers" are... us. The end users, consumers of electricity and gasoline and natural gas (methane) and propane and firewood and charcoal and all of the other things that burn and release CO2. (We won't even get into the maniacal consumption of things that consume energy.) The way the United States and its proud and avowed capitalist system works is that producers produce what consumers demand. Nobody does anything that doesn't make money. There is no altruism involved, unless it's a good guise for generating more revenue.

And: if the U.S. government were to "simply impos[e] a fixed levy" (i.e. tax) on carbon, then this is what would happen: four years after signing the legislation, the President would be voted out of office, along with all of the members of Congress who supported it with him. A new crew would come in, all of them wearing elephant patches on their sleeves, and repeal the tax in the name of "freedom from big government."

That is why, in a capitalist system, you use capitalism to get things done, not altruism, not ethics, not intellectualism, not legislation or the balance of powers. You let the bankers and their clients get rich, and since their clients include the owners and shareholders of the energy producers having CO2 limits imposed upon them, everyone's happy. If the companies don't scream, and the shareholders don't lose money (and instead gain it), and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have no Democrats or "liberals" to attack because it wasn't them demanding climate sanity, it was the financial system and the corporate world it supports, then we all win by losing.

It's a fucked up way of doing things, but in a society so tightly encapsulated in an unbreakable ideology of money über alles, then hey, let's take what we can get.
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