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Mitchell Hearns Bishop | Howard Besser's IS 208 | Information Studies, UCLA
And then there are the cars, the old American cars in Cuba. Sure they look cute, but....
I don't really like cars. In fact I kind of hate them. They choke the ever expanding streets and freeways, they are always in the way, a blight on the landscape that cannot be avoided.
Then, of course, there's the smell. Especially the diesels which you can detect before you actually see them. Really fun to be sitting behind an old Mercedes diesel at a stop light, you know the ones where the whole back of the car is black.
Yeah, kind of like that. Stinking and burning.
When I was a kid I did go through a period of being able to identify all the different makes and years but I lost interest after 1962. That's when they started getting ugly. Also, as a budding environmentalist, it had not escaped me that the world seemed to be getting paved over for the damn things. The whole thing seems so thoughtless, oddly irrational and poorly planned. Human beings are animals and we do have our irrational side in spite of our attempts to appear otherwise.
(courtesy of Public Domain Images http://www.pdimages.com/WEB6.html-ssi)
Unfortunately, our use of fossil fuels is more like a monkey with gun than a monkey with a typewriter. According to the EPA, the average car produces 80 lbs. or hydrocarbons, 606 lbs. of carbon monoxide, 41 lbs. of nitrogen oxides, 10,000 lbs. of carbon dioxide, and burns 550 gallons of gasoline. If that's the case for the average American car, you can imagine what these museum pieces do for the air in cuba. Good thing there aren't that many of them.
Are all these cars really necessary? I see all these people, one person per enormous sports utility vehicle driving around doing what? Now they are even introducing the obnoxious Unimog, the ultimate SUV. Every year the roads have to get bigger and the traffic and the air gets worse. Now we have an entire administration that seems to be setting the clock back on all this nonsense. The air in Los Angeles is the worst in the country. When I was a kid, I remember playing on the playground at Knollwood elementary out in the North part of the San Fernando Valley and we would watch this sort of rusty looking bank of fog creep across the valley. It made your chest hurt when you took in a breath of air. You couldn't do much on the playground because it was too painful to breathe. Now it's not so visible but even more nasty.
(courtesy of Public Domain Images http://www.pdimages.com/WEB6.html-ssi)
Industrial democracy seems to be strapping us down to "Old Sparky" or the long term public health equivalent.
I sometimes wonder what someone from another planet or culture would think of all these people driving around one to a car. If you consider the anthropology of it, it really is quite remarkable the resources that individuals and society as a whole has set aside for this. Clearly it isn't about getting from point A to point B efficiently. It seems to be about status and independence and some weird thing that humans have about mobility and freedom to move about. Why are car pools such a hard sell? Why do cars have to be so big? Why do they look the way they do? I'm reminded of computer boxes. The exterior of the computer has nothing to do with the size, shape and function of the actual working parts. What's that all about. Why are computers in these odd box like containers? Macs have this sort of Playskool look and the PC's all have this pseudo business box that must date back to IBM and the early days. So after this somewhat prolonged rant what about the cars of Cuba? Well, they are an interesting example of how long something can last outside a consumer society. Unfortunately, they may seem quaint but they actually represent a severe shortage of transportation.
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Mitchell Hearns Bishop | Howard Besser's IS 208 | Information Studies, UCLA