It was high mass for reverb fans at The Orpheum last Wednesday, when the Kentucky band My Morning Jacket brought their thunderous tour to town. The epic performance made me wonder why more things in life arent as good as some music. On one plus side of lifes ledger you have Bachs Brandenburg concertos, the Beatles Abbey Road and My Morning Jackets Z. On the minus side you have irritable bowel syndrome, Karl Rove and clamshell packaging.
Ah yes, clamshells. Just the other day yours truly and a pair of scissors were locked in mortal battle with a pair of newly bought headphones. Weve all been there. Small, high value retail items like consumer electronics now come in one off-the-shelf form, as nuke-proof Kinder Eggs.
Clamshells are security devices meant to deter theft. But the real offense involves that an average of 6,000 Americans end up in emergency rooms every year, after injuring themselves trying to open these plasticized hell-spawns. Many of those injuries are mediated by so-called wrap rage. Thanks to economies of scale, consumer-level annoyance is just one more unfactored externality, offering no threat to the manufacturers profit margin.
However, if were going to spend time getting annoyed at a resource-wasting container, a worthier target is the four-ton metal sarcophagus in the driveway. At least thats the message from Eves Engler, coauthor of the cheerily-titled Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Social and Economic Decay. The automobile kills more people a year than smoking, Engler noted in a panel last week at SFUs Harbour Centre. Ergo, anyone who gets behind the wheel is flirting with the clamshell-hard laws of probability.
Engler recited some familiar charges against the automobile: it offers a negative return not just for individual health and the environment, but also civic life. Auto routes slice and dice neighbourhoods and neighbourliness. They mediate big box store underworlds and strip-mall purgatories. Civic bylaws across North America mandate a certain guaranteed number of parking spaces, making it illegal to build car-free neighborhoods. Theres also the pain in the pocketbook. The average automobile costs a whopping $8,400 a year in insurance, maintenance, gas and other costs. Some lower-income wage earners spend up to 40 per cent of their pay on their millstone-on-wheels. No other invention better stratifies class distinctions, says Engler.
On the one hand, ecologists tell us the combustion-based vehicle is the single greatest threat to global ecology, and that fossil fuel extraction is unsustainable. On the other hand, filmmakers, copywriters and advertisers tell us that a fast car and a stretch of open road is the quickest way out of a fix. The automobile and screw-you individualism go a long way back. Its a trope that ranges from beat poet Jack Kerouacs On the Road to Ridley Scotts Thelma and Louise to the Fast And Furious film franchiseto say nothing of 60 years worth of print and broadcast advertising.
Given these mixed media messagesgas-guzzling planet-killer versus metallic vector of personal freedomyou might expect conflicted social behaviour around our gleaming gas buggies. For example, pundits have been puzzling over the shots of middle-class hockey rioters posing victoriously in front of flaming vehicles in downtown Vancouver. Beyond the goonish, alcohol-fuelled impulse to bust things up, was something else going on here, with a backlash against our cultures sacred cow? Its a question I put to the panel at SFU.
The people who overturned and burned those cars on Granville, its also an example of thwarted promise, said Carmen Mills of stopthepave.org. These are people who have cars, and have homes, and they have money, and theyre not happy. Theyve been promised that having all that will make them happy. And its a lie.
Ironically, transit for my wife and I to see My Morning Jacket cost a total of $15, while parking across from the Orpheum would have only been $12. That disconnect should annoy me at least as much as a clamshelled set of headphones. But Im philosophical about Vancouvers transit prospects. Incentivizing fossil foolish vehicles out of urban spacesat least in this townis still a ways away. But one day well get there.
www.geoffolson.com
