Coming Through!

I’m pulling on the cardigan and getting Andy Rooney angry again, and, as you well know, that’s mad as hell. Today I’m angry with the press – like I’m usually not. Today it’s different because a major news story in two papers that I checked (The Washington Post and the Boston Globe) reported the facts in one of their news stories and offered no editorial balancing. How bad is that?

It seems that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a non-profit organization that appears to have no axe to grind – right - says that if you buy a small car and you get hit by a big car you’re more likely to be pushing up daisies than if you’d switched sides. Now the people at the Institute didn’t act surprised; in fact, they seemed to understand the laws of physics.

It’s kind of like Wild Bill deciding to play running back for the New York Giants breaking through a hole on the right side and meeting Brian Urlacher, linebacker for the Chicago Bears, coming full speed the other way. Despite wearing the same protective gear, guess who the memorial service will be for?

But don’t the morons buying those mini-movers have a number of motives beyond wanting to have their relatives hit the lottery of a huge insurance settlement after they’ve gone? Could it be that these folks have been told that they shouldn’t be burning up too many hydrocarbons, so they’re trying to save the planet? Couldn’t they also know that putting the feedbag on their magnum SUV is expensive to the point of hurt and that it burns up an ever scarcer natural resource? Some of them may have actually though through the process to the point that they think the manufacturing of these vehicles uses less steel and that they’re are cheaper to build and sell. And there must be other selfish and do good reasons for their stupid decision to drive these rolling coffins.

In the continuing debate on personal safety, selfishness, hubris, and screw the losers in life’s economic lottery on the EIB Broadcasting Network , el Rushbo repeatedly declaims to his brilliant ditto heads that they should run out and buy the biggest heaviest monster they can fit into their mega-garages. Rush knows that Global Warming is nothing but a figment of Al Gore’s overactive imagination and that revving up the Sherman Tank in the back yard is the best way to show your independence and your true blue American patriotism.

It’s all well and good that the Institute should describe the facts that the little guy in a collision is likely to get the worst of it. But don’t you think the papers have at least a little obligation to point out some of the reasons why – beyond the price of gas – people should be conserving natural resources and thinking about the environment?

In a related story, it is reported today that the Navy is going to retire the USS John F. Kennedy next year. This mega-ship, many football fields long and twenty-three stories high is one of the last ships to burn oil. Wouldn’t it be prudent for a rich ditto head to put training wheels on `Big John’ - as the sailors call it – and drive it down the freeway? Nobody on that bad boy is going to get smushed in a head banger with a Toyota.

Blog on!

Wild Bill