Did My Car Join Al Qaeda?

February 16, 2003
By WOODY HOCHSWENDER
www.nytimes.com


SALISBURY, Conn. - I drive a large, four-wheel-drive
vehicle. Does that mean I'm a bad person?

You might think so, from all the sturm und drang we've
heard lately from the Virtuous Ones who insist that
America's fuel consumption - indeed, our very style of life
- is somehow responsible for the enmity toward us in the
Middle East, not to mention the rest of the world. A series
of TV commercials put together by the columnist Arianna
Huffington and Lawrence Bender, the Hollywood producer
behind "Pulp Fiction," have even linked S.U.V.'s with
Mideast terrorism. The idea is that the petrodollars
transmigrate from the Gas 'n' Go to the oil sheiks to the
hands of maniacs wielding AK-47's.

Leaving aside for the moment that this is trendy, illogical
thinking - and leaving aside also the odd sensation of
being lectured on socially responsible behavior by the
producer of "Pulp Fiction" - isn't this really a backdoor
way of blaming America for Sept. 11 and other crimes like
it? Those who implicate Americans - particularly our
adventurous habits, offbeat choices and breathtaking
freedoms, including the freedom to drive to a poetry
reading followed by dinner at a French restaurant in the
midst of a raging snowstorm - validate the terrorists as
essentially right.

Where I live, about 100 miles north of New York City, at
least half of all the vehicles you see on the road are
S.U.V.'s or other light trucks. They make a great deal of
sense. This is not just because we have plenty of long,
steep driveways and miles and miles of dirt roads. We also
have had more than 70 inches of snow this winter. When the
sun goes down and the melted snow re-freezes, the roads are
covered with insidious stretches of black ice.

Four-wheel-drive vehicles allow workers to get to and from
their jobs, and parents to transport their children safely
to school, sporting events, ballet classes and the rest.
Yes, there is something vaguely obscene about driving solo
to the supermarket in Beverly Hills to pick up a carton of
milk in your two-ton Navigator. But not so much in Portland
or Green Bay or Chicago.

The well-publicized notion that S.U.V.'s are actually
unsafe, based on their propensity to roll over, does not
take into account personal responsibility. Rollover
accidents tend to be something the driver has a substantial
degree of control over. I choose not to whip around corners
or to follow others so closely and at such high speeds that
I have to make harrowing emergency stops. I drive so as not
to roll over.

However, if some drunken driver veers across the center
divider - a situation I have no control over - I would
prefer that my 9-year-old and I not be inside a Corolla.
>From the standpoint of a reasoned individualism, S.U.V.'s
are safer in many situations than cars. I think a lot of
intelligent people realize that.

Of course, S.U.V.'s use a lot of gas. This goes for my
wife's all-wheel-drive Volvo as well as for my voracious
mistress, my 1989 GMC. But a car's miles-per-gallon rating
is only one measure of fuel efficiency. Miles driven is
another. People who drive light trucks quickly learn not to
drive around aimlessly. We tend to combine trips and to
keep engines finely tuned and tires properly inflated. It
all comes down to home economics.

What are we supposed to do now, turn our S.U.V.'s in? En
masse? Only the independently wealthy can treat their cars
purely as fashion items.

The S.U.V.-bashers' argument also falls apart on
macro-economic grounds. Were we to somehow cut our national
fuel consumption by 20 percent, would that deprive the
terrorism sponsors of cash? Unfortunately, the world oil
market is, well, a market. Even if America were energy
independent, there is no guarantee that Exxon, Texaco and
Getty - or, for that matter, France, the Netherlands and
Japan - would cease buying oil from Middle Eastern states.

My guess is that this campaign has less to do with
politics and economics than with an American tendency to
mind everybody else's business. So, busybodies, let me ask
you a question: How big is your house? Ms. Huffington's is
reported to be 9,000 square feet. We all know what it costs
to heat and air-condition a joint like that. A couple of
years ago I replaced the aging oil furnace in my
3,000-square-foot house with a new fuel-injected system. It
saves me about 800 gallons of oil a year. Hey, that's
almost precisely the yearly fuel consumption of my GMC. I
think of that as progress, for me, as a world citizen.
Maybe I'm not such a bad person after all.

Woody Hochswender, a former reporter for The Times, is
co-author of ``The Buddha in Your Mirror.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/opinion/16HOCH.html?ex=1046519779&ei=1&en=d9f08e379bd9733c