Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com 

We're America, Get Out of Our Way 
Maureen Dowd The New York Times  Monday, May 21, 2001 

WASHINGTON We want big. We want fast. We want far. We want now.

We want 345 horsepower in a V-8 engine. We drive behemoths. We drive them
alone. We don't have limits. We have liberties.

If we don't wear our seat belts it doesn't matter, because we have air bags.
If the air bags don't deploy it doesn't matter, because our cars are so
beefy. If we need to widen the streets for our all-wheel drives, we will. If
we need to reinforce all the bridges in the country, so that they don't
buckle and collapse under our 5,800-pound SUVs, our engineers will do that.

We'll bake the earth. We'll brown serve it, sauté it, simmer it, sear it,
fondue it, George-Foreman-grill it. (We invented the Foreman grill.) We
might one day bring the earth to a boil and pull it like taffy. (We invented
taffy.) If rising seas obliterate the coasts, our marine geologists will
sculpt new ones and Hollywood will get bright new ideas for disaster movies.
If we get charred by the sun, our dermatologists will replace our skin.

If the globe gets warmer, we'll turn up the air-conditioning. (We invented
air-conditioning.) We'll drive faster in our gigantic, air-conditioned cars
to the new beaches that our marine geologists create.

We will let our power plants spew any chemicals we deem necessary to fire up
our Interplaks, our Krups, our Black Deckers and our Fujitsu Plasmavisions.