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.