Listening For The Backfire Of An SUV Attack

By TOM JACSON, The Tampa Tribune (1-11-03)

Only in America, where the free exchange of ideas and concepts has produced HBO's wonderful "Band of Brothers" miniseries and NBC's deplorable "Fear Factor" in the same continuum, could the most popular variety of vehicle on the road also be the most vilified.

Loved and hated is the sport utility vehicle, the most-discussed form of transportation since Cro-Magnon Man hitched goat to cart.

For years, annoyance with SUVs - for being too big to see around, too menacing in traffic and too casual with a gallon of gasoline - has been limited and perceived as a fringe activity. Lately, however, the hostility has become organized and brazen, although most anti-SUV tactics remain the province of guerrilla groups and vigilantes. For instance, the Earth Liberation Front, a group of happy arsonists, claimed blame for destroying several new SUVs at a Ford dealership in Erie, Pa. A vandal in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C., soiled SUV door handles with dog feces. Nice.

Now, coming to a TV channel near you, is an advertising campaign that means to link ownership of hulking SUVs with Middle East terrorists. Spearheaded by columnist and political gadfly Arianna Huffington and embraced by the Hollywood left (as if there were a Hollywood right), the effort mirrors federal drugs-benefit-terrorists commercials.

Right There In The Constitution

Disclaimer: Although I drive an American-made sedan, there is an SUV in the Jackson garage. It is not gargantuan, nor is it a bauble; it fits our needs. But even if it were a bauble, it would be a bauble affirmed in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution - that business about the "pursuit of happiness."
Liberty produces excesses. Genuine liberty is boisterous and blunderous. It vexes those who prefer restraint or tidiness in the behavior of the masses (you and me). Happily, recent elections suggest there are increasing numbers of Americans who prefer exuberant liberty to someone else's idea of enforced decorum.

So, while Huffington and her pals attempt to shame SUV owners into trading down to Saturns and Escorts, lest imported oil money wind up in the hands of terrorists, instead what they may do is make the case for drilling where the staunchest environmentalists don't want oil companies drilling: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean believed to contain generous oil and natural gas reserves.

They Won't Stop At SUVs

The war we are in, after all, is a war over lifestyle. Muslim extremists prefer a crushing, marauding 7th Century view of the world. Americans are fascinated by, and indulge in, the promise of progress. Trading down is not progress.

We may, and should, ask: What next? Will the sanctimonious busybodies target gas-gulping, emission-belching pickup trucks, which are remarkably popular with Americans who enjoy the fantasy of hauling impressive loads but hyperventilate at the reality of scuffing the bed's showroom shine? How about lead-footed soccer moms in minivans who race from one stoplight to the next?

To be sure, importing oil from nations that coddle terrorists is abominable, which is why an Iraqi regime change - and the Middle East dominoes it may trigger - is so attractive. At the same time, America ought to tend to its energy needs domestically, too.

Our thanks to Ms. Huffington for bringing this to our attention.