On Saturday night I watched an intriguing French docu-drama called "2013" about the probability of petroleum reserves running out and the ensuing collapse of the world economy. Here in Auz I noticed that sales of SUV petrol-guzzlers increased over the last 6 months, as if the gronks who drive such bullshit cars couldn't give a shit about the polluted planet, petrol wars, heritage areas demolished for freeways, or the millions killed and maimed in crashes, they just want to big-note their fat-arsed, pathetic nobody selves by bulldozing thru the rest of us.
I also recall that the anti-hero of the movie "The 40 year Old Virgin" rode a pushbike and was referred to as an infantile nerd for doing so. I get around Sydney on a pushbike and love doing it as it keeps me healthy, gets my endorphins flowing, saves money, is good for the environment and beats the traffic jams, yet I'm looked at by the enslaved car-drivers as the ultimate loser for doing so, a bum who gets in their way and slows them down for a second or two.
The Daily Terror newspaper even does an anti-bike campaign every few months, no doubt sponsored by the car/petrol cabals, to lambast bike-riders for running red-lights and causing accidents, but really because the fuckers are jealous we're thumbing our noses at their egregiously expensive machines, traveling for free, defeating their gridlock, and tightening our butts into the bargain, unlike their sloppy bums. I personally think cars and their concomitant industries have ruined the planet and city living and should be banned in favour of total public transport, but I'm whistling in the carbon-monoxide wind, for Cars Rule, OK (not!!!) I long to live in a community like Amsterdam where everybody rides a bike, they are the admired norm, and cars are viewed as alien invaders, soft, slushy slugs sealed within metallic carapaces, to be crushed like noxious cockroaches from Hell if they try to run over you.
P.S. : Two years after I wrote this, as we all know, petrol prices doubled and hard-working motorists abandoned their big gas-guzzlers in droves for smaller, more efficient vehicles, and the automobile cabals at long last promoted hybrids like electric cars. The powers that be had the chance in the '90s to push alternative technologies, (as shown in the doco "Who Killed off the Electric Car"), but wanted to flog off their old shit first so the last 10 years got wasted with petrol wars and economic hardships fucking us all over. I still hate cars with a passion, they're always trying to run me down as I try to leisurely get about, the lazy shits should walk more and maybe there wouldn't be so many fires burning up the planet.
While the Daily Terror lambasts our Lord Mayor for trying to reinvent Sydney as a livable city with bike-paths to keep us safe from the marauding auto wars, it also knows where there's a buck to be made with a human-interest smoke-screen, now promoting pushbikes as a money saving alternative for hard-up commuters, only the bikes and gear they pictured were priced at around $7000, a hot way to be economical for the Ferrari set. But that's High Capitalism for you, money has got to flow, THEY will even sell you the bike chain to whip you with.
