Badpuppy Gay Today

Friday, 14 March, 1997

The darker predictions of Kenneth R. Schneider in his 1971 classic, "Autokind Vs. Mankind," are proceeding eerily on schedule. Schneider, with his pioneering analysis of the gross social dangers posed by gas-mobiles, an analysis that danced through aesthetics and survival, charged that the auto, presently constituted, is the single greatest threat to planetary life.

But President Clinton has not, unlike his Democratic science-minded predecessor, Jimmy Carter, declared "the moral equivalent of war" against big oil. Instead, he wants to expand, over a six year period, the automobile's ever-expanding turf, he says, so that Americans can say they have the "best" highways in the world. Having signed a bill to end welfare ("as we know it") he proposed (on March 12) making former welfare recipients do what one pundit labeled "chain gang duty."

The Clinton highway plan calls for $600 million to pay former welfare recipients, otherwise ordinary folk who'll make up what, in some circles, is called Clinton's Brigade, a reference to his virtual support for the establishment of nationwide road gangs. "What taxpayers ought to realize, is that Clinton is asking taxpayers to cough up a certain ungainly amount so government can put one-time welfare recipients to work, improving superhighways."

"Clinton's actually doing little more than shuffling our tax monies from 'Sit-On-Your- Butt Welfare' to the 'Will-Work-on-Highways-for-Food,' dimension," insists Ralph T. Hamm, an environmentalist dismayed by America's over- crowded, ever-expanding private transportation system as well as the endless production of roads it requires as sustenance. "Dummies sit around and wonder what the Beast in the Book of Revelations can possibly be?" jokes Hamm, " so tell 'em its the auto, eating every person in its way. No bombs. No explosions. We'll just all die from accidents and cancers." Hamm gingerly imagines himself as "the very last person alive," and he's sure he'll star, he says, "in a frequently flashed TV ad: 'If its a really happening funeral, you need a '97 Hearse Deluxe.' "

Critics say the $175 billion, which is approximately $17 billion more than a previous six-year highway plan, is most likely to be used for massive road repairs instead of for expanding highway construction. "The current system is already crowded and broken," says Hamm, and to drive backward-in-time in hopes of resurrecting such a very primitive technology, is our own peculiar tragedy."

"When the Automobile Manufacturers Association reminds us that 'mobility is a correlate of progress,' we wonder if the transport crisis now gripping America is just more progress than America can stand," wrote Kenneth R. Schneider, "Forced mobility is threatening to grind us all down to one gigantic halt," he wrote in his passionate polemic. Schneider's plan calls first for a clear analysis of auto-tyranny, followed by the logic of a proposal for rebellion, and finally, a well-thought out plan for reconstruction.