Joanna Sheldon wrote:
>
> At 02:28 25-05-01, Carrol wrote:
> >
>
> But maybe the expression of anti-SUV sentiment is really an attack on a
> symptom of the distortion of values under capitalism.
>
Yes -- but they take the form of an attack on the victims. The attacks are essentially what (in my pre-marxist days as I was gradually becoming radicalized) I called "put-downs," and put-downs moreover which (a) are of an essentially religious nature and (b)are focused on a non-existent category. That is, SUV drivers do not constitute a unified category about which general statements can legitimately be made. They are a miscellaneous group of people having absolutely nothing in common but the superficial fact of having purchased SUVs. There is nothing one can say of them in the abstract that is not either grounded in what amounts to religious inspiration or a crude sort of literary criticism, the SUV being considered a poetic image.
Why of the infinite number of false categories one can extract from daily life in the United States should one pick on the SUV drivers and invent a mystic explanation holding them together as a sort of Platonic form? I object not just to the particular excplanations that have been offered -- I object to _any_ conceivable explanation. An explanation, to even be considered, must assume something to be explaine. And that something must have some sort of unity. How could one explain the following conglomeration of entities:
Marilyn Fitzgerald shopping at K-Mart while wearing sandals.
The wreck of a 1987 Lumina being left in the southeast corner of a junkyard.
The screen resolution blurring on the monitor of Henry Morgenthau's new Compaq.
Bad weather in the southern provinces of Argentina.
A student somewhere in California reading Cliff notes on Hobbes.
That is every bit as reasonable a category as SUV owners. Please offer me a sociological, historical, or psychological interpretation.
Carrol
P.S. If you consider the words, as a poem written by Carrol Cox, then you have a unity that can, possibly, be explained or interpreted. But SUV drivers are not lines in a poem, unless you believe in a theistic god and see them as words in his/her poem.