At 00:01 26-05-01, Ian wrote:
> > But maybe the expression of anti-SUV sentiment is really an attack
>on a
> > symptom of the distortion of values under capitalism.
> >
> > cheers,
> > Joanna S.
>=============
>What are the undistorted values of which capitalism wreaks havoc?
You're implying that all values are distorted, are you? Never mind. Take loyalty, which, under capitalism, is more likely to be expressed (as dd joked the other day) in the form of brand loyalty than loyalty to other people.
At 00:55 26-05-01, Carrol wrote:
>Yes -- but they take the form of an attack on the victims.
...Victims? What are SUV owners the victims of, other than our attacks?
>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.
Nor, I suppose, do the categories of football players, dog owners, child abusers, ornithologists, people on death row, lefties...
>They are a miscellaneous group of people having
>absolutely nothing in common but the superficial fact of having
>purchased SUVs.
(I don't know what a superficial fact is as opposed to a non-superficial fact.) The fact of owning an SUV puts you in a certain income bracket, at the very least, so there's another thing SUV owner-drivers have in common.
> 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.
Well, I'll grant you, when Max said he wanted an SUV I did a double-take. Just shows how much my prejudices'd had their poetic way with me. But you see, he doesn't have enough money to buy one, so my SUV-owner image is still safe.
>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 dunno, Carrol, maybe it's because sport-utility vehicles cost more than they should because the target buyers have lotsa money, consume huge amounts of gasoline/petrol per distance travelled, are allowed to pollute up to 60% more than (mere) cars because they've been carefully manoeuvered into the same classification as pickup trucks, cause a lot of accidents because the drivers are sitting way above traffic and can't see the rest of us (a couple of years ago I myself was bumped and nearly crushed by an SUV driver who tooled off, blithely unaware that he'd knocked me down), and are commonly marketed as a symbol of material success.
The SUV-ness of Amerika. I like it.
>I object not just to the particular excplanations that have been
>offered -- I object to _any_ conceivable explanation.
--?? Uh, jeeze, why am I bothering...
>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.
Oh, pish, of course it's not, and you know it.
>Please offer
>me a sociological, historical, or psychological interpretation.
Someone else'll have to provide that. I'm only good for observations.
cheers, Joanna S.
>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.
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