[lbo-talk] Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon May 8 05:39:33 PDT 2006


Gar Lipow wrote:


>But as you know
>from Manhattan, a decent public transit system that gets you where you
>want to go as quickly as an automobile is as attractive a technology
>as an automobile.

Yup, but it only works when people live close together, and Americans seem to want to live further & further apart.


>Actually some of the train systems I favor look more like dicklike
>than cars do.I suppose painting them some shade of flesh color would
>be too obvious; but possibly a good marketer could do something with
>the fact that they are bigger than automobiles/SUVS and can keep
>thrusting tirelessly forward longer.

Ah, but trains are collective dicks, and what lots of people want is a personal dick. As the Jungian market researcher G. Clothair Rapaille put it, Americans want vehicles that are like tanks on the outside and living rooms on the inside. Or, as a CNN interviewer put it the other day, there are a lot of low-income people in bus stations, and people have a problem with that.

Doug



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