In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.
The convoy truckers, however, paid little price for the havoc they caused. Indeed, vehicular aggression and violence increasingly goes unpunished. On June 24th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man aimed his pickup truck at a group of women protesting that morning’s Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. When his vehicle first came into contact with them, the women stood fast, and grabbed its bull bar — the steel armoring designed to protect the grille against livestock, but used more often these days to intimidate humans. With a yell, he plowed ahead, driving over one woman’s ankle and giving another a concussion. When the police arrived, they interviewed the driver, but they have yet to charge him or even identify him publicly. He was probably shielded by a law the Iowa legislature passed in 2020 immunizing drivers who run into or over protesters, if they simply claim to have been fleeing in fear. Ominously enough, Florida and Oklahoma have passed similar laws essentially encouraging such acts.
Are You What You Drive?
Here in the heartland, white nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone. Ranchers, wheat-growers, oilfield roughnecks, firefighters, loggers, hunters — in short, the very kinds of guys who populate today’s ads for pickup trucks — are widely viewed as the real Americans. Most pickups today, however, are found not out on the range but on city streets and Interstate highways, sporting empty beds and clean tires, with their drivers settled into cushy captain’s seats. For many of them, big pickups are no more than a non-utilitarian cultural statement and, in today’s culture, that means a political statement, too.
Big trucks, aggressively driven, straddle the borderline between a democracy in crisis and a country (and world) facing a climate emergency of the first order. They guzzle fuel, spew pollution, and degrade our quality of life. With the paramilitary wing of the anti-democracy, anti-Earth GOP at the wheel, such vehicles portend even worse environmental harm to come. If the far right prevails, its politicos will choke off any state or federal efforts to phase out fossil fuels. If, using means legal or not, they consolidate their power over the Supreme Court, Congress in 2022, and the White House in 2024, they will be spewing the political version of rollin’ coal and are guaranteed to smother the possibility of climate action, probably long enough to make runaway global heating inevitable.
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by Stan Cox
03/08/2022