....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I love conspiracy theories. I don't believe in them, but they are so much more entertaining than reality. Like the current popular tale about the crafty oil companies conspiring to drive up the price of gasoline. Every broadcast news program seems to have their own angry guy or gal standing at the pump whining about how the oil companies are ruining their lives, as they plug the fuel line into their twenty foot wide, two story tall sport utility vehicle. Do you think could there be a connection here? Did Lucy want to sing with Desi's band?
How did these trucks ever get to be called Sport Utility Vehicles, anyway? The name makes them sound so harmless. There is nothing sporting about these road hogs and nothing utilitarian about the way they are driven, either.
I recently watched one of these mammoths in a Ralph's parking lot, pull into a space already occupied by Ford Escort. The driver couldn't hear our frantic warnings because she was way up there in cab, where the thin air doesn't carry sound as well as it does down here on earth. By the time the little lady climbed down the access ladder and noticed she had an economy car stuck in her grill we decided to just call the Escort abstract sculpture and leave it where it was.
The driver's first reaction was to pop open her cell phone and tell her assistant to tell her husband she was going to be a little late getting home with the French Bread. I was speechless. To pick up a pound and a half of baked flour she needed a vehicle large enough to scare the pants off a tractor trailer!? The wonder isn't that SUV's have driven up the price of gasoline. The wonder is there is gasoline left at any price!
My wife invented her own name for these metal monsters: She calls them SPEW-IT-CULS because they spew so much gunk into the air. But for some reason that name has not caught on. Maybe because everybody is driving a spew-it-cul. Leaving me, in my early nineties minivan, looking up their tailpipes, fully aware that if the driver in front should suddenly slam on his brakes he might not notice the collision until my widow filed the lawsuit.
There could still be a conspiracy to raise gas prices, I just don't think so. Do I trust the guys who run the oil companies? No, of course not. Do I think they are crafty enough to form a conspiracy? No, of course not. The average oil exec was a "C" student in business school. They tend to steal paper clips and pad their expense accounts. Bill Gates hired all the "A" students. They are the ones you have to watch.
No, the truth is the gasoline price rise started with the collapse of the Asian economies in ‘98. OPEC suddenly had a lot of excess oil which they dumped on the world market, which dropped oil to $10 a barrel, which dropped the price of gasoline to below a buck, which convinced everybody that driving around in a ten ton tank with a child seat in the back was Nuevo chic. But two years later it ain't Nuevo anymore and the chic is now in Arab..-ie.
Then there were a couple of broken pipelines in the last year and a few problems in production of new "air friendly" gasoline - which is like saying "lung friendly" cigarettes. And with a wave of the magic wand of market dynamics you see that cheap gas has disappeared to be replaced by the same old problem we've been facing since 1977; oil is a pretty non-renewable resource. It starts out as ooze on the ocean floor and we are making more ooze all the time. But it takes twenty or thirty million years to convert ooze into octane. So the problem is not going to go away in this millennium.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no tree hugger. I like my minivan, I like the air conditioning and the tape player and I like the idea of being able to drive just about anywhere I want to whenever I want to. So the rest of you had better get your acts in shape if I'm going to be able to keep doing what I want to do. I want to see all you in Ford Escorts by the end of the year.
Kimit A.Muston is a writer living in North Hollywood. His work may be also be read in the Los Angeles Daily News