Behold, the shrinking car, home, your flabby flesh. Yay for the recession!
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/08/27/notes082708.DTL&nl=fixThe bumper sticker on the blinged-out black Chevy Tahoe with the 24-inch rims and lowered shocks and properly cliched penile-compensation issues read "Big-ass boys drive big-ass toys," which I couldn't help but notice, given how the adorable hulking thing was just sitting there, parked on an SF thoroughfare recently, leering at passersby like a tumescent muscle builder who can't even raise his arms over his head, trying desperately to look menacing and cool when of course all it really looks like nowadays is a big, fat gift to Exxon and Shell and the giddy sheiks over in the United Arab Emirates.
Truly, like just about anyone else paying even cursory attention to current socioeconomic events, all I could do was glance at this distended eco-destroyer and feel a bit sorry for the beast's owner, who I'm sure thought he was buying a righteous all-American status symbol, but who is now laying out $100 at the gas station every two hours just to keep his senseless Detroit leviathan swimming in 12 mpg war-happy petroleum.
Ironic, I thought, how quickly Americans' emblems of cool first-world excess, of waste and wealth and war, flip right over into symbols of wrongheadedness and empty cultural pathos. I mean, isn't it?
It's certainly happening with cars. It might be happening with homes. It's already happened with technology, though that's a somewhat different engine. It's been happening in industrial design for years, but now it seems to be happening to everything from clothing to hair to energy usage to portions of food. Hell, it could even be happening with the human body. Sort of. ...
Read the rest:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/08/27/notes082708.DTL&nl=fix
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
