Thursday, January 06, 2005

Obliviously they roll on

This LA Times story about a ban on off-road vehicles in a large swath of California desert will strike future residents of America as a bizarre and disturbing tale of excess. We will seem a people so obsessed with motoring that we choose to motor around in circles to get no place in particular, just to ride. We do this in the desert where we chew up the fragile desert floor with our overgrown tires, heedless of the fact that the oil we are burning will soon become so expensive that no one except a rich person would dare use it for anything but a necessity.

If the desert is so beautiful and you have to see it, why not just take a walk there? But then I guess real men don't walk, do they?

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