Sharpe's Opinion
Saturday, 7th Feb, 2009
The People’s Republic of Mortimer is a Totalitarian State
Alix Mortimer is banning cars from the People’s Republic:
But I just hate the bloody things. I hate how noisy they are, how smelly they are, how ugly they are – I sometimes think I’ve gone through my entire life to date missing some essential eyesight component, because the cultural belief that cars can be attractive is so universal and unspoken and to me it just seems totally weird. I mean, it’s a tonne of metal and plexiglass held together with a bunch of rivets and welding in an unearthly shape of the sort that lurks in the nightmares of small children running a high fever. Exactly which classical muse are people invoking when they slap down their welding mask and set the nozzle on to Maximum Liquid Magna Core? Even the Greeks with their tremendous powers of imagination and penchant for fear-and-wonder spectacle never dreamed up anything as terrifying as the car.
Apparently, not liking something is a good enough reason to ban it for everybody. I wonder what else is banned in the PRM – smoking? drinking? breathing? Walking backwards?
It’s a bona fide Orwellian nightmare in there!
(Incidentally, I don’t have a car and I agree with a fair amount of Alix’s points…)
What do you mean? All my citizens are Very Happy and Productive.
It raises an interesting point, this. Normally it’s the people of a libertarian or right-leaning tendency who are proclaiming their right to be all individual and drive great big bloody cars around, and it’s lefties and authoritarians who are the bossy moralistic nightmares who don’t like cars. Not always, but normally, the petrolheads are on the side of personal liberty. And yet it’s perfectly possible to make the libertarian/individualistic case against cars in terms of rights impingement and so forth, cos I just did it. A pity more people don’t, cos it might actually get somewhere. I suppose that’s what comes of having the environmental movement in the hands of the Greens et al.
Alix
February 7, 2009 at 2:02 pm