This began as a response to Abbreviated Pundit Roundupon Sunday June 26, which included pontification on electric vehicles and some celebration of the Mythical Political Center™.
But it seemed to lead me to some deeper relections and I ended up with a very long comment, but political and social 'centrism' and various other drags on progress have retarded the evolution of various social issue, alternative energy being one of them.
And because of that, I believe it will be a pretty long time before the electric car I want is available. What I want is driven by utility and the common good - not by greed or egotistical and materialistic concerns.
I am at a point where I do not want to buy another new car with a gas or diesel engine.
I have a car and a truck and I am simply nursing them along. I don't want to get a new truck because it's not going to be so good on gas, but a truck is all I am interested in.
Now... a proper electric car is available - the Tesla - but it's hardly affordable. For me.
I am so totally and thoroughly uninterested in a "passenger car" like the Pruis or the Honda CRZ or the Chevy Volt, or the Nissan Leaf. The Tesla Roadster is very promising.
And more exciting to me......
But.......
I'd still rather have a truck.
If a person is going to have 1 vehicle, a truck is the thing to have. It's useful. It's the utilitarian in me that just loves the pickup truck. It's a tool for living.
But this is America where shiny is more important to look marvelous than to be marvelous.
Sure, in a lot of places a shiny truck is acceptable, but you know too many Americans are still caught up in the Consumer Society fantasy of ‘my car is shinier than yours and means I am more successful than you”, which truly sucks.
My fear is that a functional electric replacement for my Toyota 4x4 pickup is something that will be developed sometime after passenger cars and sports cars, neither of which I am really interested in.
Which brings me to a basic fact, I think.
I'm not part of the center.
I am just not a normal, average middle of the road voter or 'American'.
I despise the Consumer Society and have tried to distance myself from it as much as possible, though it is impossible to escape it short of going and living in the forest.
On those political tests I score far to the left, without even trying.
On one - can't remember which - I scored well to the left of people who voted for Obama, who, in action, is defining himself as more centrist than not: I feel he's thrown the Left more scraps than anything else.
Here at Daily Kos I hear various squabbles about labeling him one way or another, but it's pretty clear he leans further right than when I voted for him.
Even my conservative running buddy - a former Marine who forces himself to respect Obama as CiC but who HAS been impressed with a number of things Obama has done (and was just blown away by whacking OBL) - he just said, 2 nights ago "It seems like Obama is trying to be all things to all people" and wasn't sure that was the right thing to be doing either. He seemed to think that Obama was giving more the the Republicans "than to you lefties".
To which I replied "he IS a professional politician" They do that".
The Politician preaches late-night TV and cake for breakfast to children and promises early bed times and vegetables for children when speaking to adults.
With few exceptions, politicians get where they are by telling people what they want to hear. Obama is simply no exception.
Doubtless, I am even more fringe than my particular activist topic - cannabis reform is far more mainstream than many of my other views on protecting society and the environment and all that anti-capitalist DFH stuff.
Centrism and the celebration thereof is quite an unfortunate reality as far as progressive persons are concerned.
Metaphorically, I view this de facto celebration of centrism as similar to valuing lower IQ's and less education.
Like making a 'C' more popular than getting an 'A'..when you can get an 'A'.
Like valuing a bad diet and laziness over healthy living, when healthy living isn't THAT hard.
Like valuing shiny over function and utility, even though shiny does you no good in an emergency.
Like equating freedom with slavery.
Which brings me back to proper electric vehicles and the future electric truck. The electric car is about the best thing I can imagine happening and I clearly want an electric truck.
I understand battery storage and energy conversion are the cutting edges of this issue.
And I know that physical reality is a main limiting factor in the way of making desirable progress on this - and there have been recent breakthroughs promising better efficiency - which shows it can be done.
But there has been resistance to it - the removal of solar panels from the white house by a pro-oil hard rightwing republican is still a fine, concrete example of what has been a pervasively anti-alternative energy culture entrenched in DC. The failure to get them back is day-to-day testimony to it.
Money is wasted on so many other political (ie: useless) things that could be better spent resolving our necessary conversion from petroleum to electricity as a major fundamental aspect of our evolution. This is something we absolutely have to do - it's not really an 'option'.
I think we need to press the envelop on this, and not be dancing in the streets celebrating mediocrity and half-steps.
And that's where my electric pickup is stuck.