It's
an outrage what Robert Lind and Charles Dines are perpetrating
against you SUV owners.
I mean, here you are, going peaceably
about your business of blocking other drivers' vision, threatening
Corolla occupants with decapitation-by-bumper, burning oceans
of gasoline, loosing nebulae of pollutants into the air and taking
up two parking spaces at a time--exercising your God-given rights
as Americans of higher-than-average income--and along come these
clowns bent on embarrassing you.
San Francisco is home base for
their conspiracy, but Lind and Dines recently were sighted in
Santa Monica. It was a pleasant Friday afternoon, and they were
strolling 3rd Street north of Wilshire Boulevard, looking like
a couple of law-abiding tourists who'd overshot the Promenade.
"Hey, there's one," murmured Lind.
They made directly for the white
Ford Expedition parked like a gigantic refrigerator-freezer between
two modest compacts. On reaching it, Lind looked this way and
that to see whether anyone (such as a cop) was watching. He removed
a white bumper sticker from the hip pocket of his jeans, peeled
off its backing, and in one deft motion smoothed it onto the Excursion's
back bumper.
"I'M CHANGING THE CLIMATE!" the
sticker proclaimed. "ASK ME HOW!"
A few minutes later, Lind and Dines
came upon an especially tempting target, a black Lincoln Navigator
("the Darth Vader of SUVs," said Lind) parked on Wilshire at 2nd,
with its driver behind the wheel. "It's
all attitude," said Lind. "You gotta walk around like you own
the place." With that, he strode up to the Navigator and affixed
a bumper sticker to the lower right corner of its rear window.
The driver, a woman leafing through a magazine, didn't notice.
"The
people who drive those things are oblivious to everything," said
Dines.
To counter such obliviousness,
the bumper stickers refer to Lind and Dines' Web site, changingtheclimate.com.
There you will encounter a catalog of SUVs' transgressions against
the environment, society and good taste. You will also find instructions
on how to remove the bumper sticker with a little rubbing alcohol.
Lind and Dines have been waging
this campaign for a year. In that time, Lind estimates he has
personally tagged 1,200 SUVs. "This is just applying pressure,"
he says. "Making as much noise as possible so people will start
thinking."
Because there are so many SUVs--almost
21 million in the United States, more than 1.2 million of them
in Southern California--Lind and Dines restrict themselves to
the largest of the large: Excursions, Navigators, Expeditions
and others of similar bloat.
The 41-year-old Lind is a self-employed
marketer of natural animal repellents (one of his products is
called "Not Tonight, Deer"), and Dines, 39, is a failed actor
with an MBA who is now a carpenter. With the polar ice cap melting
while former oil executives in the White House covetously eye
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we are currently experiencing,
Dines says, "the last spurt of overconsumptiveness in America,
with SUVs being . . . " Lind chimes in, " . . . the most perfect
expression of consumer madness."
The gas gluttony of SUVs, which
are classified as light trucks and thus escape the more stringent
federal fuel and pollution standards for passenger cars, is said
to be responsible for a significant portion of the recent upsurge
in per-gallon gasoline prices. More SUVs with low gas mileage
means greater demand, and that means higher prices--for all of
us. SUVs are also behind the relentless, decade-long decline in
the average fuel economy of all vehicles on America's roads.
Lind and Dines have been surprised
by the amount and ferocity of anti-SUV sentiment expressed on
their Web site, one of many devoted to trashing SUVs. The pair
say their "movement" has spread to every precinct of the United
States and Canada. Visitors to their Web site are encouraged to
download their bumper sticker and go into action themselves. The
Web site features a "Tagger of the Week," to honor the especially
diligent.
The days of the biggest SUVs are
probably numbered, and not just because it may soon cost $100
to fill one up. The trend in SUVs, says Jeff Schuster, a forecaster
for the automotive consulting firm J.D. Power & Associates, is
toward smaller, more luxurious car-like vehicles that are effete
replicas of their mastodonic forebears.
Lind, Dines and comrades, however,
won't run out of targets any time soon. Personally, I wouldn't
let these guys hold me up to public ridicule. If I owned an SUV,
I'd park it in the garage and never drive it again. That'd bend
their crankshafts, but good.
