Education
Near Stanford University I visited a smaller university that offers courses in obedience. The students, dogs of all races, colors, and sizes, learn to stop being dogs. When they bark, the professor punishes them by squeezing their snouts with her hand and yanking painfully on collars made of sharp steel points. When they remain quiet, the professor rewards their silence with treats. That is how she teaches them to forget how to bark.
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Driven out by the ruin of their lands and the poisoning of their rivers and lakes, twenty-five million people are wandering about, looking for their place in the world. According to the most credible forecasts, in the coming years environmental degradation will be the principal factor causing an exodus of people from the countries of the South. And the countries that smile so nicely for the pictures, those happy protagonists of one economic miracle or another, think they have paid the toll, have passed the pole, and are on a roll, but they are already paying the price of their great leap to modernization: in Taiwan a third of the rice crop is inedible because it’s poisoned with mercury, arsenic, or cadmium; in South Korea the water from only a third of the rivers is drinkable. There are no longer edible fish in half the rivers of China. In a letter he was writing, a Chilean child drew a picture of his country: “Ships depart filled with trees, and ships arrive filled with cars.” Chile today is a long highway bordered by shopping malls, arid lands, and industrial forests where no bird sings; the trees, like soldiers at attention, march off to the world market.
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View of Dusk at the End of the Century
Poisoned is the earth that inters or deters us.
There is no air, only despair; no breeze, only sleaze.
No rain, except acid rain.
No parks, just parking lots.
No partners, only partnerships.
Companies instead of nations.
Consumers instead of citizens.
Agglomerations instead of cities.
No people, only audiences.
No relations, except public relations.
No visions, just televisions.
To praise a flower, say: “It looks plastic.”
* * *
The twentieth century, a weary artist, ended its days painting still lifes. The extermination of the planet spares no one, not even the triumphal North that contributes the most to the catastrophe and, at the hour of truth, whistles and looks the other way. At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before we’ll have to put up new signs in maternity wards in the United States: Attention, Babies: You are hereby warned that your chance of getting cancer is twice that of your grandparents. The Japanese company Daido Hokusan already sells air in cans, two minutes of oxygen for ten dollars. The label assures us: This is the electric generator that recharges human beings.
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Wild Blue
This sky never grows cloudy; here it never rains. On this sea no one ever drowns; this beach is free of theft. There are no stinging jellyfish, no spiny urchins, no bothersome mosquitoes. The air and the water, climatized at a temperature that never varies, keep colds and flus at bay. The dirty depths of the port are envious of these transparent waters; this immaculate air mocks the poison that people in the city must breathe.
The ticket doesn’t cost much, thirty dollars a person, although you pay extra for chairs and umbrellas. On the Internet, it says: “Your children will hate you if you don’t take them…” Wild Blue, the Yokohama beach encased in glass, is a masterpiece of Japanese industry. The waves are as high as the motors make them. The electronic sun rises and falls when the company wishes, and the clientele is offered astonishing tropical sunrises and rosy sunsets behind swaying palms.
“It’s artificial,” says one visitor. “That’s why we like it.”
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News
In 1994 in Laguna Beach, southern California, a deer came out of the forest. Galloping down the street, the deer was struck by a car. It leapt over a fence, crashed through a kitchen window, broke another window, threw itself off a second-floor balcony, burst into a hotel, and, like a bullet stained red with blood, raced past the astonished patrons of beachfront restaurants before plunging into the sea. The police trapped it in the water and hauled it onto the beach, where, bleeding profusely, it died.
“He was crazy,” the police explained.
A year later in San Diego, also in southern California, a veteran stole a tank from an arsenal. Driving the tank he crushed forty cars, damaged several bridges, and, with police cruisers in hot pursuit, ran down whatever crossed his path. When he got stuck on a steep rise, the police climbed on the tank, forced open the hatch, and plugged this ex-soldier full of bullets. TV viewers saw the entire spectacle live and direct.
“He was crazy,” the police explained.
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THE SACRED CAR
Human rights pale beside the rights of machines. In more and more cities, especially in the giant metropolises of the South, people have been banned. Automobiles usurp human space, poison the air, and frequently murder the interlopers who invade their conquered territory—and no one lifts a finger to stop them. Is there a difference between violence that kills by car and that which kills by knife or bullet?
THE VATICAN AND ITS LITURGIES
Our age abhors public transportation. In the middle of the twentieth century, Europeans used trains, buses, subways, and streetcars for three-quarters of their comings and goings. Today the figure is a quarter. That’s still high compared with the average for the United States, where public transportation, virtually eliminated in most cities, accounts for only 5 percent of all transportation.
Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone were good friends back in the twenties, and they both got on well with the Rockefellers. Their affection for one another reinforced a mutuality of interests that went a long way toward dismantling the railroads and creating a vast network of roads, then highways that spanned the United States. With the passing years, the power of car, tire, and oil magnates has grown ever more ruinous. Of the sixty largest companies in the world, half either belong to this holy alliance or work for it.
Today’s high heaven, the United States, has the greatest concentration of cars and the greatest quantity of weapons. Six, six, six: of every six dollars spent by the average North American, one is for the car; of every six hours of life, one is spent traveling in the car or working to pay for it; and of every six jobs, one is directly or indirectly related to the car, and another to violence and its industries. Each murder by cars and guns, of people and of nature, adds to the gross national product.
Talismans against loneliness or invitations to crime? Car sales parallel sales of weapons, and cars could well be considered a form of weapon: they are the principal killers of young people, with guns a close second. Every year cars kill and wound more people in the United States than all the U.S. soldiers killed and wounded throughout the long war in Vietnam, and in many states a driver’s license is all you need to buy a machine gun and riddle the entire neighborhood with bullets. A driver’s license is also required to pay by check or to cash a check, to sign for documents or notarize a contract. A driver’s license is the most common ID: cars give people their identity.
North Americans enjoy some of the cheapest gasoline in the world thanks to sheiks in dark glasses—kings straight out of light opera—and other allies of democracy whose business it is to sell oil at a bargain, violate human rights, and buy U.S. weapons. According to the calculations of the Worldwatch Institute, if ecological damages and other “hidden costs” were taken into account the price of gasoline would at least double. In the United States gasoline is three times as cheap as in Italy, the second-most-motorized country in the world, and each American burns on average four times as much gas as the average Italian, which is to say, a lot.
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Paradise
If we behave ourselves, it will come to pass. We will all see the same i
mages and hear the same sounds and wear the same clothes and eat the same hamburgers and enjoy the same solitude in our houses all alike in neighborhoods all alike in cities all alike where we will all breathe the same garbage and serve our cars with the same devotion and carry out the orders of the same machines in a world that will be marvelous for all who have no legs or wings or roots.
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U.S. society, afflicted with autoitis, generates a quarter of the worst gases that poison the atmosphere. Although cars and their unquenchable thirst for gasoline are mostly to blame, it’s politicians who give cars the right to roll and rule in exchange for money and votes. Every time some fool suggests raising gas taxes, the Detroit Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) scream to the skies and with broad popular support mount million-dollar campaigns decrying this vile threat to public freedom. And when a wayward politician feels wracked by doubts, the companies prescribe an infallible remedy: as Newsweek once put it, “The relationship between money and politics is so organic that seeking reform is tantamount to asking a doctor to perform open-heart surgery on himself.”
Rarely is any politician, Democratic or Republican, willing to commit sacrilege against a national way of life that venerates machines, squanders the planet’s natural resources, and equates human development with economic growth. Advertising extols the miracles that way of life performs, miracles the entire world would like to deserve. In the United States everyone can achieve the dream of owning a car, and many can trade their vehicles in regularly for new ones. Can’t afford the latest model? This identity crisis can be overcome with aerosol sprays that make your autosaurus purchased three or four years ago smell as good as new.
Like death, old age is a sign of failure. The car is the one eternally youthful body you can buy. It eats gasoline and oil in its own restaurants, has its own pharmacies with its own medicine, and its own hospitals for diagnosis and treatment. It even has its own bedrooms and cemeteries.
Cars promise people freedom—highways aren’t called “freeways” for nothing—yet they act like traveling cages. Despite technological progress, the human workday continues to lengthen year after year and so does the time required to get to work and back in traffic that moves at a crawl and shreds your nerves. You live in your car and it won’t let you go. “Drive-by shooting”: without leaving your speeding car you can pull the trigger and shoot blindly, as some people occasionally do in the Los Angeles night. “Drive-thru teller,” “drive-in restaurant”: without getting out of your car you can get money from the bank and eat hamburgers for supper. And without leaving your car you can also get married—“drive-in marriage.” In Reno, Nevada, the car rolls under arches of plastic flowers, a witness appears at one window, the pastor at the other and, Bible in hand, he declares you man and wife. On your way out a woman dressed in wings and a halo gives you your marriage certificate and receives your “love donation.”
The automobile, that buyable body, moves while the human body sits still and fattens. The mechanical body has more rights than the one of flesh and bone. As we all know, the United States has launched a holy war against the devil tobacco. I saw a cigarette ad in a magazine with the required public health warning: “Tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide.” But the same magazine had several car ads and not one of them warned that car exhaust, nearly always invisible, contains much more carbon monoxide. People can’t smoke. Cars can.
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Flight/3
In the sewers, under the asphalt, the abandoned children of the Argentine city of Córdoba make their home. Once in a while they surface to grab pocketbooks and wallets. If the police don’t catch them and beat them to a pulp, they use their booty to buy pizza and beer to share. And they buy tubes of glue to inhale.
Journalist Marta Platía asked them what they felt like when they got high.
One of the kids said he whirled his finger and created wind: he pointed at a tree and the tree swayed in the wind he sent forth.
Another recounted that the world filled up with stars and he flew through the sky; there was sky above and sky below and sky to the four corners of the earth.
And another said he was sitting beside the sleekest and most expensive motorcycle in the city. Just by his looking at it, it was his; a harder look and he was riding it full speed while it grew and changed colors.
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Rights and Duties
Although most Latin Americans do not have the right to buy a car, it’s everyone’s duty to pay for that right. For every thousand Haitians, barely five are motorized, but Haiti spends a third of its foreign exchange to import vehicles, spare parts, and gasoline. So does El Salvador, where public transportation is so disastrous and dangerous that people call buses “caskets on wheels.” According to Ricardo Navarro, a specialist in these matters, the money that Colombia spends every year to subsidize the price of gasoline would pay for handing out 2.5 million bicycles.
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Cars are like gods. Born to serve people as good-luck charms against fear and solitude, they end up making people serve them. The church of the sacred car with its U.S.-based Vatican has the entire world on its knees. The spread of car gospel has proven catastrophic, each new version deliriously multiplying the defects of the original.
A tiny proportion of the world’s cars circulate on Latin America’s streets, but Latin America boasts some of the most polluted cities on the globe. The structures of hereditary injustice, laced with fierce social contradictions, have given rise to cities that are outsized monsters beyond any possible control. The imported faith in the four-wheeled god and the confusion of democracy with consumption have been more devastating than any bombing campaign.
Never have so many suffered so much for so few. Disastrous public transportation and the absence of bicycle lanes make the use of private cars practically obligatory, but how many people can enjoy the luxury? Latin Americans who don’t own a car and can never hope to buy one live engulfed in traffic and suffocated by smog. Sidewalks shrink or disappear altogether; distances increase; more and more cars cross paths while fewer and fewer people meet. Not only are buses scarce, in most Latin American cities public transportation consists of just a few rust-heaps that spew out deadly plumes of exhaust, adding to pollution instead of alleviating it.
In the name of freedom—free enterprise, freeways, and the freedom to buy—the world’s air is becoming unbreathable. Cars aren’t the only guilty party in this daily act of murder, but they’re the worst culprits. In cities the world over, they produce most of the noxious cocktail that destroys our lungs and eyes and everything else. They cause most of the noise and tension that makes our ears hurt and our hair stand on end. In the North, cars are generally obliged to use fuels and technologies that at least limit the poisons they give off—a big improvement, if only cars didn’t reproduce like flies. But in the South, it’s much worse. Only rarely are unleaded gas and catalytic converters required, and even then the law is respected but not obeyed, as tradition dating from colonial times would have it. Ferocious volleys of lead penetrate the blood with utter disdain, attacking the lungs, liver, bones, and soul.
The inhabitants of Latin America’s largest cities spend their days praying for rain to cleanse the air or wind to carry the poison elsewhere. Mexico City, the largest city in the world, lives in a state of perpetual environmental emergency. Five centuries ago, an Aztec song asked:
Who could lay siege to Tenochtitlán?
Who could move the foundations of the heavens?
Today the city once called Tenochtitlán is under siege from pollution. Babies are born with lead in their blood and one person in three suffers frequent headaches. The government’s guidelines for dealing with the motorized plague read like a defense against an invasion from Mars. In 1995, the Metropolitan Commission for the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution advised residents of Mexico’s capital that on so-called days of environmental contingency, they should go out of doors as
little as possible, keep doors, windows, and vents closed, not exercise between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
On those days, which occur ever more frequently, more than half a million people require some sort of medical attention from breathing what was known not so long ago as “the most transparent of air.” At the end of 1996, fifteen poor peasants from the state of Guerrero marched in Mexico City to protest injustices; all of them ended up in the public hospital.
On another day that year, it rained oceans on the city of São Paulo, creating the largest traffic jam in the country’s history. Mayor Paulo Maluf celebrated: “Traffic jams are a sign of progress.”
A thousand new cars take to the streets of São Paulo every day. The city breathes on Sunday and chokes the rest of the week. Only on Sunday can you see the skyline from the outskirts. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Paulo Conde, also likes traffic jams. Thanks to that blessing of urban civilization, he once said, motorists can talk on their cell phones, watch their portable TVs, and enjoy music on their cassettes or compact discs. “In the future,” the mayor announced, “a city without traffic jams will be considered boring.”
His prediction coincided with an ecological catastrophe in Santiago de Chile. Schools were closed and crowds of children packed the emergency rooms. In Santiago, environmentalists say, each child breathes the equivalent of seven cigarettes a day and one child out of four suffers some form of bronchitis. The city is separated from the heavens by an umbrella of pollution that has doubled in density over the past fifteen years, a period when the number of cars has also doubled.