[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Eventually, we will have cars propelled along by dylthium crystal batteries, cars that can perform just as well as the S-class Merc of today, cars that will go for 20,000 miles between recharges and cities with power points at every parking meter.And as a result, the air will be cleaner and cities will be quieter, and we’ll wear flowers in our hair and not eat meat.Or maybe not.You see, charging up the millions and millions of electric cars that Marvin hopes will one day roam the roads, will require a lot more effort on the part of power stations which, at present, are responsible for 90 per cent of ‘greenhouse gases’.By running an electric car, all you are doing is displacing the pollution from your exhaust pipe to a power station somewhere else.Even the LA goody-goodies admit this by stating that 64 per cent of the city’s power is not generated in the LA basin.In other words, we clean up our act and to hell with those who’ll suffer as a result.Now I don’t dispute that LA has a dreadful smog problem because I’ve been there and I’ve seen it.Nor do I dispute that motor vehicles are to blame but why is LA’s smog worse than anyone else’s?It seems that the prevailing winds from the Pacific are blocked by the mountain range behind LA.Consequently the smog doesn’t get blown away.Rather than make all the world drive around in milk floats, surely Marvin would have been better off seeking the advice of a demolition team.He’s already said he doesn’t mind pollution so long as it isn’t in LA so why doesn’t he simply blow up the mountains?In the prologue to Look Stranger, W.H.Auden said: ‘Far sighted as falcons, they looked down on another future; for the seed in their loins was hostile.’Marvin probably thinks he’s being a falcon but it might be a good idea if he had a good look between his legs.Clarkson on CarsCruel to be KindI find myself wondering whether the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the good Doctor George Carey, has ever been scrumping.Without wishing to sound like Frank Muir, to scrump is to break into an orchard and steal apples.I used to do it.My father used to do it and I’d bet a wedge of Melvins that old George cannot put his hand on his heart and say that, at one time or another, he hasn’t climbed over a wall and helped himself to the odd bit of somebody else’s fruit.However, times have moved on and this is what George and all the other weirdos who go on television to talk about ‘social issues’ fail to understand.In the fifties, people would queue for hours to see Way to the Stars, a dreadful black and white film where people said ‘bother’ if they trapped their thumb in a door and, apart from people trapping their thumbs in doors, nothing much happened.Today, youth is not satisfied unless strange metal aliens chop whole limbs off.Furthermore, those who do get de-legged do not say bother.Then there’s sex.In the fifties, the merest hint of an ankle would have the censors reaching for their scissors whereas these days no film is complete unless it features at least six panty hamsters.Translate that sort of progress into the real world and it becomes a damn sight easier to understand why the modern-day equivalent of scrumping is ram-raiding.We do not need hairy social workers and do-good churchmen looking for complicated reasons why the youths of Newcastle and Oxford want to steal cars, because it’s patently obvious to anyone under the age of 100.They do it because it’s bloody good fun.Why do you think rock stars throw televisions into swimming pools? Why can I not walk past a stack of beans in Safeway without getting a sometimes uncontrollable urge to push it over?Glass makes a satisfying noise when it breaks but I bet it makes a hell of a more satisfying noise when you’ve just driven a Range Rover through it.And I absolutely cannot think of anything which would be more fun than racing a Golf GTi round Woolworths.George Carey has the bare-faced effrontery to claim that the recent spate of rioting is because of ‘social deprivation’.His sentiments, inevitably, are echoed by various beardies who have been invited to wax lyrical on Newsnight in recent weeks.But ram-raiding has as much to do with social deprivation as pork pie.What it does have a lot to do with is risk.I would steal apples because if I was caught, and the chances were slim, the worst I could expect was a pair of boxed ears.And I reckoned that the thrill of nicking a Granny Smith easily outweighed the possible consequences
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]