Armed Liberal

You know how, if you kind of know you way around mechanically, you decide whether to have the disc brake rotors on your car turned when you're going to do the brakes?

You check to see if they're warped, and whether they have been scored by the old pads.

You shouldn't, however, drive home down a 1,000 foot hill, pull into your driveway, get out of the car, and reach past the mag wheels to run your fingers over the (hot!! damn!! damn hot!! really damn hot!!) rotor.

I'll be typing with my left hand for a day or so until the blisters on my fingertips go down...

I'm a gearhead, and have been one for as long as I can remember. Colin Chapman was my hero as a preteen, and I have great memories of forcing my poor dad to take me to Can Am races back in the glory days of Bruce McLaren and Jim Hall.

In high school, I worked in a race-car shop to pay off the bills for the suspension and engine work I had done to my Austin Cooper S so I could race it more successfully in autocrosses (and on Mulholland Drive).

I've had BMW's (including a M5), Saabs, and a variety of other cool vehicles...including a proto-SUV, a Toyota FJ60 Land Cruiser.

I'm laying this out so that when I criticize SUV's you don't think I'm some kind of hair-shirt environmentalist who believes that we should all drive Suzuki Swifts running on recycled french-fry oil. I'm not. The smell of carb solvent is actually kind of pleasant to me (even though I wear gloves now when I handle it), and one wonderful thing about Tenacious G is that she doesn't go ballistic when I wash small parts in the kitchen sink.

I love vehicles, and love good design and good engineering wherever I can find it.

And when I bought my Land Cruiser, I bought it for many of the reasons people buy SUV's today.

I had driven an Acura before that, and had been tail-ended hard enough to require knee surgery by an unlicensed, uninsured woman in a Buick. When the car was totaled, I determined to replace it with something safer.

And I worked in a highly status-conscious industry, where my peers competed to own the most expensive and exotic vehicles. So I tried a sidestep and bought something that at the time had no slot in the status curve...a truck.

The Land Cruiser model I had was bare-bones; cloth and exposed metal in the interior, manual transmission and windows, it was the furthest thing from the leather-lined luxury cars my peers drove.

And it was safe; I had an accident in which a Mercedes driver threw his door open in front of me; I probably did $15,000 in damage to his car. The rubber end cap for the bumper cost $25 to replace.

People got out of my way; at the time, vehicles that size were fairly unusual, and merging onto the 110 was suddenly much easier.

Plus Moby (it was white) was just damn cool. The FJ60 series had that hard-to-define elegance that good design always has.

It did have some drawbacks. It got 14mpg highway or street. It was more than a bit hard to park, and had the turning radius of a semi. My wife tore her skirts getting into it all the time. It was slow. The suspension was so stiff that it make my sons carsick regularly...we re-nicknamed it 'the Chuck Wagon'.

I had driven back and forth to the Bay Area almost weekly when I was in college; I could drive my BMW 2002ti from Berkeley to LA in five hours, have dinner, go out, and still have some energy left over to dance for a while.

Driving Moby to SF was tiring. It took seven hours. When we got there, we were a bit spent. At first I thought it was just age; then we drove up with a friend in their Mercedes, and realized that the car was fatiguing us. It was noisy, rough, slow, and steered vaguely enough to require constant focus and attention.

And one day we caught a ride in a Taurus wagon taxicab and realized that it was almost as large inside as the Land Cruiser. It even had a rearward facing jumpseat so we could seat two more kids.

And we started thinking about it. We'd had Moby for seven years, and it looked like it would run another seven easily. But it was worth almost as much as we'd paid new for it, and the hassles were starting to add up.

So we sold it, and bought a Taurus wagon. I also sold my M5 and bought a Mustang convertible. Part of this was about my giving up on the idea of a car as a status object - heresy here in L.A., I know. But I was tired of working to pay for something that basically impressed parking valets.

But a part of it was just the realization that while the Land Cruiser was a brilliant piece of machinery for running safaris in Kenya, or for hauling journalists in Afghanistan, it wasn't really a good solution to transporting a family living in Los Angeles.

And over the following years, as I saw more and more people move to Suburbans, and Expeditions, and Excursions, I'd occasionally scratch my head.

My neighbors both had Tahoes (mini-Suburbans) at one point; we all went skiing to Mammoth together (us in our Taurus), and while they could carry more than we could, it wasn't very much more at all.

And the front-wheel drive of the Taurus worked fine in the six inches of snow that we faced.

Ultimately, we had Littlest Guy and went from two sons to three, and decided we wanted something bigger. We looked at a Suburban, and then bought an Aerostar minivan. It was bigger inside, cheap to run, relatively easy to drive. I went through a couple of years with no car at all, just a motorcycle and rental cars, and then when we divorced, bought a Subaru Outback.

I wanted a slightly macho wagon, didn't want to spend the $$ to get an Audi or BMW, and just wasn't in touch with my inner Soccer Mom enough to drive a Taurus again. The Outback was as big as a Forerunner or other midsize SUV inside, and drove brilliantly...I managed to shock more than a few sports cars with it.

When Tenacious G and I got together, we decided we needed a big car again, and looked once again at SUV's and decided to buy an Odyssey minivan. It drove far better than a Suburban, was as big inside, smaller outside, got better gas mileage, and was better built. As soon as TG lets me supercharge it, it will be the perfect urban family vehicle.

So my objection to SUV's isn't aesthetic, it isn't moral, it's functional.

If I lived in Wyoming, and had two miles of dirt road to cover on my way to drop the kids at school then head to the office - and two months a year it was six inches of muck, and four months a year six to twelve inches of snow - my old FJ60 or one of the modern 'upscale' replacements would begin to make sense. And that's exactly what's being sold with each SUV - the image that you don't live on a curved street in a suburb in Thousand Oaks, but on the old family homestead in rural Wyoming.

And in buying the 'image' of the SUV, folks are like the self-deluding people who believe that wearing Ralph Lauren will suddenly give them a generations-old family place on the Cape. The style isn't the thing.

And for a true gearhead, the idea of buying image over function just doesn't sit well.

People know how little I think of 'SkyBox' Gray Davis. But two recent news stories show him an even less favorable light.

We know he lied about the budget deficit before the election.

Now he's lying about the causes of the deficit. From the Sacramento Bee, when Dan Weintrab sets him straight:

The important fact about the treatment of energy purchases as loans is that they did not affect, in the slightest, how Gov. Gray Davis and legislators fashioned a state budget in 2001 or 2002. While they may have created a cash-flow squeeze, requiring additional outside borrowing, the energy loans had absolutely no effect on the budget itself, as state budget officials repeatedly pointed out at the time. Some Republican legislators suggested that the energy outlays be treated as budget outlays, rather than as loans, but the dominant Democrats rejected that suggestion because it would have sharply curtailed other spending.

This bit of fiscal history is being offered because Davis, Attorney General Bill Lockyer and other state officials have decided to rewrite it to serve their own political purposes. The false account of what happened is contained in filings this week with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, supporting their assertion that California was ripped off during the energy crisis by energy generators and brokers.

So, basically, we got mugged by the energy providers. And, having blown our paycheck at the stripper bar, we're looking at our domestic partner sadly, and explaining that we'd have brought the paycheck home if only we hadn't been hit on the head.

That's a deliberate lie. There's no other term for it because Davis, Lockyer and the others who filed the papers with FERC know the truth. It's a lie that not only bolsters their case with FERC for refunds, but one that also, in effect, acquits Davis and legislators of responsibility for the budget crisis that did develop in 2001.

The budget crisis occurred because Davis and lawmakers of both parties foolishly succumbed to political pressure from various interest groups to cut taxes and raise spending when state revenues suddenly spiked upward in 2000, even though they knew that the windfall could be a one-time occurrence. It was just a one-time revenue boost, as it turned out, but because spending had been ratcheted upward and multibillion-dollar tax cuts had been enacted, the state was left with a huge "structural deficit" between income and outgo. The current estimates of the problem, something in the $26 billion to $35 billion range, are the accumulated deficits of the past two budgets, plus the projected shortfall for the next fiscal year.

I don't have trouble with Gray Davis because he's liberal, or because he's a Democrat, or because he shoves his staff members around when annoyed. I have trouble witH him because there was never a state policy he wouldn't rent for a campaign contribution, or a state issue where he'd directly sit down with us - the voters he's here to serve - and tell us the truth except when it served his immediate political interests.

Sorry, Ann, but this is just too damn much. But wait! There's more!

Despite the fiscal crisis, and the fact that the jobs of teachers, home health workers (but not prison guards!) are on the block, 'SkyBox' always has room on the payroll for a few good men and women - who worked hard on his campaign. From the normally supine L.A. Times (intrusive registration required, use 'laexaminer'/'laexaminer'):

As California's budget problems leave the prospect of freezes and layoffs hanging over tens of thousands of state employees, many of the people who worked on Gov. Gray Davis' reelection campaign have been given new government jobs or promotions.

At least 21 of the governor's campaign workers have been either hired into new state jobs or have received promotions despite the current hiring freeze and a call by Davis to cut half a billion dollars annually out of salary and benefit packages for public employees.

Sometimes their salaries come out of the very departments facing cuts that will be directly felt by the public -- areas such as environmental protection, disease research and child protection services -- even though most of the employees actually work on the governor's support staff.

After all, who's gonna take care of his Presidential campaign??

Look, it always happens that good election staff get jobs. That's the normal deal. But at this moment in time, it's disgusting. And that's why I'll never support Gray Davis for anything, ever.

I talked here of a friend of mine who managed to get himself into trouble with the law.

Well, his sentencing was dragged out as the DA and police tried to use the evidence he gave against some larger fish, and then he had bariatric surgery (he was morbidly obese, and knew it), but then he missed our housewarming and stopped answering emails.

I got a call from a mutual friend on Monday, mentioning that he'd missed work for a few days, and wondered if he'd been sentenced and it hadn't gone well and he hadn't the heart to call us to see him off. But it was weird that he was so out of contact, so I offered to stop by his apartment on my way home from work the next day; he said no, he'd stop by on his way in to work in the morning instead.

No one answered, but he got the neighbors concerned enough to call the police, who broke in and found his body. I just got the calls from his friends and family.

I don't know any details (we're working to get the Coroner to expedite their processes to allow a funeral when his family gets here this weekend), but I'd assume it was natural causes.

He lived alone in a slightly shabby apartment building near the airport; his apartment was immaculate, nicely furnished, with a beautiful fish tank that he labored over.

Somehow, it's heartbreaking to me to think of him dying alone in his apartment, not found for days. I think that's a hard image because we expect to live and die surrounded by friends and family.

And it's sad to think that he ended his adult life in trouble with the law - the way he began it.

But from talking to him, I got to know how far he came from the youthful rage with which he must have lived as a young gang member. The man I knew was thoughtful, considerate, and gentle.

And he stands as a lesson to me of the waste that the remaining racial divide in America represents; I used to call him "Senator", simultaneously teasing him about the political dreams he had confided to me and acknowledging that he had the tools to make it happen. I always told him that Fitzgerald was wrong; that there could be second acts here in America. I wonder what his life would have been like if his childhood had been mine, and what he could have added to the world.

Godspeed.