THE END OF AN ERA

Dear Readers,
As Wall Street crashes and burns, how fitting it is that the status symbol of the last 17 years - the big, I-don't give-a-damn-how-many-miles-to-the-gallon-it-gets automobile - is coming to it's well-deserved end.
The prime villain, the SAV, or Suburban Assault Vehicle, has finally been brought down - not by protesting knit-your-own-yogurt types or namby-Bambi types- but by the price of a gallon of gas. Like H.G. Welles' Martians, it was not the dogged resistance of the invaded that stopped the onslaught, but the humble microbe. (I know comparing a microbe with the price of gas is not a classically perfect metaphor, but this is a blog on the Internet, hardly the Eden of accuracy).
I, for one, am thrilled at the prospect of watching these resource-scarfing behemoths disappearing from the road in my lifetime. Good Riddance.
When I became a full-time driver several years ago, I looked around at all the transportation options and decided my best plan was to buy a fuel-efficient Toyota Controlla. I was bucking a trend by purchasing a vehicle that was so small that I was unable to even wear a moderately bulky sweater while driving it, lest I be unable to fit in the front seat. Yet this little wonder gets 452 miles per gallon and goes zero-to-sixty in less than five minutes. Despite gas being free at the time, I was more than ready for the coming apocalypse.
The trouble was that I began to notice that while driving, I was becoming surrounded by giant vehicles with aggressive names like the Ford Explosion, the Chevrolet Yugokiller, the Toyota F-You Cruiser and the worst of them all, the Hummer (complete with two 30mm forward-firing cannons and three top-mounted Sidewinder missiles). I felt we were going well in the wrong direction.
Once cellphones were added to the mix, trying to share the road with these 8-miles-to-the-gallon testosteroned tanks driven by clueless, distracted, multi-tasking, coffee drinking scofflaws was like trying to move up the middle in a Nascar race on a pogo-stick. I felt like I was in Ralph Nader's nightmare, a world full of mutated Corvairs, all driving backwards - straight at ME!
Rescue first came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, raising the price of a gallon of gas to fifty cents. Then OPEC saw what we would gladly pay anything for petroleum (as long as it had the cache 'imported') and decided the world should stump up more money for it's fuel. Soon, prices were off to the races, and even Americans -blithely unconcerned about gas mileage -began to understand that the party was over. Tootling along the roads in my gas-sipping anti 'chick magnet', I noticed more and more owners pulling their SAV's over to the side of the road and sadly firing a .357 round straight into the engine block of the inefficient beast. Salvation was at hand. And when the economy finally Titanicked, the age of the great SAV was over. While today, the species is not quite extinct yet, the great die-off has surely begun.
It's not a completely feel-good story though. People who built these monsters have sadly lost their jobs and the oily car-salesmen and their phony wheeze of 'let me check with my boss' now have to crawl on their bellies to get you to buy anything. But perhaps it's some consolation to take the long view. The oil we've been burning through all these decades is the result of the massive dinosaur die out of millions of years ago (how that transformation came about is still a mystery to me) so, maybe as the SAV's die, perhaps their bodies, turfed under the soil by their grieving owners, will, in millions of years, morph into some new fuel for the transportation needs of 1,000,000,000,005, A.S.A.V. (After Suburban Assault Vehicles). Maybe not.
Well, I know what I'd like all that matter to turn into, so as a tribute, I'll put the kettle on and get the good china out, for somewhere, it's 4 o'clock, and time for a nice up of tea.