You can argue with The American Thinker’s politics, but they’ve got a point: there’s a spooky parallel between Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Door Into Summer” and the current Cash for Clunkers (a.k.a. C.A.R.S.) program. [thanks to fincar1 for the link] Grok this:
The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns—all sort of great big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive ’em between the jaws, then crunch! smash! crash!—scrap iron for blast furnaces.
It hurt me at first since I was riding the ways to work and didn’t own so much as a Grav-Jumper. I expressed my opinion of it almost lost my job . . . until the shift boss remembered I was a Sleeper and really didn’t understand.
“It’s a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They’re two years old now and then can never be sold . . . so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry.
You can’t run a blast furnace just on ore; you have to scrap iron as well. You ought to know that even if you are a Sleeper. Matter of fact with high-grade ore so scarce, there’s more and more demand for scrap. The steel industry needs these cars.”
“But why build them in the first place if they can’t be sold? It seems wasteful.”
“It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down their standard of living”
“Well why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market abroad then they are worth as scrap.”
“What! and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad everybody we’d get everyone sore at us—Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?”
One big difference. The cars in the book were new. The trucks being scrapped in the C4C program are mostly heavily worn. The only parallel is that the government is involved.
Y’all should try to get over the idea that anything the government does is bad and that anything private corporations do is good. Reality is much more muddled than that.
John:
Amen. People think way too much about stuff (me included unfortunately). Set goals, achieve them without compromising your moral/ethical code and don’t worry about stuff…
I got paid last week.. Everything else is just OPP.. (Other People’s Problems)
Yeah, there’s a big difference between scrapping crappy ’90s SUVs that were never very good at what they were used for in the first place (family haulers) and destroying brand new cars.
Note that Dan Davis (the hero and narrator) later learns that the cars destined to be crushed wouldn’t even be salable in the first place. Here is an excerpt from later in the same scene:
“The workmanship was sloppy and they often lacked essentials like instrument dials or air conditioners. But when one day I noticed from the way the teeth of the crusher came down on one that it lacked even a power plant, I spoke up…”
(…the response is, why should the cars have been any good in the first place if they were destined to be scrapped?)
:
not all c4c ‘trade-ins’ are crappy, worn out cars / trucks…
just sayin’
I’m sure there’s a million or two ‘mericans who would love to have their go at the pick of the litter of the c4c trade-ins and have those ‘new’ vehicles be infinitely better than the heap they’re currently driving…
Because Heinlen was probably talking more about agriculture price supports than anything else. Just extrapolating.
Spooky parallel?
Well, both involve scrapping cars.
Beyond that, not so much.
Hmm, come to think of it, there’s a scary parallel between the animated movie “Cars” and the C4C program. Both involve cars, some junkers, some new.
Look out. We’re in trouble now.
A scarier parallel to our society might be his Starship Troopers which praises militarism.
I guess I prefer the movie where you couldn’t vote unless you served. It should be changed to paying taxes.
Errh… the book was exactly the same way. No service, no vote. Of course, the book had robotic exoskeletons (which were dropped by the director so you could see Casper van Diem’s pretty mug), intelligent bugs (who’d believe intelligent bugs? Let’s just make them mindless swarms of bugs! bugs! bugs!) and a complete lack of gratuituous boobage. The movie was a complete piece of shit compared to the book.
Starship Troopers… despite is fascist overtones… does present an intriguing take on democracy. Where not only the politicians have to prove their right to lead… but the voters have to earn the right to choose.
A vote should not be buyable. Not everyone who pays taxes actually cares enough about their vote. But anyone willing to sacrifice a significant portion of their life to serve the government for little pay deserves to have their say.
–
Interesting parallelism… C4C may not be about scrapping new cars, but it is about scrapping old cars which still potentially have a few years left in them if maintained properly… and they are being scrapped merely to prop up consumerism, production of new cars and to protect jobs… jobs in an industry which fails to sell cars in the first place.
The car-scrapping bit shows some nice acid satire on the part of Heinlein. But a big chunk of the plot centers on our hero’s scheme to go into suspended animation for a long time, in part so he can legitimately marry his business partner’s 11-year-old stepdaughter. Say what you will about Fritz, I don’t think anyone has accused him of any such inclinations.
Don’t get me wrong, “The Door into Summer” is a sharply written book and I loved it as a kid. Rereading it as an adult, though, the book is a bit…creepy.
Heinlein’s views on love, sex and war should punch your creepy buttons if you are paying attention. There are reasons I was so fascinated by Heinlein in my teens :).
cpmanx,
I laughed when I read your comments. Reading Heinlein’s books, I loved the strong characters and the imaginative telling of daily life in the future and space, but that man was a freak!
I abandoned “To Sail Beyond The Sunset” after I realized it was just a long series of strange sexual situations, half of which involving incest.
This car scrapping business strikes me as wasteful and sad. Attrition will remove these vehicles from the road naturally. Destroying them simply props up the prices of parts and destroys the supply of cars for those who can’t afford a new one, even after the rebate.
But in times like these, we have to think of automakers, dealers, and “the environment.” The common taxpayer can just pound sand.
I hope who ever ends up with my “clunker” van will strip off the good bits, I had to pay over $1,000 (well, me and the insurance company) to replace the passenger side door, they had a heck of a time finding a scrap yard one good enough to repair. I’ll miss the old girl, she gave good service for 20 years, just not worth fixing her anymore.
I loved Heinlein when I was a raging torrent of adolescent hormones. He was kind of like a fun-to-read Ayn Rand with a sex obsession. He was also a damned fine story-teller.
But, as with so many things, I outgrew him and the libertarian philosophy that was at the core of his work.
Now, if you’re looking for real prophecy, Orwell’s your man.
Now, if you’re looking for real prophecy, Orwell’s your man.
Nah, Orwell got it wrong. The world we live in didn’t come to resemble 1984, it most closely resembles Brave New World. Or at least we’re headed in that direction.
Ah, Heinlein. The bizarre man-into-woman in “I Shall Fear No Evil.” The enjoyable rape in “Friday”. As someone said,
“The later Heinlein was exclusively written by someone who was either drunk, horny, or, on some occasions, both.”
Adub: +1
I’ve long thought that those who count on gov’t cheese for their day-to-day lives have far too great a conflict of interest when the time comes to select those who will govern us.
Jack Baruth +1
I enjoyed Heinlein immensely in college, but the later in his career you got the more fixated on sex of all kinds he became and the less interesting his writing became IMO. Books like Red Planet, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and his last true science fiction, Starship Troopers, were much more enjoyable than Number of the Beast or (please forgive me) Stranger in a Strange Land. Now Isaac Asimov wrote great science fiction, both the Foundation and the Robot series of books.
To the point at hand, the parallel is most certainly there. Heinlein may have been thinking of agricultural price supports but his view of a future where those price supports carry over into other industries is becoming entirely too accurate. The government support of the domestic car industry through the bailouts and government ownership of the resulting companies could easily be the first step towards the future described in the passages above.
There is a point that some clunkers could still be driven at less cost to the environment then over a new vehicle. If that is the case, then it is a wasteful program for just the environment.
In an example of using a high mpg “green car” vs. gas guzzling block in the wind, a few years ago CNW Marketing (see page 11 in the link below) stated that when considering a vehicles energy use from it’s concept to when it’s scrapped, a Toyota Prius had a cost of $3.25 per mile vs. a Jeep Wrangler’s cost at $0.60.
http://cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/DUST%20PDF%20VERSION.pdf
“Nah, Orwell got it wrong. The world we live in didn’t come to resemble 1984, it most closely resembles Brave New World. Or at least we’re headed in that direction.”
The Ministry of Truth is, in my opinion, the single most absolutely-right-on bit of literary prophecy ever penned. Having said that, Huxley was also onto something: “Ending is better than mending”.
Dealers are forced to destroy perfectly good cars.
There are deeper reasons why the scheme is wrong
Presumably it’s to save on oil/gasolene and to lower emissions:
Yet fuel efficient cars effectively means cheaper energy which in turn means they will be used more (instead of, for example, using public transport)
Fuel efficiency is of course an advantage people can consider when buying a car – and can compare with advantages that inefficient cars can have (speed or greater safety because of greater weight, etc, as well as a probably lower price – or they would be efficient already).
As far as government is concerned, any oil shortage – for geopolitical or economic demand reasons – raises the gasolene price and – guess what – increases demand for fuel-efficient cars anyway, no need to legislate for it.
Another reason is that – as research at Georgia Tech has shown – it is possible to clean emissions of CO2 (and other substances at the same time).
A fuel-neutral emission tax on cars therefore makes more sense:
If it is economical to make – or to fit current- gas-guzzling cars with emission processing then, again, there is no reason for government to try to lower the use of such cars.
Any regulatory measures should therefore focus on emissions, rather than the fuel used, and emission taxation on cars retains consumer choice, while also giving significant government income with the lower sales of high emission cars, income that can go to projects that themselves lower emissions eg. electric car manufacturing subsidies etc.
(Regardless of whether CO2 reduction makes any sense, lowered emissions of course have their own benefit, for all the noxious sulphur etc substances that the emissions also contain)
For more see http://www.ceolas.net/#cc25x
Why all energy efficiency regulation is wrong – from light bulbs to buildings http://www.ceolas.net/#cc2x