Posts Tagged ‘Ronald Reagan’
“The American really loves nothing but his automobile”*…
FT correspondent John Burn-Murdoch on America’s infatuation with large personal vehicles, and its consequences…
For all the grim tales of guns and opioids, the thing that really hits you as a visitor to the US these days is the cars. Literally, for too many people. In 2021, road fatalities were the second leading cause of death among Americans aged under 45, ahead of Covid-19, suicides and gun violence.
On a visit to the US last month, three things made a strong impression: the sheer size of the cars; the relative lack of electric models with their characteristic hum; and speed limits that seem entirely optional. All, I think, stem from the same underlying tendency: to see driving as an expression of personal freedom.
To an extent, a similar dynamic plays out the world over. Just look at the furor that has accompanied recent schemes to curb residential traffic in the UK. But, when it comes to vehicles, the US really is exceptional.
The average new American car purchased in 2021 weighed 1.94 tonnes, fully half a tonne more than the European average. Purchases of SUVs and “light” trucks together now account for four out of every five new vehicles bought in the US, up from one in five 50 years ago…
… This would all be a mere curiosity except that these vehicles have a variety of lethal qualities. As American cars have bulked up, the number of fatalities for the drivers and passengers inside these rolling fortresses has fallen by 22 per cent. But the number of pedestrians killed has risen by 57 per cent. According to an estimate by Justin Tyndall, assistant professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, the lives of 8,000 pedestrians could have been saved between 2000 and 2018 if Americans had stuck to smaller vehicles.
For many inside the cars, too, the association of individualism with driving proves lethal. Almost one in 10 drivers and passengers in the front seat of US cars do not wear a seatbelt, and 45 per cent say they often drive at least 15 miles per hour above the speed limit on motorways. In the UK, both measures are way lower, at 3 per cent.
The grim result is that half of the car occupants killed in the US in 2020 were not wearing seatbelts vs 23 per cent in the UK. Speeding is implicated in 30 per cent of fatal crashes in the US but just half of that in Britain. All told, 43,000 people died on America’s roads in 2021, the highest mortality rate in the developed world by some margin. By my calculations, a fifth of those could be averted every year if rates of speeding and seatbelt-wearing matched peer countries.
Finally, there’s the environmental impact. Less than 5 per cent of new US cars last year were either partly or fully electric, compared with 17 per cent in Europe (rising to 86 per cent in Norway). As a result, the average new US car emits twice as much carbon dioxide per mile as its European counterpart, all while carrying the same number of occupants as in the UK — 1.5 people per trip, weighted for distance driven…
When bigger isn’t better: “America’s obsession with big cars has fatal consequences” (gift article), from @jburnmurdoch in @FT.
See item #2 in this post from @Noahpinion for a gentle critique of Burn-Murdoch’s charts, resulting in a (slightly) more positive take on U.S. road safety… though it seems to your correspondent that Burn-Murdoch’s fundamental point still hold.
* William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
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As we scale back, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that President Ronald Reagan issued Proclamation 5457, designating 1986 the Centennial Year of the Gasoline Powered Automobile.
“The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis”*…
Kanya Kanchana‘s panegyric to lists in literature, to the literature of lists, and to the authors who make them…
… We all make lists, if only to buy bread and milk. But we tend to forget how mythic and subversive (as we have just seen), joyful and maddening, enchanting and sobering, and utterly chilling lists can be—and what they can do. To love a list is to partake in letter and word, form and change. To make lists is to join a long line of list makers, to indulge in a timeless art, to break down the artificial wall that separates thinking and doing, thinkers and doers…
From Borges and the Bhagavad-Gītā to Georges Perec and Atul Gawande: “One Thing After Another: A Reading List for Lovers & Makers of Lists,” from @Longreads.
* Umberto Eco (one of the authors on the list)
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As we check it off, we might note that today is National I Am In Control Day… an annual celebration of two disparate things: it is meant to encourage people to take control of their lives. At the same time, it marks the occasion of an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan (on this date in 1981) immediately after which then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, in a press briefing, uttered the famous words, “I am in control“… which wasn’t factually correct and contributed to his resignation not too long after.
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”*…
Unintended consequences…
The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. Decades of propping up the dairy industry—by buying up surplus milk and turning it into processed commodity cheese—had backfired, hard.
The Washington Post reported that the interest and storage costs for all that dairy was costing around $1 million a day. “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible,” a USDA official was quoted as saying. “Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.”
Instead, they decided to jettison 30 million pounds of it into welfare programs and school lunches through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. “At a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure, their Government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of food turn into waste,” Reagan said in a written statement. The New York Times declared that the bill would “give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus.”
But the surplus was growing so fast that 30 million pounds barely made a dent. By 1984, the U.S. storage facilities contained 1.2 billion pounds, or roughly five pounds of cheese for every American. “Government cheese,” as the orange blocks of commodity cheese came to be called, wasn’t exactly popular with all of its recipients…
The long, strange saga of ‘government cheese’: “Why Did the U.S. Government Amass More Than a Billion Pounds of Cheese?,” from @DianaHubbell in @atlasobscura.
See also: “How the US Ended Up With Warehouses Full of ‘Government Cheese’,” from @HISTORY (source of the image above).
* G.K. Chesterton
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As we chew on it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1916 that Joseph L. Kraft was grated a United States patent for processed cheese… the very process used to create ‘government cheese.”
Kraft had become curious about an issue that plagued his industry: cheese went bad, very fast, especially in the summer. He hypothesized this was caused by the same bacteria that produced the cheese in the first place. He began experimenting with different heating techniques to destroy the bacteria while preserving the cheesy flavor and consistency; he perfected the process in 1914 and patented it two years later.
Though the cheese industry condemned Kraft’s creation as an abomination, by 1930, 40 percent of all cheese consumed in the United States was made by Kraft.
“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die”*…
One of dozens of definitions, from acrimony to wrath, that make up the language of resentment– “Glossary: Rivalry & Feud.”
* Carrie Fisher
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As we slog through the swamp, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that Ronald Reagan delivered what is still considered one of the most effective political speeches ever made on behalf of a candidate, “A Time For Choosing,” an endorsement of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. While Goldwater was roundly defeated the following month, the speech launched the political career of Reagan, who was, soon after, asked to run for Governor of California… and who carried the tag “the Great Communicator” for the rest of his life.
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”*…
What is a sentence? But that is such a formal question. How about, what is a sentence for? Less formal, perhaps, but obviously impossible to answer, for sheer variety. There may be some human purposes that don’t find their way into sentences, but writers keep trying, and for any limit we experience there may be a sentence in waiting and a writer to try it…
I’ll propose one purpose that all sentences have in common. The purpose of a sentence is to end. If this is a property of all sentences, any ought to do for an example, but here is one particularly determined to be done with itself:
1 The world is everything that is the case.
It comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as translated from German into English by C. K. Ogden in 1922…
From the first of the Paris Review’s eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic, scholar, and poet Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence every week. Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.
[TotH to John Stedman]
* H.L. Mencken
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As we pause to parse prose, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that the celebration of the crafter of so very many elegant sentences, Martin Luther King, was made official, when President Ronald Reagan signed the bill creating the Martin Luther King Jr. Day federal holiday. Reagan had opposed the holiday, citing its cost, joining southern Republicans like Jesse Helms, who were more naked in their reasoning; but the enabling legislation had passed by a veto-proof margin.
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