Notes from Prison

Corrected Version:  An error in the earlier version has now been corrected.

Expensive

I would like to count the times the word “expensive” occurs in my father’s vocabulary.

Wars are not expensive.


Remote controlled airplanes whose bombs and rockets  kill and maim women, children, and men too in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Sudan--ripping off arms and legs or heads, burning living flesh, tearing innocent people to pieces---none of that is reckoned as expensive.

Haircuts are expensive and cars are expensive.

The ecological consequences of the personal automobile (self-steered orgies of consumer preference) are not expensive.

My mother is complaining that she can’t get out of bed.

If we leave the house, my father sits in the front seat and regularly exclaims, “Look at all the cars!”—but most of the “cars” are trucks.

He exclaims in astonishment at the number of cars, but the number of cars in this dusty border town certainly can’t be compared to a crowded metropolis, certainly not New York or Prague or even Vienna or Bratislava.

I add the note that VIenna is a pedestrian friendly city, while El Paso Texas is pedestrian-hostile-and insulting.  The bike lanes in El Paso Texas are a bizarre sort of joke---filled with potholes.  The mere act of crossing one of the wide streets in eptx is frightening.  The sadists employed by the city  have designd the traffic light system so that any potential pedestrians are allotted the minimum number of minutes to cross the street. The flashing lights and even the computer-voice count-down add to the unpleasantness of the experience.  (Get your ass out of my way.---says the large man in an even larger truck.)


I add another note on the width of all of the streets:  I've lately had a fantasy of a fat cat in the construction industry counting all the dollars he'll get if the streets are wide---and someone, sitting in an air-conditioned office in a tall building far away, someone with a warped soul reckoning this as "progress", preparing a report... .  And at the same time, I recoil in disgust at the idea that the citizens of this noble and free country felt a need to fill those wide streets with wide vehicles and wide bodies....... that too a kind of "progress"....

My mother complains and complains and complains.  If she did not complain, she wouldn’t have anything to say.

I dream of a day when I lived by myself, had my own flat, and regularly used public transit.  For thirteen years I had no car, and during that time I never for even one second wished that I owned one.


I dream of the day I escape from the merciless sun and the equally merciless system of non-stop propaganda.