I’ll Take the Leaf

by paradox

There has been an enormous amount of market criticism of Elon Musk and Tesla Motors for choosing the penis extension $109,000 Roadster as the first production model for Tesla Motors, whatever dubious auto culture segment it aims for the price at over a hundred large could never be a viable production entry for a virgin automaker. Given the numbers and enormous production obstacles I agreed with the rational analysis until I saw one parked in front of 24 Hour Fitness last week.

Jesus Christ on his gym bike, I may have temporarily lost a correct sense of market price, but for what the Roadster is $109,000 instantly seemed dirt cheap. Sleek, low and sexy, it can easily dust the new Chevy Corvette without a sound but the hiss of its tires. It never needs an oil change, there are no spark plugs or transmission fluid, no filthy choking exhaust, hell it won’t even rust. No, it won’t make it to LA in a day but viva la revoluciõn all the way, motherfuckers, bring this future on! I don’t want one, it’s an absurd idea for me on many levels, but for the first time in my life I was blown-away this-has-to-be-the-future impressed by a car. An American car.

One of my great dreams for our children and grandchildren is American society enslaved to electricity, squeaky-clean electrons that give everyday life a pearly blue sky of health, so vastly cheap in its renewable sunshine that comparisons to the stupidly heinous chains of internal combustion will only lead to horror at thoughts of the spewing, poisonous past. No more vast outflows of cash to the middle east, no more background worry we’re killing the planet, no more degradation from drilling, our people happy and employed in a great infrastructure evolution for the future, hope an intensely driving pulse of joy in everyday life instead of a mocking political slogan.

We need a new grid to begin to get there, after we know and accept renewable electricity as our only future (with a likely 10-15% nuclear capacity to keep the grid up for the first four generations, bummer). That new grid will be completely underground in its urban and suburban layout, bye-bye all those horribly ugly and half-assed poles and lines, along with seamlessly handling micro inputs from uncounted home turbines and panels, every house has them.

Since were there with the new grid, right, it’s not hard at all to lay in a fiber optic node-to-node internet right alongside it, the kind Google wants to wire some lucky small city with. How I so wish for blue ethereal skies for my grandchildren, no stupid disastrous wars for no future, no noxious blatting engine noise, but—amazingly—somehow those dreams fade in the magnitude of American grandness launched into a breathtaking future with a real internet. To give that vision and reality to our children and people, so clean and peaceful, with so many new dreams to be lived….

Back in our dirty, noisy, carbon-dioxide soaked life of polluting war I’ll take the Nissan Leaf, an enchantingly modest engineering try I can afford. I don’t want to drive to LA, I never do, I’m never spending $40,000 for a Volt or any other car.

There was a recent heartbreaking effort to get the solar panels Jimmy Carter installed on the White House back, they found them still working, thousands of dreaming Americans rapturously scrawled messages on them on a tour before delivery. They were callously, obnoxiously rejected with arrogant claims of environmental accomplishment, the recent screaming catastrophe in the Gulf just ludicrously ignored, as with all the other disasters of internal combustion.

Too liberal, employment and blue skies and dreams we can’t even dream and real hope for our children chucked in the shitcan, Fox News deserves attention and action, not those ridiculous political loser environmentalist hippies who—no matter how we abuse them—vote for us anyway.

Oh yes, votes you will get. To us, duty to our children and the future and our Earth trumps all, even if it means voting for Democrats.

Such a burden of shame and longing such a path so continually brings to us. I so wanted to give that clean, peaceful, hopeful planet and country to my grandchildren and people, but it will forever have to be a liberal dream, it seems. We could have been so much better than this, so easily.