Yuppie Bastards

Tonight I watched an episode of the new "Planet Earth" series in Discover. Pretty nice, it was, full of good camera work and novel things, and I happen to like Sigourney Weaver's voice. But man was it ever hard to finish. It seemed that every five minutes the show cut to commercials, and one set of commercials in particular made me scream with frustration - the new Volvo commercials touting the safety features of their cars. I'm sure the engineers at Volvo designed them in good faith, but the commercials make it obvious that the supremely unconcerned yuppie bastards in the car are clearly relying on technology to take the place of judgment.

Fer instance: here's the self-important yuppie couple driving home from some insufferably self-important yuppie soiree (I like to think it's a Dave Matthews Band concert or a "poetry slam" at the local coffee house). It's dark, and it's foggy, and they're going too damn fast, and they're constantly looking at each other as they flap their gums and emit wan self-important drivel. It's only when the collision-avoidance system starts to flash that Yuppie Bastard At The Wheel looks up to see the newspaper delivery truck, and what's his move? Hit the brakes? Oh, come on, I'm driving a damn Volvo, I'm too self-important to hit the brakes! I just duck into the next lane. The moral of the story is that you don't have to slow down in fog, exercise good judgment behind the wheel, or for that matter even look at the road, because your collision avoidance system will do the work. Meantime, you can exchange tepid and superficial po-mo claptrap with your date without having to look up.

Fer instance: here's another yuppie cruising down the freeway in light traffic, and suddenly he's held up by another car. He gives his rear view mirror the most cursory of examinations, too regal in his august yuppiedom to actually turn his head and look, and he almost runs a motorcycle off the road until his "blind spot detector" tells him to stay in his own lane already. Heaven forbid the self-satisfied moron should actually expend any energy at all by turning his head and looking. The moral of this story is that there's no need to check your blind spots and maintain situational awareness; you can forget the world around you and cruise in blithe, unconcerned self-satisfaction knowing that technology will keep you from squashing someone. Besides, Louis XIV never had to check his blind spots; why should you?

Fer instance: a woman walks toward her car in the dark parking lot and the remote can now tell her if it detects a heartbeat in the car. She backs up and walks away quickly, presumably to call Ghostbusters to get the class-5 full-roaming vapor out of her car (a real nasty one too). Does this actually happen? Is it common practice for thugs to lurk in the backs of cars? It's never happened to me, but then again, I'm 6'4" and nobody would ever want to rape me, so maybe I'm not the right person to judge the relative lunacy of this "safety feature", but it certainly sounds to me like it's pandering to paranoia and urban myth, not actual need. But if it helps someone avoid being attacked, I'm all for that, and unlike the aforementioned "safety features" it doesn't actually encourage bad driving habits. It's just such an overt Oxygen/WE touch it seems crass and exploitative to me.

If Volvo is really serious about improving the safety of the highways, here's a short list of technological features they should put in their cars.

1. A system that every 20 seconds would bellow SLOW DOWN, PAY ATTENTION, SHUT UP, AND STOP TAILGATING!

2. A robot arm that would grab any cell phone in sight and chuck it out the window. It's drivin' time, you clod, so lose the phone.