FAST CARS AND FREEDOM

Fast cars are expected to drive, well, fast, right? However, if you’ve driven on a freeway in the Desert Southwest, you know that’s not always, and hardly ever, the case. We tend to expect the old Ford Ranger or Chevy Malibu to barely be clunking along, or the 1992 Pontiac Grand Am driving down Rancho Boulevard in Las Vegas on its last leg with a plume of smoke billowing from its exhaust, creating a cloud big enough to stop traffic. So the Corvettes, convertibles, BMWs, Porches, and other high-end cars are expected to have some get up and go. But by the time in your life that you are able to afford such a car, your get up and go has got up and left. Sure, there are some younger folks who were able to buy those cars while in the prime years of 20s and 30s, but now all the real estate agents driving Jaguars while wearing leopard-skin pants with three inch high heels are now trying to date guys not in the mortgage industry to pay for that car purchased during the fat years.

It seems nowadays that these fast cars are being driven by the snowbirds that are decked out in khaki shorts, oversized Hawaiian shirts, tennis visors, sandals with long socks, who are enjoying their retirement and the nice summertime weather in Arizona. As the driver gaggles along in the fast lane cruising at an impressive 45-55mph, always driving 10 miles under the speed limit to avoid a ticket, the line of cars behind him are pulling maneuvers only seen in Nascar races, which they have picked up from the previous weekend. This is how the economy of the modern rat race moves forward, surpassing the guys whose only concern is making it to the Indian reservation casino before the breakfast buffet ends at 11am. By modern calculations of getting up by 4:30am, reading the paper and having coffee, getting onto the freeways in time to be the leader of the freeway bottleneck during the morning commute, the average slow-poke snowbird can still make it to the casino buffet by at least 9am. 64-ounces of Diet Coke and three Cuban cigars later, he makes it to the casino with time to spare.

Now we have tons of speed enforcement cameras popping up along all the major freeways in metropolitan Phoenix. My initial thought is to use these cameras to ticket the lolly-gagger snowbird as he slows modern day progress. But this is hardly the case. Now we are expected to drive at a mind-numbing pace and follow in his slow driving misery as we hail back to the days of 55mph zones of the 1980s, only with tens of thousands of more cars on the roads as compared to then.

Between being watched by law enforcement cameras along the highways, our cell phone calls subject to being tapped, our privacy is slowly being stripped away. But where is the opposition for big brother watching our every move along the roads now, as there was such an outcry of tapping into our phone conversations? Arizona Governor Janet Napalatano has stated that the state revenue from speeding tickets captured by the freeway cameras will bring in some $50 million dollars, which helps to alleviate the several billion dollar state budget shortfall. What an impressive Democratic strategy of economic development by taking small amounts of money from many people creates a lot of money for one group – the government. We should all band together and make sure no one ever gets a ticket from these cameras and they have to take them down because the maintenance costs will be more than the revenue it generates.

At that point, the governor will then have to develop other methods to generate revenue without encouraging something that actually spurs economic development. Perhaps she can implement a “reverse lottery.” This is where the traffic cameras take a photo of your car and you are required, as a citizen of the state, to contribute to the state lottery. I’m sure that could pull in several million as the cameras take a photo of a vehicle every 10 seconds for the random reverse lottery. We could also place used Cool Whip containers at every cashier stand at the supermarkets where people can donate change to the Napalatano government instead of the Ronald McDonald house. If these systems don’t work then we’ll have to resort to “income pooling” in which everyone contributes his or her income to the gigantic state pool. The state gets the first cut and then the rest is re-distributed as determined by a complex computer system with a Cricket Wireless internet card. The money is then sent to everyone’s personal bank account according to the random amount determined by the computer.

I think our best hope is that our governor is drafted into the Obama administration into some sort of unimportant position like Secretary of Agriculture. How long has it been since we’ve even known who that is? And what does he or she do? Perhaps the worst thing that would happen is she would levy a tax on eggs and she can install cameras in every cage-free chicken farm to make sure the chickens have their due process rights before being subject to the execution board.

As for now, I’ll avoid the freeways as much as possible and wonder why in this day and age of cameras and Google Earth, that my truck was stolen from a central Phoenix parking garage in mid-day on a weekend, and we have no pictures of the jerk who took it. But if I drive my car over 60mph there’s going to be a photo of me cruising past some convertible snowbird puffing away at his Cuban while driving in the fast lane and blasting Tony Orlando.