Copyright 2000 The Times-Picayune Publishing Co.
The Times-Picayune
July 17, 2000 Monday, ORLEANS
SECTION: METRO; Pg. B7
LENGTH: 753 words
HEADLINE:
THE POLITICKING IS WORSE THAN THE PRICES
BYLINE: Robert
Reno
BODY:
Watching a gasoline pump pump gas is not
most Americans' idea of exciting home entertainment or imaginative presentation
of the latest news.
And nothing says more about the sad and superficial
state of television news than the endless footage we've been seeing -- live,
canned and sometimes accompanied by vapid sound bites -- of gasoline pumps being
monotonously operated in a pointless drive to make sure no U.S. viewing
household forgets that gasoline costs more than it did a few months ago.
When you've seen one gas pump, I say you've seen them all. But this
didn't stop one intrepid network from going to Europe to televise gas pumps
doing the same thing they do here. With microphones stuck in their faces, mostly
bewildered Europeans were asked how they felt about high gas prices. Since
Europe is used to high gas prices, these produced some interesting responses,
most of which seemed to imply the questioning reporter was demented.
But
still the anchors drone on, insisting we look at one more gas pump performing
its tedious duty with the dollars and cents going up at a fractionally higher
rate imperceptible to most home viewers. The coverage rarely goes deeper than
the usual ain't-it-awful lament with the additional comment that somebody must
be to blame. Major floods, building collapses, serial murders are sometimes
bumped for the latest live view of a gas pump. It has been enough to make us
long for more animated footage of people jumping up and down in front of Elian's
Miami bungalow.
It isn't considered news to coincidentally report that
gas prices are cheaper in America than anywhere in the industrial world. It is
simply too much to expect all these would-be Katie Courics to patiently explain
or even understand that in inflation-adjusted terms, gas prices are generally
cheaper than they ever have been in U.S. history, that the recent run-up in
prices has been balanced by stable or steeply declining prices over the past 15
years.
But if gasoline television is tedious, gasoline politics is
worse. You might think that George W. Bush would lay low on this issue because
he was an oil man; he comes from a state where they regularly pray out loud for
rain, football teams and higher oil prices. Instead, the Bush forces have blamed
Bill Clinton for higher gasoline prices, saying it just shows the administration
doesn't have a coherent energy policy.
To these people, having a
coherent oil policy means having a policy to permit oil exploration in every
park and arctic wilderness that can be reached by a bulldozer and a drill rig.
It does not mean higher fuel efficiency standards for the
trucks and SUVs that are driving up gas prices by burning the stuff like gas was
still 30 cents a gallon and OPEC had not yet been invented.
Some
Republicans briefly suggested a temporary suspension of state and federal gas
taxes as a remedy. But it didn't take long for them to figure out this would eat
into the revenues that support the lucrative highway spending that drives so
much of American politics.
Then, of course, there is the 565 million
barrels of oil sitting uselessly in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. If gas
prices were worth half the fuss the blond anchors suggest, isn't this just the
time to flood the market with oil that could be easily pumped from the reserve
into the refineries? This idea sort of died on the vine when people were
reminded that the petroleum reserve was created for a far more critical global
emergency, like a situation in which gas couldn't be had at any price.
The gas crisis seemed on the verge of boring us all to death when Saudi
Arabia gratuitously announced it was prepared to dump an additional 500,000
barrels of oil a day onto the world market. By the time this reaches U.S.
refineries, it should be enough to provide a significant price break around
Labor Day. This seemed to signal the Saudis' shrewd determination to keep prices
at levels that will not provoke unnecessary hysteria in its military guarantor,
the United States.
And that, folks, is in a nutshell why we fought the
Gulf War. When George W. Bush's father grandiloquently declared we were fighting
for "our way of life," what he really meant was that we were propping up a
feudal kingdom where they don't even let women drive cars so that brazen
American women -- men, too -- could go on driving their eight-cylinder,
mountain-climbing off-road toys over the paved slopes to the local mall.
- - - - - -
Robert Reno is a columnist for Newsday.
COLUMN: ROBERT RENO
LOAD-DATE:
July 17, 2000 
