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Feb 22/ 05: My Maryland is acting
up again
Md. Bill Would Charge Owners of Big SUVs More
Driving a super-sized sport utility vehicle on Maryland roads
could cost $750 more a year, under a bill being considered by Maryland
lawmakers. Delegate Bill Bronrott, a Montgomery County Democrat who also is
bringing bills this year to keep young drivers from using handheld cell
phones, is pushing legislation to require owners of SUVs that weigh more than
6,000 pounds to pay an annual $750 surcharge on their registration renewal
fee.
"This bill is not about pickup trucks, vans or your standard SUV," Bronrott
told fellow members of the House Environmental Matters Committee at a hearing
Tuesday. "It's about the largest, heaviest passenger vehicles that are the
least fuel efficient and the most toxic to our air, land and water."
With a name like that we ought expect no less than this
Lilliputian verve from Mister Delegate Bronrott. I wish he were but an oddity. If
unto himself, Bronrott would be a curious, even amusing Annapolis carnival show.
Sadly, he's advocating and provoking a good bundle of his constituents to a
view expressed weekly on their favorite broadcaster, NPR and its
Car Talk. The Mechanic Sages of Cambridge
loathe SUVs.
Yes, Click and Clack are a wonderful pair, and fun. But damned,
they can't stand other people having fun in their cars. For them, the automobile
is a mathematical equation with a sociological imprint so long as it's contained
to naming rights over the family Volvo or innocuous stories of rodent
intrusions. When cars do what cars do best, Car Talk takes on all the fright and
self-loathing of Gregg Easterbook and his horsepower rant (see entry
Jan/19,
with additional comments of Feb 5 &
Jan 28).
Literature long ago resolved the problem of the frighted
Slayers of SUVs, a click to which Delegate Bronrott has enlisted. These are part
Swift, part Cervantes, and part R. E. Raspe, author of the
The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
The Swift comes of their own self-description. Their monster
takes on proportions well beyond Bronrott's 6,000 lbs. In "The Hidden Life of
SUVs," by --Jack Hitt (Mother Jones, July/August 1999):
Any savvy dealer... will try to talk you up to
one of the latest behemoths, which have bloated to such Brobdingnagian
dimensions as to have entered the realm of the absurd.
In Hitt's mind, that is. Methings he's forgotten that Swift's
Brobdingnag was a joke. In that land every human wart, every human fault was
exaggerated to the size of giants. Yes, absurd, but a joke on us. Don Quixote,
of course, needed a crusade and found it everywhere as he set about slaying
windmills and the absurdity of his kind. The Baron Munchausen is a less powerful
story whose relevance is less for his fantastical misadventures -- which were
joyful and fun, none of which our SUV Brigade shares -- than for the Baron's
modern descendant, the medical syndrome that carries his name:
Parenthood Betrayed: The Dilemma of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
A Web of Deceit: The term "Munchausen syndrome by proxy" (MSBP) was
coined around twenty years ago, and hundreds of reports have appeared since
then. In most cases, a mother either claims that her child is sick, or she
goes even further to actually make the child sick. This "devoted" parent then
continually presents the child for medical treatment, all the while denying
any knowledge of the origin of the problem--namely, herself. As a result, MSBP
victims may undergo extraordinary numbers of lab tests, medication trials, and
even surgical procedures that aren't really needed. For example, by the age of
eight, Jennifer Bush [her story earlier in the article] had had more
than 40 operations, including the removal of much of her intestines. Other
children have scarcely experienced a day of their young lives without being
brought to the doctor's office or confined to the hospital. In the vast
majority of cases, the perpetrator is the mother and the victim an infant or
toddler.
The title of the disease is apt, if deprecatory of the flighty
but good hearted Baron. MSBP is nauseating:
The web of deceit the caregiver spins can be
buttressed by medical signs and symptoms that mislead the most skillful of
physicians. Their acting skills can match those of a veteran performer. For
instance, the MSBP perpetrator might induce "apnea" (a cessation of breathing)
by suffocating her child to the point of unconsciousness, then frantically
display the limp child to the hospital or clinic staff as the tears roll down
her cheeks. She may secretly place a drop of blood in the child's urine
specimen, then appear aghast at lab results that alarm the unsuspecting
physicians and nurses. Behind closed doors, she may scrub the child's skin
with oven cleaner to cause a baffling blistering rash that lasts for months.
Since it may take many years of illness for doctors finally to arrive at the
truth, it should not be surprising that this form of child abuse has a
mortality rate of nine percent.
Would that the critics of the SUV have the power of story and
irony of Swift, Cervantes, and Rasp. Instead, they are their own caricature --
and a dangerous, sick falsehood of fantastical danger and straw men whom they
must slay.
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