The New York Times, May 20, 2001


Drill, Grill and Chill
 by MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON - We want big. We want fast. We want far. We want now. We want
345 horsepower in a V-8 engine and 15 miles per gallon on the highway.

We drive behemoths. We drive them alone. This country was not built on
H.O.V. lanes.

We don't have limits. We have liberties.

If we don't wear our seat belts, it doesn't matter, because we have air
bags. If the air bags don't deploy, it doesn't matter, because our cars are
so beefy, we'll never get bruised. If we need to widen the streets for our
all- wheel drives, we will. If we need to reinforce all the bridges in the
country, so that they don't buckle and collapse under our 5,800-pound
S.U.V.'s, our engineers will do that.

We'll bake the earth. We'll brown & serve it, sauté it, simmer it, sear it,
fondue it, George-Foreman-grill it. (We invented the Foreman grill.) We
might one day bring the earth to a boil and pull it like taffy. (We
invented taffy.)

If rising seas obliterate the coasts, our marine geologists will sculpt new
ones and Hollywood will get bright new ideas for disaster movies. If we get
charred by the sun, our dermatologists will replace our skin.

If the globe gets warmer, we'll turn up the air-conditioning. (We invented
air-conditioning.) We'll drive faster in our gigantic, air-conditioned cars
to the new beaches that our marine geologists create.

We will let our power plants spew any chemicals we deem necessary to fire
up our Interplaks, our Krups, our Black & Deckers and our Fujitsu
Plasmavisions.

We will drill for oil whenever and wherever we please. If tourists don't
like rigs off the coast of Florida, they can go fly fishing in Wyoming. We
won't be deterred by a few Arctic terns. We don't care about caribou. We
don't care for cardigans. Give us our 69 degrees, winter and summer. Let
there be light - no timers, no freaky- shaped long-life bulbs. (We invented
the light bulb.)

We want our refrigerators cold and our freezers colder. Bring on the freon.
Banish those irritating toilets that restrict flow. When we flush, we flush
all the way.

We will perfect the dream of nuclear power. We will put our toxic waste
wherever we want, whenever we waste it. We have whole states with nothing
better to do than serve as ancestral burial grounds for our effluvium. It
can fester in those wide open spaces for thousands of years.

We will have the biggest, baddest missiles, and we will point them in any
direction we like, across the galaxies, through eternity, forever and ever.

We will thrust as many satellites as we want into outer space, and we will
surround them with a firewall of weapons for their protection.

We will guarantee broadband and fast connections to the Internet. We will
not permit anybody, anywhere, at any time to threaten the delivery of all
the necessities to computers, Palm Pilots and BlackBerrys: stock quotes,
sports scores, real estate listings, epicurean.com recipes, porn. (O.K., so
we didn't invent porn.)

By arming space, and protecting satellites, we ensure life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness - our 500 TV channels drawn from the ether.

We will secure the inalienable right of every citizen driving by himself in
his big car to be guided by a global positioning system. Nobody should have
to call in advance for directions to a party when the satellite can show
the way.

We will modify food in any way we want and send it to any country we see
fit at prices that we and we alone determine in the cargo ships we choose
at the time we set.

Our international banking arm - the World Bank and the I.M.F. - will
support whatever dictatorships suit us best.

We will fly up any coast of any nation on earth with any plane filled with
any surveillance equipment and top guns that we possess.

We will build superduperjumbo jets so Brobdingnagian that runways will be
crushed under their weight at the most congested airports in the history of
aviation. (We invented aviation.)

We will buy, carry, conceal and shoot firearms whenever and wherever we
want, as is our constitutionally guaranteed right. (We invented the
Constitution.) We will kill any criminal we want, by lethal injection or
electrocution. (We invented electricity.)

We are America.

 Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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We will own and copyright all cultures, codifying the Chief Wahoo and the
Dakota truck and the Jeep Cherokee and the Princess Pocahontas and the
Crazy Horse Malt Liquor.  We will all be Native Americans (we invented
America) and prove it with dream-catchers and plastic-beaded headdresses
hanging from our metal gas-eating war-ponies' rear-view mirror.  We will
find the indians' gene for resisting cancer and it will profit the world
(but especially us) while they will continue to die of diabetes and suicide
because we can't cure all of society's ills all at once.