Biking Back to the Future
In one decade, William Greider wrote three excellent books on three defining issues of our time—money, failing politics, and corporate globalization. I should add a fourth. Until recently, I’d forgotten in that time he also wrote a book on the military industrial complex, and maybe there’s no issue of greater immediate importance as the National Security State’s latest misadventure in the Ukraine goes tits-up.
Greider started in journalism as a writer, then an editor at the Washington Post. He left the Post to write books and “save my soul.” I got to know Bill twenty years ago, developing a wonderful intellectual friendship around politics and the state of the world.
Best was after all he had previously taught me, I was able to teach him a few things. The biggest lesson I was able to convey was what a low and dishonorable lot American media had become. When I first started pointing this out, Bill's journalistic back would go up in defense, “Oh, they just got that wrong.”
I’d reply, “No Bill, it’s deliberate.”
So, I made a point of sending him things over the course of a few months. Incontestable examples of the NYT, Post, and all the others, deliberately misleading, call it lying, about a given issue in support of whatever vile rotten cause they currently pushed.
One day, Bill called saying, “Well I guess you're right about this.” Then he took a breath adding, “By the time everyone else figures it out, you won't get any credit,” simultaneously laughing with a deep cackle sculpted from too many years smoking filter-less Camels. In the years after that, he'd refer to me now and then as a good teacher. Maybe, the highest compliment I've ever been given.
In the years since, I've had these Greider moments, where things I've harped on for a long time start gaining acceptance. The most recent was today. I almost spit a mouthful of coffee all over my keyboard. The FT ran a piece on bicycles as part of a real transportation solution!
It begins,
“In a stunning photograph from Shanghai in 1991, clusters of cycling commuters stream across a bridge. The only motorised vehicles to be seen are two buses. That was China in the 1990s: a ‘Bicycle Kingdom’ where 670 million people owned pushbikes. Chinese rulers were then still following the lead of Deng Xiaoping, who defined prosperity as a ‘Flying Pigeon bicycle in every household’.”
I had experienced this first hand thinking I had seen the future. In 1992, I bicycled down one of the main roads of Beijing. Six or seven columns of bikes going in each direction, the few vehicles, mostly buses, alternating down one lane in the center. At this point, they were just finishing the first ring road, a beltway circumnavigating Bejing. There's now seven ring roads around Beijing filled with people sitting in traffic, shoulder to shoulder, not moving — call it progress.
The Chinese were not quite smart enough to stand up to the American bankers. After all, David Rockefeller’s Chase and the rest were quite generously dismantling industry across America and rebuilding it across China. How else did a Rockefeller define development but car culture? The Chinese should have said thanks, but no thanks.
Amusingly, the article has an old Brit, white man’s burden take. While bikes are part of the transportation solution, they are a Global South solution. In an amusing paragraph, the author writes,
“In lower-income countries, bikes tend to be stigmatised as poor people’s vehicles, whereas in rich cities they get stigmatised as hipster toys. Many people in poorer megacities dream of living in Los Angeles and owning an SUV. For now, though, they can spend hours a day stuck in motionless status symbols that sometimes cost a third of their income, especially with soaring petrol prices.”
The first sentence unfortunately true enough, the last however a bit confusing. I can't quite tell if he's talking about people sitting in their gas guzzling, income depleting, motionless status symbols in Lagos or LA.
Overall it’s a fine piece, getting to the nut the world needs to start designing and redesigning away from automobile infrastructure, and that’s no energy transition, it’s an economic transformation.
Of course one article does not a trend make. Further up the page, a FT headline blares,
“Ford to invest $3.7bn in Midwest US manufacturing amid electric vehicle push”
I hear Greider hardily laughing.