As a child, my favorite Walt Disney movie was Pollyanna. Sorry she was an orphan, of course, but the prospect of being ensconced in Aunt Polly’s astonishing Victorian house looked, to my young eyes, too good to be true. Of course, that was the hallmark of any Disney movie of the time- or Disney anything including Disneyland, for that matter- an idealized image of turn of the century America that did not include things like, for instance, horse manure.
But let’s not soil poor Pollyanna with horse manure. It is, actually, Pollyanna’s ‘glad game’ that I’m in mind of. For you poor souls that don’t know about it, or know why an optimist is sometimes unfairly dubbed a Pollyanna, she was, you might find interesting to know, given to looking on the bright side of everything. Pollyanna would, as the old joke would have it, ask for a shovel and then dig like mad when confronted with a manure pile, as, presumably, where there is dung, there will be a horse. On yesterday morning’s news show, a psychologist was featured who took the view that our present morass of economic problems was made worse by our general perception that they are problems- what exacerbates any economic woe is our societal refusal, as it were, to indulge in the glad game. Well, of course, it is hard to feel glad about $5 per gallon unleaded gasoline, isn’t it? I am, though. Frankly, I wish it were something closer to the $11 per gallon our friends in England are paying. As I got off the San Francisco Municipal Railway this morning and walked up Sansome Street to our Jackson Square galleries, I had to dodge a half dozen people who were so, shall we say, plump, they impeded the passage of everyone on the sidewalk. If you haven’t noticed, we are replete with fat people in this country and why? As a nation, the private passenger car is still seen as the only reasonable way to get from one place to another. Consequently, we seldom walk and get only the least possible amount of exercise, piling into our cars for even the shortest trips, usually to the grocery store to stock up on frozen pizza, potato chips, and Coca-Cola.
Don’t get me wrong, though- I’m not criticizing Coca-Cola. Although it has been a significant fellow traveler along with automobiles in making us a nation of porkers, I am glad the corn that is used to make its major ingredient- impossible to metabolize, spare tire around the middle producing high fructose corn syrup- is now being price-co-opted into the manufacture of ethanol, a renewal energy resource. Doubtless Coke will be forced to return to reliance on its traditional sweetener, sugar, resulting in, I’m glad to say, a return to boom times for the moribund sugar industry in Hawaii.
But, of course, ethanol cannot be produced in unlimited supply, and its use in transportation fuel will only function to moderate the rate of increase of fuel costs- not make them any lower. And this brings us around to the point of the beginning- they shouldn’t be any lower, as the increased cost will, at long last, force fat Americans out of their cars and onto the sidewalks, I’m glad to say. Horse manure? I prefer to indulge in the Glad game.