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RALPH NADER'S LATEST CRASH STUDY
Suddenly, overnight, everyone hates him. Ralph Nader. The man who, most of my life, has told us which of our cars will blow up, why our water tastes funny, and how come are children are coming out with flippers and two foreheads. It's all turned around because this time he's gone too far and robbed us of our lesser of two evils. Damn that guy. It should have been a very simple election – the same arrangement as usual, our two richest candidates going head-to-head, a son of a senator versus the son of a president, and not this son of a bitch. He must have been having some kind of ego trip. Yeah. Making things difficult for humble, selfless men such as Bush and Gore and Lyndon LaRouche. Nader grabbed all this attention by telling us the system is rigged – which of course, we knew. He also told us a lot of other things we knew but didn't hear anywhere else, and although it wasn't the most convenient time for a third party to arise, when is it ever? Besides, Nader commanded such veneration that we believed him. We always do. The thing with Ralph Nader is, he has never lied to us. Ralph first appeared on our cultural horizon in the mid-1960s as a rumpled, 32-year-old lawyer and freelance writer who published a rather technical, automotive study called "Unsafe At Any Speed." It didn't even sell particularly well at first. But it pissed off General Motors so badly that executives there tried to discredit its author by sending out beautiful women to seduce and blackmail the poor little fellow. Picture that: Some mid-1960s Jane Mansfield wannabe, sitting on Ralph Nader's lap at the bus station, and getting that horrible look from him that he always has – sort of a cross between an Amherst graduate student and Dracula. Back in those days, Detroit built some really cool-looking cars. The Corvair, for example – God, was it gorgeous. Racy, futuristic, as if a mechanical alien life form that came to our planet knowing just how to make drivers everywhere feel like TV detectives. The only problem, Nader pointed out in his book, was that when you took a sharp corner, the car – for complicated reasons that had something to do with how the rear suspension let the wheels buckle inward – would flip over and kill you. That was around 1964, when GM spent only $1 million of its $1.7 billion in profits – around half of one-tenth of one percent – to fund external automobile accident research. The general presumption was that if you got into an accident, your own idiocy was to blame anyway. So for better or worse, Nader helped popularize the notion that a lot of what happens to you might be someone else's fault. After that, Nader branched out to investigate corporate abuse, natural gas pipelines, radiation emissions from television sets and X-rays, and hazardous working conditions in coal mines. Then he hired a bunch of college students, who promptly ripped the Federal Trade Commission a new one. That this agency does anything at all now is largely to Nader's credit. Later groups that he helped found reported on and lobbied over lax government oversight of our food, our air, our water, our banks. Our nursing homes, our crops, our land, our real estate developers, our mental health centers. And that brings us up to about 1972. Say... Why couldn't he have been the Democratic nominee? Well, because by now, people were already calling him "reckless." What he was wrecking at this point was the free-market system – by demanding standards and fairness, and adding layers of federal bureaucracy to our happy, musical shopping experience. Anyway, we jump ahead 30 years, and Nader has helped found a swarm of advocacy groups around the country to help curb the power and abuses of corporations. That idea, plus an emphasis on the environment, was ultimately to form the core of his presidential campaign. He also unapologetically supported affirmative action, wanted to eliminate the death penalty, called for an end to the War on Drugs, campaigned for alternative energy sources, and favored gun control, an equal rights amendment, a higher minimum wage, cuts in the military, an end to nuclear power, and a lot of other things that people haven't talked about since the Carter administration. He also, I should add, was said to have promoted a less friendly attitude towards Israel. Old Ralph, still reckless. Do I agree with all that stuff? Some of it. A lot of it. Do I think his goals are realistic? Pardon me while I choke on my own bile-flecked gales of derisive laughter. Do I find merit in his complaints, and I am I glad somebody finally articulated them in our current post-Reagan era of corporate lock-step? Yes. Very much so. Did I vote for him? No. So he ran, and because of him, Gore apparently has lost. It seems that for the next four years we'll have a president who – though he will probably exceed everyone's low expectations of him, as this particular individual tends to do – represents a set of ideas that most people voted against, and who won't know much about the environment or the underclasses because frankly he really doesn't give a crap about them. Gore, as vaguely Nixonian as he is, would have done better things with the office. But outside of that, Nader succeeded brilliantly. Did Democrats want to galvanize their party? Did they want to inspire the sort of passion that could regain Congress in two years? Well look around. People who wouldn't have pulled Gore out from in front of a double-decker bus three weeks ago now want to go to war for him. Everybody is talking about the supreme importance of one or two or three votes. I haven't seen Democrats do this much soul-searching since Garrison Keillor got divorced. As for Nader, he's used to having people hate him. He'll survive, and he'll still be pulling our sorry asses out of the fire for a couple more decades before passing on to his own unique chapter in the history books. His name is mud for a couple of years. But he is one of the greatest citizens this country has ever produced, and from time to time, I'm not entirely sure we deserve him. * * * * * * * * * * * * * For a much longer and more boring history of Ralph Nader – from which I stole all my facts and even a couple of entire sentences – go to http://www.nader.org/history/. As you can tell by the web address, his own people wrote it, so take it for what it's worth. His campaign positions are, I believe, still posted at http://www.votenader.com/issues/issue_summaries.html.
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