Diana The Mythic Princess

I’m a republican to my bones, and the notion of blue blood makes my red blood boil. However I was agog at the extraordinary collective grief that occurred world-wide when Diana of Wales died. 

I wrote this piece in 1997 as an attempt to understand the phenomenon. 

It is the 17^th anniversary of her death today.

Diana The Mythic Princess

The stunning phenomenon which united two and a half billion people watching the planetary theatre of Princess Diana’s funeral, (September 1997) left many questions in its wake. The masses of women and men sharing in a catharsis of mourning approached the mythical and mystical realms of experience. The intense flood of grief aroused by Diana’s death was intensely real, yet any intimacy we felt with Diana’s death, was in fact illusionary. She was a woman who had become a mirror for millions, absorbing and reflecting not only our fantasies, but our deeper selves.

We live in a time of profound alienation, cut off from many traditional spiritual resources. Market forces rule, custom dictates belief only in the ‘real’ and the exploitable. People have become bereft of faith in the spiritual. Media-market- driven-make-believe has become our heaven. Celebrities are a focus and prey for ordinary folk’s dreams and yearnings. Film actors are like stars in our spiritual firmament; a decadent live Elvis, dead becomes a religion; royalty become gods. Celebrities and their cult of glamour, dwell in the place that once gods and goddesses inhabited. Diana was the First Lady in residence within the pantheon of stars that the media has made our Olympus in the late twentieth century.

Diana’s cult whilst she was living was a complex and fascinating one, because it contained so many contradictions. Poor little rich girl – was she media victim or wily manipulator, party animal, or Our Lady of the Minefields? Her many paradoxes, plus her charisma, fed her iconography in the tabloids. In life, she was seen as a fairy-tale princess with all the trials and travail that a true heroine has to suffer and overcome. She endeared herself to peoples’ hearts with her ability to speak out about her bulimia, her lack of confidence and her betrayal by the Prince. Just as fairy-tale demands, flawed, yet pure of heart, she became a true princess, not merely a royal one.

A ballet shoe tied to the railing outside Kensington Palace was inscribed “You were a Cinderella at the Ball, and now you are a Sleeping Beauty.” Alas a Cinderella with no fairy godmother, a Snow White with no seven dwarfs. No magic wands or supportive home-help; this fairy tale did not live happily ever after.

Her pink and gold beauty was united briefly with the dark and exotic playboy ‘prince’, who had stepped into her life straight out of Arabian Nights. They were flying high on the magical Mercedes carpet across Paris, City of Love. But woe, it was driven by bloody Death, a drunken driver. The Grim Reaper mowed her down at the 13^th pillar. The shock waves of her entering that tunnel and into the black void stopped all our hearts.

A light went out in the world and the heavens corresponded with a solar eclipse. Diana left the media circus, the fairy glamour, the soap opera of her life and entered the Underworld, the domain of myth.

She was the First Lady of the World. She is now the Lady of the Lake. Her resting place at Althorp, on an island in the middle of the lake is mythical in its setting. The Lady of the lake is a beautiful and powerful Celtic myth which offers us ways through and beyond Diana’s death, to find meaning in her life. 

Her gift to us is Excalibur, the magical sword. In esoteric teachings, the sword represents the element of Air, the new breath, the word, the pen the power of thought and communication. Excalibur is the promise of renewal. We must grasp the clear sword of focus, the challenge of new goals and new directions.

Of course it takes a hero to seize Excalibur from the Lady’s disembodied hand – to transform and transcend our emotions. And yes, we can all be heroes in a spiritual sense, if we strive to rise clean, pure and refreshed from the healing waters of grief. We can become the Lady’s heroes in a quest to overcome the very forces, the human Diana was battling with all her life. Not only the causes of Hospices, Aids, and Land Mines, but the need for us to revolutionize the sexism of spousal abuse, the exploitation and commodification of youth and beauty, and the self-serving invasive tactic of a competitive and amoral media. Daunting tasks indeed, which only a collective Excalibur, wielded by heroes united in service of a greet Queen of Love can undertake.

She named herself Princess of Hearts. “The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test” (taken from the hymn sung at Diana’s request during her wedding and again at her funeral) was a guiding principle in her life. Love was a major link in the relationship the public forged with her in their personal lives. She died with her faith still intact in love, sweet love.

In the land of myth, the great Queen of Heaven and Sea – Aphrodite - was the Goddess of Love. She is a dominating archetype at play in Diana’s life. Aphrodite was attended by the three Graces – Joyous, Flowering and Radiance. They dance through Diana’s style, her caprice, her gaiety. Diana’s graces enchanted and fascinated as she flirted with mass audiences. Look through Aphrodite’s mirror to see Diana’s carelessness of consequences, her wealth and extravagance, her vivid brilliant beauty. Thalia the Flowering, who crowned Aphrodite with flowers and casts rose petals beneath her feet, was manifoldly present outside Kensington palace. It was she who moved through the London crowds showering flowers onto Diana’s funeral chariot.

Aphrodite rules laughter, joy and little children.

Diana’s candour and child-like charm turned her into a conqueror of hearts. The Goddess of love and beauty was married to Hephaestos, the unattractive, crippled god, who is patron saint of all ungraceful but rich men everywhere. He is ugly, but his jewels are not and he pleases his wife with his gifts. He demands their return when the marriage turns nasty. Unbonnie Prince Charlie was in an Olympian marriage to the Goddess of Love! When she was caught in the web of adultery, we laughed at him and wept for her.

But our modern culture has an uneasy and troubled relationship with the Goddess. We have built no honest temple to Aphrodite.

We want her gifts – more love, more money, more beauty, more pleasure – yet our cultural epidemic of low self-esteem, sex without love, work without joy, are gauges of how she languishes amongst us.

Venus de Milo, armless cold marble locked in the Louvre, names our psychic condition. Incapable of embrace or sensuous touch of the fingers, she entices, but cannot have or hold. Tragedy stalked our most memorable pop Venus icon Marilyn Monroe, known for her allure AND her unhappiness. The antique goddess Aphrodite however, is NOT a tragic princess of great beauty yoked to dashed hopes, poignant dissatisfaction, personal trauma.

In a time where politics, legislation and culture are dominated by men, and all the major religions exclude goddesses – I suspect Aphrodite and her immortal sisters are angry with us. In myth, mortals are punished by the gods if we dishonour them. As if to prompt us to learn to honour ALL the needs of our psyches, the Fates decree tragedy and catharsis. The extraordinary reverence so many humans showed Diana in her death is perhaps part of a new homage we will be prepared to render to Aphrodite – to our heart chakras. Let the impulse for renewal that springs from the sadness of her death, be one of daily worship and celebration of the vital, sacred need we all have for ‘her ways of gentleness and all her paths of peace.” (again taken from the hymn sung at her wedding and her funeral)

The Goddess has many faces, and the mortal Diana was the namesake of another great archetype, striding through our ancestral consciousness. Diana or Artemis as she was known to the Greeks, is the virginal Goddess of the Moon. Diana of Wales was born with her Sun in the Moon’s sign of Cancer, and died in the dark phase of the Moon. Artemis, who has become a shadowy goddess in modern times, is the crescent aspect of the Moon and her chaste purity has been partly absorbed into the cult of the Virgin Mary. Yet Mary, major icon of Western Womanhood for 2000 years, is a curious hybrid of Virgin and Mother. Certainly Princess Diana born under the Great Mother’s sign of Cancer, played out her role of divine mother in providing a future King of England and a spare heir. Her obvious love of children, her humanitarian work and instinctive charisma she incorporated into the role of Mother of the Dispossessed, are dominant strands woven into her complex cult, feeding her star saint status.

Her Madonna was a perfect counterpoint to the vulgar American pop version. Diana’s deification startlingly resembles the Spanish and Italian baroque excess of Mater Della Rosa. The universal convulsion of grief which the world experienced as the Sun was eclipsed by the Moon, in the zodiacal sign of Virgo the Virgin, could easily become a Mexican wave of Madonna-Diana worship. Surely it won’t be long before people make their pilgrimage to her burial place to be miraculously cured by the waters. The Lady’s ghost will haunt us in many forms – apparitions in the London subways, shrines in hospices and leprosy Missions. Dying as she did at the peak of her youth and beauty, catapults her into the stratosphere of Divinity.

Diana – Lover, Mother, but above all Diana the Virgin. The title Virgin signifies ‘she who belongs to herself’ and Diana/Artemis is the representation of pure femininity that is defined neither by relationship to a lover, child, father or husband. In our culture femininity is rarely represented in the absolute, but always in relation to some other reality in the masculine world. Female virginity seems to exist for us only when it introduces the transformation into a “real” woman – as if femininity could never be complete in itself. 

Shy Di, the virginal kindergarten teacher was transformed by her marriage made in media-heaven, into the quintessential woman. Strangely though, even after the wedding, motherhood, extra-marital affairs, she still remains the shy faun – the ingénue – in our mind’s eye. 

Diana’s beauty was indeed Venusian – the English Rose with an ancient Greek profile. Yet Artemis is a beautiful Goddess too. Diana Spencer’s beauty had an athletic, androgynous quality and she carried herself with the psychic solitariness of a Virgin Queen.

Princess Diana consistently chose fashion and music and Mediterranean cruises over hunting, horses and dogs – Aphrodite over Artemis. But if her style was always Venusian – warm and sensual – her attempts to get away from it all are pure Diana. Escaping the ritualised killing of local deer and birdlife in the cold Balmoral forests, to holiday on the warm beaches of the Caribbean, is still to honour Artemis’ demands – to seek retreat, to know self.

Independence, solitude and privacy are necessary prerequisites in Artemis’ domain.

But how to defend her privacy against an impossible invasion on all fronts? Goddess of the Hunt, Artemis was never violated.

Her story tells of Actaeon, the hunter voyeur who wanted to contemplate the splendour of his goddess whom no man had ever touched. Artemis caught him spying and without pity. She transformed him into a deer and he was devoured by his own hunting dogs.

Guardian of Adolescence, the Virgin Forest, the Sacred Grove, fierce Artemis sanctifies all the wild, undomesticated, intact, physical and psychological spaces in nature and in ourselves. But this goddess has been grievously wronged – dishonoured – in our culture. Men and especially women who are so closely associated with nature, have lost the power to defend a sacred territory, interior or exterior, physical or psychic. Nature is universally exploitable and commercialised. Women and girls have become violable and utilisable.

In olden days, our society had strict controls in place to defend holy Artemis. When Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets, the Tom who peeped, daring to defile her beauty, was stricken blind and driven into exile by angry villagers. Today the Peeping Toms, the men on motorbikes with computerised cameras and satellite-linked mobile phones, the high-tech hounds of fame, break all taboos.

When the deep drives of a goddess are repressed, distorted or actively violated, she will take her revenge. Artemis is a savage deity; her arrow is cruel, sure and swift. Blood sacrifice is part of her myth. Diana Spencer had been an innocent virgin cynically used and sacrificed to the Palace of Patriarchy. Once she left the chilly bosom of the Windsor Establishment, she became prey to the commodification of fame in a global media economy. She became ‘the most hunted woman in the world” and as if to propitiate an untrammelled media’s voracious appetites, she was hunted to her death. The paparazzi not only became her nemesis, but defiled her death like jackals feeding off carrion.

Diana’s oh-so-modern death was not a willing sacrifice such as Joan of Arc’s heroic death, but a hideous and pathetic mauling. The terrible Hecate, who personifies the dark of the Moon, let loose her death-dealing dogs and extracted her bloody revenge on humankind. The angry goddess showed her dark and cruel face, leaving us mortals in eerie silence.

Artemis, sister to us all, must be appeased, if we are to be redeemed by her namesake’s sacrificial death. Diana’s brother swore to vigilantly preserve her children’s right to privacy, to sacred space.

 

Can we too honour Artemis in our lives? Is it possible to defend the Goddess of Virgin Femininity from the rape of the Emperor’s mercenaries? Will we become protectors of her sacred groves?

Written in September 1997

Bibliography

Pagan Meditations. The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis and Hestia by Ginette Paris. Translated from the French by Gwendolyn Moore Spring Publications Inc Texas. 1989.

The Living Planets. Venus. By Dana Gerhardt in The Mountain Astrologer. August/September 1997.

Breaking Bad

I was particularly taken with the phrase Culture of Belligerence – that was coined by a American blogger that I linked in my last post. I think Robert Platt Bell fingers some significant cultural shift that has been occurring for some time. He mentions that people don’t seem to recognise that there has been a fundamental attitudinal change from one generation to the next. The culture has been breaking in new ways of being bad. He likens us to that frog in slowly boiling water, who won’t jump out because he doesn’t realise he’s being cooked.

Well I’m a she-frog and perceive with maddening regularity, just how much has changed over the last 30 years. I wish I could jump out of the pot, but it’s my culture too and I’d rather rail and rant. I’ll croak till I croak.

The changes are enormous. The rat race has ramped up under an unregulated free market ethos; the ‘politics of attack’ dish up insider dirt to discredit any opposition; the media feeds us a voyeuristic diet of sensation instead of balanced and holistic news; violence, murder and misogyny have become normalised on the huge array of screens that interface this brave new world; bullying in schools is commonplace; a culture of binge-drinking amongst young women and men accompanied by a rape culture is horribly real.

I suggest many of these cultural changes are due to the Empire of global corporate capitalism striking back against the enormous inroads made by the Movements of Feminism, Environmentalism and Indigenous peoples’ during the 1960’s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Peoples’ Power really did shift the collective global consciousness and the power elites did not like it.

I was in the vanguard of the second wave of Feminism that hit the western world during those earlier times. We were armed with an idealism that believed we could make a difference. However, entrenched and institutionalised sexism is hard to budge and has bitten back like a Hydra - with two heads erupting from any one head that’s been chopped off.

The cultural backlash we have been experiencing since Women’s Liberation started smashing the Hydra’s heads of patriarchy has spread its poisonous vapours far and wide, terrorising our societal landscapes. Despair, inertia and disempowerment overcome both young and old.

The Hydra’s Heads Multiply

In the ‘70s we did a good job of hacking off the head of the age-old idea that men by biological right should dominate women. Nowadays, the dehumanisation of women by objectifying and sexualising the female form in popular culture seems to have increased, not decreased.

Gender roles which value submission in women, and power in men seem to be constantly in one’s face – billboards, TV, movies, video games etc etc.  We watch television shows that have the hero chain-sawing up the innocent young woman, and we’re encouraged to root for the guy behind the saw. 

The 1950’s was tough for women, but back then such casual violence and vicious misogyny, was not accessible in any mainstream visual form. Now we wean children on this kind of image. Not to mention the daily, weekly, monthly doses we are force-fed of domestic violence. We set up Women’s Refuges and Rape Crisis shelters in the 1970’s – today the need just grows and grows as their public funding dwindles. The assault we commit against our children in the form of child poverty and all its many guises is shameful.

The following statistics come courtesy of The Auckland Women’s Centre:-

1 in 5 NZ women are sexually assaulted by a man in their lifetime. Young Maori women are almost twice as likely to experience sexual violence.

1 in 3 women will experience psychological or physical abuse from their partners during their lifetime.

1 in 4 girls (compared to 1 in 10 boys) experience sexual abuse during their childhood.

Our courts have moved away from the analysis underpinning the Domestic Violence Act 1995, which recognised the dynamics of male power and control in domestically violent situations.

For every 1000 incidents of sexual violence only 100 are reported and only 8 perpetrators are convicted.

In the 1970’s we demanded Equal Pay for equal work.

In 2014, NZ women are paid on the average 13% less than men.

On average women in NZ spend twice as long per day on unpaid work than men.

Of the top 100 companies in NZ only 11% have female directors.

44% of women earn less than a Living Wage of $18.40.

Where is anything like Pay Equity – or even talk of it any political party - which we also demanded so long ago?!

Sex-role stereotyping was on our agenda then.

Today, pink for girls and blue for boys not to mention that dead duck of Women are from Venus and Men from Mars underlines many a ‘serious’ parental discussion in playgroups and schools. Seriously?!

Both upbringing (culture) and innate biological difference matter in social behaviours, but when we really examine gender-role differences, research has continually shown that nurture wins hands down over nature. For example it has been revealed that gendered attitudes to competition emerge at a young age. But research also shows that the stereotype of girls being averse to competition can be broken by something as simple as single-sex schooling. Examining extremely different societies, the research is pretty compelling. Amongst the patriarchal Maasai who ‘treat their women like donkeys’ men were more likely to be competitive. But in the matrilineal Khasi society women were more competitive than both Khasi AND Maasai men.

(From the Economics of Just about anything by Andrew Leigh)

If you put girls in pink and treat ’em different, they will grow up different than the blue boys. It all depends on what the larger society values, how women – and men - will turn out.

The culture of belligerence, has warped our collective reason. We have created an ultra-machismo, dumbed-down kind of world, where male heroes are measured by the size of their muscles, and not their brains, by the size of their guns and how many people they can kill, or stuff they can blow-up.

Worship Worthy?!

Being tough, mean, intimidating is the new cool. We are raising our children, boys and girls, in the art of bullying and intimidation. We are carefully nurturing them to be competitive and misogynist. Yikes, it would be funny if it weren’t tragic.

Competition is continually glorified.

Through a steady stream of propaganda from all media outlets, the male sports section of our communities is given pride of place. Testosterone-ridden games we are told, define our sense of nationhood.

Corporate workplaces reward aggressive behaviours rather than positive teaching behaviours. Workplace culture fosters “hardening up” and preaches that you are weak, if you don’t want to work ridiculously long hours.

If we go on telling ourselves the collective myth that to survive we need to be profit-driven, aggressive, hostile, only out for ourselves – we get what we’ve got. If we were more co-operative, tolerant of cultural difference and welcomed women’s voices and experience to be part of the public commons, then we would all change.

Herakles and the Hydra

So I call this fiercely competitive macho culture we live in, the Hydra - the patriarchy that feminists described and fought so many years ago. If we don’t sever, sear and stopper its multiplying monstrous heads we will all die from its poisonous venom. In the original Greek story the nine-headed Hydra was a female serpent who lived in a swamp and was a guardian of the Underworld. It seems to me we are already living in a hell of sorts, if we allow video games that award points to children for shooting prostitutes in real 3-D. Where punters, like mesmerised mice before the glare of the snake about to eat them, consume stuff like the TV series Breaking Bad.

Haindl Tarot

The Wizards Tarot

I am switching sexes in my metaphor. Women have to become the wily Herakles in their battle against the machismo Hydra. One of the beast’s heads was immortal, so can we ever win? Herakles did - with the help of his young nephew. Generations can unite and only with whanau can we ever achieve a peaceful, just and cooperative society.

Let’s rally and surf the wave of History into Herstory.

S.U.Vs - Rage against the Machine!

I’ve always lived in the central fringe of whichever city I’m in. I like having access to libraries, theatres, cinemas, the universities, the parks and green spaces. Having had the great good fortune of living through decades of peace, I have been able to enjoy all the cultural benefits that city living offers.

However during my lifetime, a different kind of war – more invisible, albeit just as violent as traditional war - has emerged through the flimsy barricades of peace. A war that was heralded in 1962 by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and has been rampaging against the natural world we call the environment, virtually unchecked to this day.

 

The big guns of applied science driven by an aggressive global capitalism have ploughed through our urban and rural landscapes as well as our stomachs, lungs, hearts and minds. Its major artillery is an irrational belief system based on unlicensed growth and the fool notion that mankind (I use this term advisedly) is a kind of supreme unique being amongst the immensity of life lived through the revolving eons on planet Earth. Lords of the universe syndrome we might call it. Others might call it ‘shitting in one’s own nest”.

I came to Auckland in 1969 when New Zealand was on the cusp of great change. Just like me, the city’s landscape has changed a lot. Ponsonby, Freemans Bay, Kingsland, used to be predominantly working class, but then incomes were more equal so rich and poor co-existed in the same suburbs.

Once considered a slum and planned to be demolished

Pacific and Maori people lived side-by-side with Pakeha families. Children walked to school, house prices were affordable for families who saved and money wasn’t worshipped as an almighty god.

During the 1980s the great gentrification began. We called them the Yuppies - consumers with disposable money and social climbing pretensions. They began to move in and displaced the older and poorer inhabitants. They began their redecorating, changing the face of these areas. It’s lovely to have the houses done up and cared for, as so many of them are heritage, and like our trees and green spaces should be respected and honoured. But house prices have reached insane prices that only rich white folks (or wealthy immigrants) can afford. Peering into the future’s crystal ball makes me shudder. My neighbourhood’s once beautiful variegated, multi-cultural mix has been overridden by those who obviously value consumerism and an individualistic conservatism. They paint their houses anodyne beige or white with grey roofs. And surprise, surprise they all drive those damn SUVs.

The streets are narrow and hilly. They live in the city. Why do they buy a huge ‘jeep’ designed to be used on rough surfaces, to drive round the neighbourhood? One driver to each oversize machine congests every school’s surrounding streets, as the children are dropped off and picked up. Why don’t they walk their children to school?  Why not use hybrid or small cars, bikes or even – heaven forbid – public transport? What is it about living in balance with other humans and their/our environment that they don’t understand?

In the war against planetary health, SUVs are the armoured tanks of the conquering army.

In the 1980’s SUVs made up one in 50 new car purchases – now they account for one in three new cars. This is a massive change in our car fleet. The latest news is that over the last 18 months new car sales are ever-increasing. The number of vehicles sold during July was the highest in 29 years and the strongest selling segment of all vehicles sold was the sale of Sports Utility Vehicles.

The reasons for driving SUVs are overwhelmingly irrational and impractical. I would love to see statistics that show how many of these inner-city Auckland road-hogs actually drive on gravel roads or in wintry conditions of snow and ice, where a four wheel drive actually would bring a safety advantage.

For at least 2 decades SUVs were notorious for their centre of gravity that made the vehicles more prone to rollover accidents than lower vehicles, especially if the SUV left the road or in emergency manoeuvres. I believe the bodies of SUVs have recently become more aerodynamic, so they don’t have this same rollover factor to the marked extent they had previously. However their top-heaviness is ludicrously ugly and tall cars do not handle well. Their sheer size and weight keeps their fuel economy poor. Maintenance of course is highly expensive.

People aren’t buying the gas guzzlers because they are fuel-efficient – presumably those that purchase have money to burn and don’t care enough about the effects they might have on their shared environment.

The pollution produced by light trucks, SUVs and minivans is only half a percent higher than that produced by conventional cars, based on a recent study. However researchers say that this tiny difference becomes enormous when considering the number of light trucks moving along the nation's highways – and of course Auckland city is infamous for its dirty air. Motor vehicles are the single greatest contributor to urban air pollution in Auckland, being responsible for between 50 to 80% of all emissions. I can’t find statistics to show just what percentage of these emissions would be from SUVs, but given the number being driven in my neighbourhood – it’s too high!

Yes it’s an ‘all about me’ culture. Most certainly other road users don’t feature in the SUV owner’s mind. Larger vehicles can create visibility problems for other drivers by obscuring their view of traffic lights, signs, and other vehicles on the road, plus the road itself. I can vouch that the lack of visibility when driving behind these machines leads to road rage. Depending on design, drivers of some larger vehicles may themselves suffer from poor visibility to the side and the rear. Poor rearward vision has led to many "backover deaths" where vehicles have run over small children when backing out of driveways. The problem of backover deaths has become so widespread that reversing cameras are being installed on some vehicles to improve rearward vision.

Their wider bodies mean SUVs occupy a greater percentage of the road lanes, leaving less room for error and for other road users, including cyclists. This is particularly noticeable on the narrow roads found in dense urban areas such as Auckland’s central fringe. Parking in Auckland becomes another major factor that doesn’t seem to deter the SUV buyer.

If reason plays no part in purchasing a SUV, I would suggest these vehicles are bought in ever-increasing numbers is because driving something so big and expensive, emotionally boosts a sense of status and power. SUV owners are actually buying an elitist dream that they can ride high in style and comfort like aristocrats of the road. And never mind the plebs who can’t afford or don’t want the damn dream. “Let them eat cake”.

How many actually travel to Antarctica in their dream machines?

Delusions of grandeur are pumped up and exploited by the SUV manufacturers and marketers who profit from the feelings of strength and security they offer to the SUV fools. TV commercials show the product being driven through wilderness areas, even though ridiculously few SUVs are ever driven off road.

Based on a sedan, but styled to look rugged, they are an obvious symbol of the culture of belligerence we have embraced over the last 30 years as aggressive capitalism has overwhelmed our collective intelligence.

Another myth that feeds the people who spend inanely high amounts of money on these pretend off-road vehicles that never go off road, is the propaganda that real Kiwi men (and by extension women) are into sports and outdoors activities. Apparently New Zealanders are all without exception rugby-loving, adventure-sports and sea-faring yachties who climb mountains before breakfast. According to wall-to-wall media, male sports define our nationhood.

This image that heads Toyota’s Hilux website is part of a media and advertising propaganda machine that allows SUV drivers to fancy themselves as part of this machismo stereotype. (Toyoto Hilux was the recent second highest seller with 13% of the market share of all new cars. Ford Ranger was the monthly top selling commercial model for July with 17%.)

The latest accident stats show if you crash your large SUV there’s a 2.7% chance you will be killed or hospitalised. If you’re driving a medium-sized car, those odds rise to 3.6%. So SUVs do make you ever so slightly safer.

The trouble is that inside the SUV, things feel different. SUV drivers have a perception of safety because they are higher and look down on – ie dominate other road users. In essence, they are driving a small truck. The height and weight of their vehicle leads to a feeling they are inside a defensive capsule and don’t have to take basic driving precautions.

They may have slightly better crashworthiness ratings, but SUVs score higher for aggression towards other road users (vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians).

So if you’re in a crash a SUV makes you 0.9% less likely to be killed or hospitalised, but makes everyone else 2.1% more likely to end up in the morgue.

Our publically-funded health-care system spreads the costs of hospital care across all taxpayers. Non-SUV owners are paying for the costs of SUV drivers’ behaviour.

Economist Michele White has called this effect “the arms’ race on American roads.”

Then there’s insurance costs; the overall cost of these pumped up station wagons is thrust upon all of us, because insurance rates are higher due to SUVs generating more expensive repairs to themselves and the cars they hit, as well as injuries from over rollover accidents.

The self-centred, anti-social idiots who are driving these small trucks around our narrow city streets are dodging the real costs of air pollution, health-care and insurance rates, while the rest of us are carrying their economic and social cost.

Folks I implore you, rage and fight against the machine!

Do not go gentle into that dark night of passivity and retail therapy

‘Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ (apologies to Dylan Thomas)

Resist the myths, bust the trends, refrain from feeding the corporate coffers.

Clean air and uncongested roads, and are worth struggling for.

In any war, resistance must be on many fronts. Consciousness raising and guerrilla action are always positive strategies. Think global, and act local.  These French people have the right idea….

Download these kiwi-made stickers and do with them what you will.