The Carnage On The Freeway

Events of this past week remind me of the first time I drove to Los Angeles.

I was 19, just out of college and living in northern Alberta on my own, trying to grab a piece of the first tar sands exploration boom. My younger brothers and sister were still at home, and our parents decided that a last "family vacation" was in order. Disneyland would be the destination. For the sake of comfort, we took two cars - the family Plymouth and my new Ford Pinto, complete with rather gaudy trick paint.

The journey was not undertaken lightly. Saskatchewan drivers are well equipped mentally for long distance driving - crossing the vast open spaces of the Dakotas, Wyoming, Arizona, and Nevada was a breeze. I can still recite verbatim most of the Steve Martin comedy tape Cruel Shoes. �("Put them on me.")

However, like everyone else, we knew that the infamous Los Angeles freeways were among the most dangerous places on earth. We knew that merely touching a brake pedal at the wrong time could transform 8 lanes of racing Detroit metal into a screeching, twisted, burning mass of death. The cars travelled "bumper to bumper" at high speed, only inches from one another in a death defying race, only moments from chaos. One blown tire and many dozens could die - and God help you if it rained. Carnage. Pure carnage.

We knew this to be fact, because every week or so we saw news reports and grisly film footage of multi-car pileups on smog obstructed, rain-soaked California freeways on CBC news.

California "hundred car pileups" were a favoured bleed-lead of the 1970's, like the role played by giant snowstorms, floods and hurricanes on the networks today. Plenty of death, destruction and distraught onlookers. In fact, much like coverage in Iraq over the past two years.

We were determined to make the journey and set our concerns aside until that bridge had to be crossed. The plan didn't include much LA driving, anyway - Disneyland, Marineland, Capistrano, San Diego, a day trip by bus to Tijuana.

After a couple of days doing the sights as a family from our small motel in Anaheim, my younger sister and I struck out on our own in my Pinto. We bought a simple freeway map, and headed to Long Beach, downtown LA and Hollywood. We went window shopping on Rodeo Drive, discovered (by chance) the mansion where the exterior shots of the "Beverly Hillbillies" were filmed, cruised around in the Hollywood hills, marvelling at the homes.

It was when we decided to return to the motel that we reailzed our timing was not so good. Deep in the evening "rush hour" and to make matters worse, the unthinkable - it started to rain. We were facing the most dangerous stretch of California freeway destruction of all; the Santa Ana.

To our relief and amazement, we discovered that the drivers on LA freeways were actually quite sensible. Contrary to what we had been led to believe, they did not plow into the cars before them at the first touch of a brake - they slowed down in an orderly fashion. The clogged lanes were capable of slowing to a full stop, then accelerating, which we did on multiple instances without so much as a dent to show for it.

It was nothing like we had been led to believe.

We returned to the motel safe and sound, with a newfound confidence in our driving competence - and a newly planted seed of skepticism about the CBC news.

Today, after an election in "war-torn" Iraq that will be forever remembered for confounding the dire predictions, defying the threat of violence, and exceeding popular expectations, as the anti-war left and Bush critics begin to concede (however grudgingly) that liberating the Iraqi people may have been the right thing to do - I'm taken back to that news footage we used to see of freeway pileups in California on the CBC.

The difference today is that some of us - a minority, admittedly - were not relying on the CBC, CNN, or CBS to get our information about the Iraq war and their prospects for democracy. We read Chrenkoff and 2Slick and Healing Iraq and knew that for all the horrific pictures and body counts on the nightly news, that there was a chance - even a good chance - that things were not quite as bad as our televisions would have us believe.

Just as California freeways of the 70's weren't one long demolition derby, most cars in Iraq were not full of explosives, most ordinary Iraqis, military and security forces left for work and arrived at their destinations, and returned home for dinner after an uneventful day.

I wonder how many of those who are seeing for the first time a larger picture of Iraq that suggests under-reported success and stablity, are reviewing what they were told in the days leading up to the election and considering the credibility of those who did the telling.

Despite the frustration of watching positive news being supressed by a media that was not so secretly hoping for a "Republican failure", in the final analysis the mainstream media may have done the Bush administration, the Iraqi people and most importantly - the western world - a huge, unintended favour.

They oversold their case.

In days to come, there will be return to partisan business as usual, to bad news and negative spin. The glow of a successful election will wane and the Media Left will again try to bury progress under failure, to forecast grave outcomes, to second guess, to challenge the motives and intelligence of those leading the war against Islamofascism. They are, after all, slow learners. I suspect it's just not going to matter as much as it used to. They threw everything they had at Iraq - and failed. Bush did not flinch, the American people held firm, and the Iraqi people threw it all back at them.

Like Dan Rather writ large, the credibility and influence of the mainstream media over public opinion has been dealt a crippling blow in Iraq. That it was self-inflicted just makes it all the more satisfying.