My sister and her family live just outside San Diego, CA in a town called Oceanside. Yesterday, she sent me the picture that accompanies this article – about what gas costs where she lives, which is $6.79 per gallon for regular. This makes me almost grateful I only had to pay $4.30 per gallon here in SW Virginia the other day.
Either way, this is killing us and probably you, too.
My little pickup – an ’02 Nissan Frontier – has a 16 gallon tank. At current SW Virginia prices, it costs about $70 to fill the tank. I suppose I ought to be grateful. My sister has a Subaru Crosstrek, which has a 17 gallon tank. It costs her about $115 to fill up her car. Both of our vehicles are small, four cylinder-powered vehicles we bought because we wanted to avoid the expense of driving an expensive-to-feed vehicle. My truck doesn’t get great gas mileage, but that was offset by the small (for a truck) gas tank and also because I don’t have to make payments on it, since it’s paid-for. These onetime hedges against the cost of driving have been mowed to the ground by the War Tax – the cost we’re all paying at the pump, which is the cost of Trump’s catastrophic and evil decision to start this war with Iran.
Even if you own a very high-mileage vehicle, you might as well be driving a “gas hog.” In a very real sense, you’ve been forced to drive one.
A Toyota Prius – pretty much the most fuel-efficient new vehicle available – has an 11 gallon tank. At SW Virginia prices, it costs almost $50 to fill the thing up. To put that in some perspective, before Trump started this war, I was able to fill up the 21 gallon tank of my old V8 muscle car for about the same. Obviously, my old muscle car burns through gas faster than the Prius does but the point is I could afford to fill ‘er up then in the same way that the owner of a new Prius can afford filling up his little four cylinder-powered hybrid car right now. If I lived in Oceanside, it would cost me almost $150 to fill up the Trans-Am’s tank. That’s what it’s costing people out there who have full-size trucks and SUVs, which typically have tanks in the same 21 gallon range.
Red Hatters will point out – correctly – that gas costs so much more in CA because it’s CA. The state applies extortionate taxes on gas and also has to import gas because its own in-state refineries have been gimped to such an extent that they cannot refine the “environmentally correct” gasoline required by the state. But that of course gets us back to the war, which has gimped supplies of imported petroleum products generally.
Ordinary people can’t take much more of this. My sister is one of them. She hasn’t got the cushion to cover $500/month in gas bills (which if you do the math comes to about $6,000 annually). How many do? A way to gauge how many is to observe how many blue signs are posted vs. red ones, ahead of the midterms.
Even in my very red rural SW Virginia county, I see almost no red signs – but lots of blue ones. I see this as an ominous barometer for the reds. Just a little over two years ago – it feels like a century ago, doesn’t it? – the lawns were peppered with red and very little blue. The signs stayed up, many of them, for months after the election and Trump’s re-ascension. They have vanished, almost all of them. The Trump Store in Christiansburg, VA – which is about 25 miles from me – has “pedophile” and “criminal” graffiti spray canned on its sides – and not one car in the parking lot. The MAGA stickers have been peeled off truck bumpers. A funereal silence has descended in anticipation of the death that seems as imminent as the passing of a bed-ridden Stage 5 cancer patient.
Apres moi, le deluge.
It is a French saying, attributed to King Louis XV – the one before the one who los his head. It translates as: After me, the flood. It is taken as the ne plus ultra expression of nihilism, though Trump’s recent comments to Tucker Carlson run a very close, if inelegant, second. Trump, in response to Tucker’s chastising about the consequences of the war, reportedly said: “In the end, we all die anyway.”
This is easy to say when you’re 80 – and even easier to say when you’re not having to worry about $6.79 gas (and nearly $10 diesel) because you’ve used your office to grift billions for yourself and your family and your cronies (20-year-old Barron Trump is reportedly worth $150 million, despite never having worked a day in his life so far).
But there will be another say in about four weeks. Not that it will materially change anything, of course. But it will be a stabbing at thee – for hate’s sake. We spit our last breath at thee.
. . .
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