North Dakotans are timely. They line up exactly on time to see Britney's opener, Jordin Sparks. The artists return the favor, with Britney hopping on stage as scheduled. The show's over by 11 p.m. All ages have come, with the primary group skewing down to 12 and topping out at 45. And they are almost exclusively female, which is unsurprising. This area of the nation offers little of what might be considered "female" entertainment. Hockey, football, hunting, dirt track car racing and such are common and plentiful. Not to say women cannot be fans of these things; but these things are generally not fans of women.

The Alerus Center shares a lot in common with the classic Simpsons "Monorail" episode: Springfield decides against fixing up the existing downtown area in favor of a slick proposal for an unnecessary monorail system that promises civic fame and wild economic prosperity. Failure ensues. The center is of the Field of Dreams school of economic development: "Build it and They Will Come." But they have not come. Spears promoters have agreed she appear in such a small location in part because of the $850,000 guarantee from the venue. The very successful 2002 Cher show is still spoken about here by taxpayers and Cher fans with equal reverence. But recent Neil Diamond and Fleetwood Mac shows were bombs. This essentially means that the taxpayers of Grand Forks promised to pay Spears even if ticket sales fall short. It cannot be overstated how apeshit this makes many residents. Add the fact that the center is in the hole more than $256,000 this year, when it is supposed to be in the black, and that its private management company has a dirty habit of hiding losses from public record. The Alerus Center is prone to a bad combination of over-optimism and mismanagement, the manner of which can be found under a variety of corporate names across smaller-citied America.

In the first six months of 2009, the top 100 tours took in over $1.1 billion, up nearly 11 percent over the same period in 2008. But the large arena concert industry is broken. Ticket sales are down and top acts are no longer selling out. And those that still manage sellouts, like U2, are forced to do it through ticket discounts. (For instance, the Grand Forks Spears show unloaded many $96 tickets at $20 "student" prices.) The comment boards of the industry's trade sites are foul with blame and rants about "wake up moments." The term "dinosaur" is used liberally.

The concert industry and health care are not so different. They are bloated systems that have found a way of delivering services in a way that would initially seem counter intuitive. The incentives could not be more backward .Profit motives hide behind high-minded rhetoric about delivering "art" and "health." And, maybe most tellingly, many of those fed up with both systems blame the wrong parties. For health care, it's illegal immigrants. For concerts, it's Ticketmaster.

Generation X's Boomer moment (i.e., being principled in youth when it's easy, before growing old and lazy and selling out) was Ticketmaster. Over a ten year period, bookended by valiant stands by Pearl Jam and String Cheese Incident, fans had an opportunity to hold Ticketmaster back. We offered our support but only in words. The result? Pearl Jam in West Valley City, Utah on Sept. 28 via Ticketmaster: $62.00 + $11.60 Convenience Charge + $3 Building Facility Charge + $5.10 order processing fee + $2.50 TicketsNow fee = $84.20-or 35 percent higher than face.

Rolling Stone, The Washington Post and The New Yorker have all recently printed versions of the "concert industry sucks" article and they all basically blame Ticketmaster or Live Nation, or both, for conspiring to make your concert experience both expensive and shitty.

Even Bruce Springsteen has blamed his greed on Ticketmaster. After the ostensibly union-friendly Springsteen apologized for signing an exclusive album release deal with Wal-Mart, he blamed Ticketmaster for the lack of availability of his "affordable" $96 floor tickets. In fact, The Boss had held back over 1,000 seats, making only 108 of these "affordable" tickets even available. The move, at worst, may make Springsteen a criminal and at best confirms he's a jerk. The scandal moved Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Joisey) to propose the toothless and stupidly named BOSS (Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing) Act. The true Boss Act should be Springsteen using his pull in the industry to push for changes in the way tickets are sold. But he won't.

By leveraging a hard built populist reputation to screw the common man and profit handsomely while blaming somebody else, Springsteen finally confirmed he really is a true American institution. Congratulations, Boss.

Make no mistake, Ticketmaster is not your friend. Like all profit-driven businesses, it is interested in money, not once-in-a-lifetime experiences or whatever poncey copy its advertising uses. And by all accounts, including the American Anti-trust Institute's, a Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger would not be better for you.

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Let's imagine that Hillary Clinton's tactics (some of which were racist) had worked better and she was today President. Would the climate be different? Not much. Spend enough time on right-wing websites and living in a right wing population and it soon becomes clear that hate for Obama is directly tied to hate for Pelosi and hate for Reid and is all part of a larger game. And while there are elements of racism, sexism and homophobia that currently drive the right, they are just the tools currently available with which to "win." Yes, it is all now a game, not so different from the NFL. And in this game the left faces an impossible task because the field (i.e., media landscape) favors the three-word, low-syllable-count language of reactionaries.

And that's what the right is; "conservative" is just a nice word for "reactionary." Being reactionary makes "No" an easy response with no lag time to consider or weigh anything. Health-care reform? No. Environmentalism? No. Economic reform? No. This is one of the reasons that some liberals who are willing to acknowledge that racism plays a role in the anti-Obama sentiment are uncomfortable jumping on the "they're just racists" bandwagon because a one-word reason is too much like the nuance-less tone of the right. It is. Dismissing anti-Obama sentiment as simply "racist" is lazy and demonstrates an unwillingness to even try to understand the very diversity of the right.

Its discomfort with Obama's race is real; but it is tied to its fear of condoms in the classroom, a perceived de-emphasizing of Christianity and the loss of decent blue collar jobs. (In fact, if Obama were stringently pro-life, many of these so-called "racists" would immediately embrace him and defend him despite almost any fault.)

These fears are not independent of one another, so an accusation against any single one fear does not make any sense to any of the hard-line right. They simply cannot see themselves as racists because they act on a conglomerated fear that has no single identifying trait of any one fear. Just look at the lack of focus in terms of how anti-Obama sentiment manifests itself: The Devil, Hitler, Stalin, The Joker, Darth Vader, etc. It uses anything-anything-that our society finds unquestionably evil, and then imprints it on him.

And to think most of the right is fundamentally any more racist than a lot of people on the left who voted for Obama is to ignore the unique depth of American racism. And numbers. Recent Gallup Poll data actually show that Obama's job approval ratings went up with those who self-identify as either conservative or Republican. But make no mistake. Racism in America is alive and well.

One focus of the anti-Obama racism commentaries are the racists running the show, such as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Or are they? It's far more likely that they are opportunists who would just as easily embrace an all black audience if it were large enough to make them money and devoted enough to be unquestioningly loyal.

An attempt to understand and explain Glenn Beck in particular is a dead end. To explain his actions would mean he has a motive. He does not. Beck's not a racist. He's an anarchist. He's that boyfriend you had and hated because he exists only to criticize and play devil's advocate. The image of Obama as the Joker from The Dark Knight has been taken up as a badge of the Beckian right's battle against what it perceives as seeping socialism. But the irony is that nobody could be more like that Joker character than Beck himself. In the film, the Joker says, "Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just... do things." And of him, Alfred says, "Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." Now, is there anyone on the national platform that that describes more than Glenn Beck, a man who bills himself as a comedian?

It's amusing (not really) that many in the media, now latching on to "racism" as the cause for our absolute failure to have any kind of what might pass for civil discourse even in the Middle Ages, still see fit to ignore the only constant in all of our increasingly polarized political environment: them. In August, Talking Points Memo printed a leaked email that pretty much sums up the problem: "CNBC approached Tea Party activists, looking for angry protest events that would make good television, according to a leaked email from a Tea Party discussion group. And one Tea Bagger responded by flagging an upcoming event that, he said, 'should be a riot ... literally.'" The story got little mainstream media attention, to the surprise of nobody.

Now, many want to silence what they see as racist. But, as Charles Davis, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, writes of another option: "As a near-absolutist First Amendment advocate, my prescription for hate speech is always more speech: Give the bigot a microphone as big as the hatred, I say, and watch as the marketplace of ideas works its magic." Basically, the old teenager-caught-smoking school of learning: Give everyone so much of something bad that it sickens them.

With that in mind, and also in keeping with the idea that propaganda has power and to ignore it is to do so at your own peril, what follows is a little gallery show (with grades!) of some of the "best of the best" racist Obama stuff floating around sites ranging from the mainstream and actively political to the downright, well, racist. Some images that follow are, of course, not safe for work.

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The agribusiness attractions are the focus of the fair. But the fair's mix of agriculture and enchantment found in Rodgers and Hammerstein, EB White and F. Scott Fitzgerald has given way to a polar combo of overcooked conceit and undercooked Neanderthalism, now represented by David Foster Wallace and Kid Rock (with Lynyrd Skynyrd; tickets went for $66, $56 & $41). Minnesota Public Radio's Garrison Keillor over here; canoe jousting by IRONJACK Timber Team Sponsored by STIHL® over there.

In 1928's A Night at the Fair, Fitzgerald wrote, "Because of the agricultural eminence of the state, the fair was one of the most magnificent in America." But Minnesota is no longer agriculturally eminent. At least not to the individual. In Fitzgerald's time, nearly 50% of Minnesotans were farmers. Today only 2% are (not counting as "farmers" the 10,000 MBAs and third world destroyers employed by agribusiness giant Cargill). This is what makes the cattle, swine and horse barns so depressing. They've become a mandatory stop on the way to fried things; they are petting zoos for the 90-some percent of visitors who no longer have any connection whatsoever to the fundamental pillar of local society going back to whatever beginning you're inclined to believe we had. Even most of the administrative attractions of Minnesota agriculture are gone. Machinery Hill, once a place to see the newest, macho-est equipment of farming, is now home to booths and booths of home-improvement porn, lawn mowers and hot tubs for which HGTV watchers can go into debt.

Each year, Minnesota's dairy industry selects a young woman to serve as its spokesperson and, in one of the more charming fair traditions, her likeness is carved out of 90 pounds of butter. Elizabeth Olson, a 19-year-old college student, was crowned the 56th Princess Kay. Olson's achievement is meaningful. The Princess Kay competition demands actual agriculture knowledge. It has no swimsuit element (though she would do fine). Olson's sister Sarah was crowned in 2002 and her sister Lana was a finalist in 2005, making Princess Kay truly American in its nepotism. (Kidding!)

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If our Congress can be measured on a scale of feces (and it should), Senator Byron Leslie Dorgan is closer to adorable rabbit droppings than, say, the diseased swine diarrhea that is Michele Bachmann (R-MN). A three-time senator, Dorgan is the author of Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America. One of only eight senators to vote "No" on 1999's financial deregulation, he is now famous for saying: "I think we will look back in 10 years and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past."

Despite his brave stand on behalf of his flock during a period of unchecked growth and dumdum optimism, many now say outright that they do not trust him. Also, he blogs for the HuffPo. Best of all, Dorgan is fit, nearly svelte, a graying, trustworthy John Edwards, a man for whom flat-front L.L. Bean slacks were invented. Because who wants to trust health care reform to some fatso?

My first stop was the Mayville Senior Citizen Center. It's a tiny ag town between Fargo and Grand Forks along the Red River. Not 20 miles the other side of the river is Minnesota's 7th Congressional district, represented by Collin Peterson (D-MN)-who you may have recently heard is in a bit of trouble after saying he doesn't do town halls anymore because "Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the Twin Towers down."

All week here, during old people hour (i.e., the nightly news) on the TV, commercials from the Club for Growth were in heavy rotation. The commercial's gist: "Old people will be forcibly put down unless they oppose reform." During my drive to Mayville, Excellence in Broadcasting® is on and Rush was giving "just the facts" on the H.R. 3200 bill.

On the way back, it was Hannity. Both mentioned "death panels."

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Far, far less racism than in April. (And far less than found at many of the tea party website message boards.) During the entire two hour evening event, featuring dozens of everyman speakers and dozens more signs, only one guy mentioned Barack Obama's illegitimate birth and that he's Muslim. And that was only in passing on his way to a point about something, I forget. Probably "socialism."

So, you people of the coasts: what do they want? They want Washington to "listen." They want to not be "treated like sheep." They want better education (maybe). They want Ronald Reagan bon mots. They want jokes about moving D.C. to North Dakota because the cold would "force politicians to keep their hands in their own pockets." They want to sing God Bless America. They want, in one speaker's words, "to take it back for the United States Constitution for liberty." They want, more than anything, lower taxes.

This last item is where the irony begins, because North Dakota is one of the greatest of all federal welfare states. It receives over two dollars back for every one paid in taxes. If anyone has reason to complain, it's the Minnesotans, who get back only around seventy cents for every one of their tax dollars. Minnesota, by the way, is only about a quarter mile away from this particular tea party.

North Dakota is home to protectionist policies ranging from agriculture co-ops to state-run insurance to a law demanding that all pharmacies be locally owned (banning the only advantage of a Wal-Mart: cheap drugs). There is the state-run Bank of North Dakota, which in a year that saw private banks taking federal bailouts, returned $30 million to the state's general fund. More importantly, these state organizations operate in competition with private business, a fact that keeps everyone honest and is a system that, while quite successful and popular here, is clearly going to destroy America if partly implemented on any national scale, such as with health care.

So this "Anti Tax Tea Party" is a bit like a grunged-up trust fund kid begging for change on the street-at the Mexican border crossing.

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The MWF bills itself as "the worlds [sic] most professional Micro Wrestling athletes," which raises questions about the world's less professional midget and dwarf wrestlers. Founded in 2000, the MWF tours year-round; it played a brutal schedule of 65 shows in 2008, and claimed an average audience of 500 people per show. MWF events can be booked in three classes: six-midget, eight-midget, and the ten-midget event (known as "MidgetPalooza").

The official line from the MWF goes through the expected empowerment messaging that society has come to expect from our freak shows: "[Fans] walk away from one of our unique events feeling as though they know the Micro Entertainer as a talented performer." It's not all that different from the empowerment messages often thrown around with porn stars or strippers. Or bloggers.

What you get when you book an MWF show is really all in their promo video. Voice-over done by the exact same guy who does all the nation's monster truck rally commercials. A drunken crowd cheering "Midgets! Midgets! Midgets!" An audio clip of Mike Myers doing the Austin Powers fat Scotsman "Ahhm bigger than yooo ahhhr. Ahm 'iyer on the food chain." Explosions. A fat midget with no pants on. A Lilliputian chipmunk-voice yelling "Be there!" A midget getting hit in the nuts with a pool stick? Of course! And a call to "support midget violence."

Bucks is typical of the venues played by the MWF, although sometimes they play Knights of Columbus halls and labor temples. The walls outside and in are decorated with the now-common nostalgia items from the good old days-the days when no self-respecting American would have entered a place so shamelessly soulless. When I arrived at 9 p.m., the (plentiful) handicap spots were all full.

The cover was $20, the average door for these events, and upon entering I was immediately hit with a wall of rock. Speaking as a rural headbanging teen at the time of its release, I am qualified to say that Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood" still has tremendous legs. Like so many of their songs, it is bound to endure to see the day when it is regarded as the most top-notch of its stripper-friendly early-90s peers. The other wall of stuff I was hit with was smoke. North Dakota does not yet have a ban.

Also boding poorly: a guy in the front row in a Michael Vick jersey.

Midget wrestling has probably been around since the middle ages. Midget wrestling, as we know it, has been around since the early 20th century. The height of the sport's popularity was the 1950s. It has flirted with the mainstream: Wrestlemania III in 1987 (which featured the legendary Hogan vs. Andre the Giant match) saw two "full size" wrestlers-King Kong Bundy and Hillbilly Jim-team up with four midget wrestlers-Haiti Kid, Little Beaver, Lord Littlebrook, Little Tokyo-in a main-event match. Beaver, 52 at the time of the match, suffered a devastating back injury from Bundy; he died eight years later.

Midget wrestling lost much of its popularity after that. Still, the WWE has brought back midget wrestling in limited amounts; its most renowned character, Hornswoggle, wrestles in the guise of-wait for it-a leprechaun.

In what CNN's Lou Dobbs would consider representative of labor markets in general, Mexican midget wrestlers have remained popular despite their American counterparts' decline.

The show began. "Standing four-foot-four and weighing 292 pounds... it's... Meatball!!!!" A small man, who looked as if he does in fact weigh 292 pounds, strutted in from somewhere in the back of the bar, through the crowd, to the ring. For anyone who has never seen one of these regional insanities, it can best be described by the scenes in last year's Oscar-nominated The Wrestler. There is no gangway. No explosion of fireworks. It's poorly lit. The ceiling's low. It smells of beer and smoke. The chairs are metal and fold. The ring is in the middle of the bar and the midgets, each in character, fling one another against ropes, suplex, pile drive and generally fly around even when only slapped across the chest with a weak backhand. They dive off top rungs. They kick out on two-counts. Also just like the WWE: before the first event starts, the crowd is cheering "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and "Kick his ass!" but after the third two-count kick-out, a lot are back to ogling the shot girl and texting.

Also, a girl goes about selling roses to couples, as if this were a quiet Italian restaurant. One guy, clearly slouch-slurring toward the title of "Drunkest Dude of the Night," buys one.

The MWF is terrifically well managed. There is a soup-'em-um phase in which the MC introduces the wrestlers. And then a long break before and between matches so the excited crowd can hit the bar for $2 Buds. It's not just that the well-oiled show is choreographed for Dick and Jane's enjoyment; it also has the profitability of the bar in mind. Also, twenty dollars is a staggeringly high ticket price here for anything. There were at least three hundred people in the bar, a tremendous crowd for a North Dakota event that isn't a Fighting Sioux hockey game or a Tea Party.

Here is some of the commentary by the crowd, executed over a span of about fifteen minutes:

"Choke that goddamn beer!"

"Ric Flair bitch!"

"...pop your cherry..."

"Woooooooooooooooo!"

"She can't stand 'cause she's got a pin in her leg."

"He's pretty cut for a midget."

A note about the "shot girl." The classic shot girl is a woman who has the job of pushing through a forest of horny drunk Neanderthals to sell what looks like Windex out of high-school chemistry test tubes. It may pay better than some other jobs but it is thankless and tragic to watch. At this event, it appeared that the classic test tube shots had been augmented with a new "syringe" shot. In utilizing these beverages, mooks buy a giant plastic medical-looking syringe and inject the terrible drinks down their gullets. I am shocked; growing up on a working dairy farm, the last time I saw these exact same syringes was when they were full of bull spunk and the vet was using them to artificially inseminate heifers.

Besides the "is it exploitation?" stuff, the MWF has flirted with controversy before. A show in Ohio last year drew the attention of Canton Liquor Commission. From the local paper's report: "...complainants have said only the women in the Micro Wrestling Federation wrestling group were nude and have alleged at least one was a porn star."

Ignoring the fact that it's not illegal to be a porn star, yet, one has to wonder who would attend an MWF event and complain about anything. The Ohio bar owner claims he was set up by his jealous competition. The city suspended the bar's license; the bar sued the city. And so goes the drama of small town entertainment industry.

No such luck for me. The performers were all men. Trixie Dynamite, the sexed up star of the MWF circuit who is supposedly soon to appear in Playboy, was not here. I was bummed, because I understand her entrance music is Warrant's "Cherry Pie," which begins: "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh Dirty! Rotten! Filthy! Stinkin'!" and just gets better.

Regarding "midget." If the inclusion of a single midget at a "normal" wrestling event is an exploitative side show, then what is a midget wrestling event made up only of midgets? The MWF position on the term is that it is inoffensive "as long as its [sic] used to promote the Micro event and not used in a derogatory manner towards little people." Seems understandable. The advocacy group Little People of America disagrees, saying the term is no different from a racial slur.

But for an advocacy group like Little People, the paradox, lost on nobody, particularly the Micro Wrestling gang, is that it is hard to claim on one hand that little people should be able to do anything "normal" people can do but then on the other hand protest midget wrestling, which is in no way different from normal wrestling, except, you know, with midgets.

One irony of this event was that even though the crowd certainly wasn't all that altruistic, most of the worst exploitative jargon came from the MWF show itself. In one instance, to goose the crowd, the MC yelled, "Who wants to see some midgets fight?!" Later, during one event where two characters taunt each other pre-fight, one said: "You look like a midget Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger!"

I would propose that the MWF is both exploitation and not at the same time. It is all intent. Take this particular crowd. Whatever the giving-it-their-all MWF performers want to think about their audience's attitudes, the fact is that it seems many came only here for the "freak" value. That isn't to say the MWF should stop, or even that this is necessarily "bad," as much as it's just universal. When the Lower East Side's Arlene's Grocery hosted an amateur female Jell-O wrestling contest, there were probably a good number of reasons given for attending, with the real one being "exposed boobs."

When I got home, I was a little wired from the Buds. I turned on the TV. I had the option of watching plus-size people dance competitively to lose weight and win prizes, amateur hookers throwing themselves at a washed-up rock star to win prizes, a "matchmaker" pimp serving willing, live sex dolls to shameless millionaires, women who didn't know they were pregnant giving birth, WWE wrestling, a psychopathic ex-wife of a Sheen boy, numerous addicts living out their possibly premature recoveries, two pathetic egomaniacs raising eight doomed children, a gaggle of narcissistic middle-age women trying to be models for prizes-and a family of midgets, just being midgets amongst others.

Previously: The Great American Teen SUV Death Race

Abram Sauer writes about things that are far away.

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But that's the way it is for America's young. You get the car that you can pay for. Most likely? It's a hand-me-down SUV, as the secondary market lags behind their rise and now fall. Thanks to nearly two decades of booming SUV sales and a one-two punch of a recession and high fuel prices, cheap SUVs are now flooding the used market-even as their primary market dies.

With rising gas prices, a jump in the acceptance of environmentalism and the end of the More than We Need lifestyle, the Age of the New SUV, finally, finally, seems to be coming to an end. Even the poster child for the model's dominance, Hummer, is kaput; it's China's problem now.

But the SUV market's legacy costs are just getting started.

Approximately 70% of teens look for a used vehicle for their first car purchase. Around 60% of teens list "price" as the primary "driver" (ha) in choosing a car. Teens are the most dangerous drivers on the road, with a crash rate double that of 20- to 24-year-olds, three times that of 25- to 29-year-olds, and more than four times that of 30- to 69-year-olds. According to the CDC, auto crashes are the number one cause of death for American teenagers, accounting for more than one in three teen deaths. About 12 teens die every day in motor vehicle incidents.

SUVs are the most dangerous varietal of auto on the road, not only liable to roll over in a light breeze (okay not really) but also, in the hands of incapable drivers, to slaughter those in other smaller, lower, more vulnerable cars. Combine this rollover danger with the fact that not wearing a seat belt in a rollover is a death sentence; add to that the fact that teens are the least likely demographic to wear seat belts. (A 2007 Utah study found overall seat belt use by teens was 67 percent, while the overall state rate was 88.6 percent.)

You don't need to be an economist to put all of this together.

One more exciting stat: An Allstate Foundation and National Organizations for Youth Safety survey found that 80 percent of teen girls and 58 percent of teen boys text while driving.

The danger of teens in SUVs is nothing new. Some may remember the preposterous 2005 "Esuvee" awareness campaign, put together by Attorneys General from all 50 states, encouraging safe SUV driving by teens. The commercials featured teens rodeo-riding some of the animals from Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. (Much of the program's funding came from a $51 million settlement with Ford over the automaker's alleged deceptive marketing practices for the Explorer SUV.) Did this Peppercorn and Bartle Bogle Hegarty Ltd. campaign make teen SUV drivers safer? The Council on Public Relations Firms' "ESUVEE Case Study" says "yes"!

An online poll conducted by Equation Research, shows that two in three members of the target audience understand safety issues regarding SUVs better than they did before the campaign began and would moderate their driving accordingly. And, a survey by Trafficschool.com revealed that its users were 60 percent more aware of SUV safety issues as a result of the campaign... The day after launch, Peppercom achieved a rare PR hat trick, as ESUVEE-related segments appeared simultaneously on all three network morning shows (NBC Today Show, ABC Good Morning America, and CBS Early Show) for a combined audience of almost 12 million viewers.

As if market forces weren't enough to put teenagers behind the wheels of SUVs, there are actual proponents of giving old gas-guzzling SUV deathtraps to teens instead of putting them on the market for pennies on the dollar. Cars.com, which claims 10 million visitors a month and to be "the leading destination for online car shoppers," actually ran a piece saying, "So rather than give it away to a dealer, why not give it to your teen who's crying for wheels? 'With their size and weight, SUVs are still the safest vehicles for the novice teen driver,' said Art Spinella, general manager of CNW Marketing Research. 'Why not give it to your teen rather than have him cram into a Toyota Corolla?'"

Yeah, Art, why not?

Well, for starters, because there is a good likelihood that teens will be getting a Ford Exploder. The Explorer was for years the best selling SUV on the market thanks to its low price and availability. First manufactured in 1990, it became not only the best-selling SUV in America but also the world. There are millions of decade-old Explorers now on the market, available cheap. In rollover tests, the safest cars get a "5" rating. A "3" rating denotes a high likelihood of rollover. Many SUVs get a "3." Only one vehicle has ever tested a "2." It was the Ford Explorer.

In any city or rural area you will find teens doing their teen thing-cruising. And more and more of them are cruising in old SUVs. I have lost count of the number of rusted-fender Ford Explorers rounding my corner, loose belt squealing away, teens hanging out all the windows like mice out a cat's mouth. As someone who grew up in a small town where at least two kids per high school class were killed or maimed between freshman and senior year, I shudder every time I see it. I will see more of it in the coming years.

....a 1995 Ford Explorer carrying four people from the Brian Head Ski Resort to La Verkin drifted off I-15. Troopers said the driver tried to bring the vehicle back onto the road, but it went off the right side of the freeway into the dirt...'The driver overcorrected to the left, which caused the vehicle to roll multiple times,' UHP trooper Cameron Roden said Wednesday. A passenger, Danial Cole Morawetz, 19, was pronounced dead at a Cedar City hospital....

And:

An SUV filled with teens speeding north on 136th Avenue left the road, rolled and sent Ryan Johnson, 17, flying from the vehicle landing in the road. Ryan Johnson, Holland Township, was not wearing his seatbelt in the 1997 Ford Explorer when the crash occurred... Johnson is in critical condition at Spectrum Health Butterworth hospital.

Oh and!

Two Klamath teens were injured during a rollover caused by a DUI on early Saturday morning 14 miles north of Klamath on U.S. Highway 101, according to a California High­way Patrol report...Van Mechelen was driving his 1996 Ford Explorer northbound on U.S. Highway 101 at an un­known speed and attempted to negotiate a right curve... The SUV flipped on its right side, ejecting Williams out of the vehicle and down the mountainside... Williams was not wearing a seat belt.

One unintended consequence of the "cash for clunkers" Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) is that it may save some teen lives. The program means many of these SUVs would avoid hitting the cheap used car market, and instead be traded for the $4,500 government stipend, far more than the market would allow. A great number of these clunker trade-ins are going to be SUVs, which is intended. (See the irony of Mr. Wrong's 13-yer-old Honda Civic). The decade-old Ford Explorers, which average about 13 to 16 MPG, hit the CARS plan sweet-spot.

According to Autobytel.com, the top five clunkers being traded in are:

1. Ford F-Series
2. Ford Explorer
3. Chevrolet C/K/Silverado
4. Jeep Grand Cherokee
5. Dodge Ram

The CEO of Hyundai, John Krafcik, told USA Today that Fords were the top brand showing up as trade-ins, especially old Explorer SUVs.

The CARS act requires that these traded-in vehicles be destroyed so that they cannot be resold in the U.S. or elsewhere. One mechanic describes how this is done: "We drain the oil, refill it with sodium silicate. Liquid glass. Start the engine and let it run until it seizes. Wait a few hours and do it again until the engine will either not turn over or will not idle. After that it goes off to its next horror."

The CARS program also requires a big bad sticker be placed on the engine: "This engine is from a vehicle that is part of the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS). It has significant internal damage caused by operating the engine with a sodium silicate solution (liquid glass) instead of oil."

So not only is this popular incentive program getting SUVs off the road and making sure they are not being replaced with more of their kind, but it might also be keeping teens, for however brief a period, from killing themselves in the most American of ways. Too bad then the latest news is that, in a bit of digital television switchover deja vu, the successful and popular one-billion-dollar program is already suffering from lack of funds and the Republicans would like to suspend it.

Abram Sauer writes about things that are far away.

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