Sigh…

Today…I was told to “check my privilege”. Okay…I’m checking it now…

I was raised by a divorced single working mother. My dad died trying to rob a bank. I grew up in a series of small apartments, wearing mostly second hand clothes and going to public school, where in the 1960s, because I was the product of a “broken home” I was treated like a problem child even though I was pretty well behaved. That didn’t change until high school. I was the first male in dad’s side of the family to finish grade school and get a diploma. I did three semesters of community college and then had to go to work to support mom and me. For most of my life I had no idea how I was going to earn a living and resigned myself to a low income life lived in rooms rented in other people’s houses. Before I started earning a good living as a software developer I had no car, and no prospects. Seen from within, the life I am living now seems an absolute miracle to me.

And yet, in some quarters, it seems I am a “privileged” Boomer, which strikes me as a real joke coming from younger people who got their college degree and found good work at a living wage at an age when I was still doing Manpower temp jobs and living with mom. But there it is…I need to “check my privilege” and shut up about my own experiences in life, and what I’ve seen happen politically in my country during my lifetime with my own two eyes, whilst Millennials discuss amongst themselves how privileged we Boomers are and how we fucked everything up for them. Because god forbid anyone should hear from someone who was actually there what he saw for himself while on the road to where we are now.

Whatever. I get that that Time Magazine article got your goat. You don’t seem to get that it was supposed to. But if playing Wall Street’s game of Blame The Other Guy We’re Screwing Too works for you fine. Enjoy the cheap thrills of the blame game while I watch people who wish to bury the past, keep on grimly repeating it.

I’m not afraid of terrorist bombs, I grew up during the cold war figuring the world would probably nuke itself to death anyway. My privileged life taught me how to duck and cover and never count on tomorrow being there. I’m not afraid of sudden poverty. My privileged life taught me how to live on a poverty line income. I’ve watched republicans tank the economy over and over and jackasses keep voting them into office anyway. Figure it will all just keep happening. C’est la vie! And…pay attention now…I don’t particularly care if people who don’t know me from Adam hate me for being something I can’t help being. I was fine with that even before I knew that I am gay. I learned how not to give a flying fuck about that even before my grade school teachers told me I was a problem child because my mother was divorced. I learned how not to care long before all that, while being hated, or at best patronized, by members of my own family for being my father’s son. And I will not wear your goddamned labels.

I grew up in the Washington D.C. suburbs. I was a very small kid when the Capital Beltway was being built. I remember when I-270, the spur that goes through Montgomery County where I grew up, was called I-70s and it was two lanes in each direction with a big grassy median. It’s 12 lanes now and even that is not enough. I watched the traffic nightmare that is the normal every day environment people live in down there reach epic proportions, even with the really nice subway system they built starting in the mid 1970s. It really is an amazingly good system, but it was overcapacity from the moment the first car doors opened.

Nothing has ever helped even slightly, even at some miniscule level, to stem the rising tide of automobiles competing every minute of every day for whatever asphalt space they can find that isn’t already occupied by another car (and sometimes even if it is), because there was never any political will to stop the land developers from building more things, which inevitably attracts more automobiles to the area, but people were always able to tie up regional highway infrastructure development in the courts. The joke is someone gets a flat tire in Tyson’s Corner and it backs up traffic in College Park…

And I am seeing these links in my Facebook stream now about a bunch of truckers who are going to “slow down beltway traffic” until some congressmen are arrested and I honestly can’t stop laughing. Oh you are, are you? Slow it down, did you say? I read one guy saying they weren’t going to allow anyone to drive over 55mph unless they had an anti-Obama bumper sticker. Well that’s a pretty all order men. I’d say you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Look…Seriously…you folks want to get noticed during rush hour in Washington D.C.? Have your people park their trucks and take the Metro into the city, and they all stand on the left side of the escalators and don’t move.

I posted this five years ago. Seems appropriate now, since the kook pews are howling again, the haters who would have looked the other way had they come upon the murder taking place, and insist everyone else should too, to revisit it.

Nothing has changed…there is nothing mysterious or hidden about what happened that night…the ghosts still talk among themselves…if you are willing to take the same walk I did one night in Laramie, you can still hear them…

The wind never seems to stop here on the plains.  It is October in Wyoming, and the wind carries with it a chill now.  The first tentative breath of winter dances restlessly over rolling hills of sage.  The days have grown short, the nights cold.  And long.  Very long.  And quiet, save only for the sound of the wind. 

Take a walk tonight across the rolling hills of Wyoming sage.  Leave the town lights twinkling in the distance behind you.  Walk toward the mountains in the darkness ahead.  There is only you here tonight.  You, and the wind, and the stars in the sky, so far away.  So very far away.  Around you are only rolling hills of grass and sage, fading into the night.  There are remnants of what looks like a small wooden fence here, that was torn down some time ago. 

Listen to the wind.  Listen carefully.  There are ghosts here on the plains.  Hear them talk tonight among themselves…

 

No one knows why Matthew was determined to go to the Fireside that night, or why he left with Aaron and Russell. It was karaoke night, which would not ordinarily have interested him. There was some speculation that he was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible. A close friend thinks that depression may have weakened his judgment, and wonders if he had taken a heavy dose of Klonopin before he went to the bar. "When he was depressed," she says, "he would just grab a handful." Romaine Patterson remembers how in the coffee shop where she worked Matthew "would just talk to anyone-people no one else would talk to, like this weird old man…. He had no discrimination in his person."
-Vanity Fair

 

Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998, 20-year-old Shepard met McKinney and Henderson in a bar. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride in their car. Subsequently, Shepard was robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote, rural area, and left to die. McKinney and Henderson also found out his address and intended to rob his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard was discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. At the time of discovery, Shepard was still alive, but in a coma.
-Wikipedia

 

Aaron Kreifels first met Matthew Shepard in a dream last Thursday night, the night after he discovered his fellow University of Wyoming student badly beaten, barely alive and tied up to a fence outside of Laramie.

Although Shepard was in Fort Collins by then, kept alive by an array of life-support machines in Poudre Valley Hospital’s intensive-care unit, Kreifels said the gay student, who was beaten beyond recognition, allegedly by two young Laramie roofers, perhaps because he was gay, came to visit his rescuer in a dream that night. Kreifels doesn’t remember much of the dream, but he said Wednesday that he awoke the next morning comforted by the vague sensation of having met the person he found in such bad shape two days before.

Although early reports indicated that two mountain bikers had discovered Shepard on the crude fence on an old, double-rutted road, Kreifels was alone that evening, struggling on his mountain bike through deep sand and for some reason ignoring a desire to turn back and find another, easier way back to town. Before he knew it, he had fallen. He was on the ground, his front wheel broken beyond repair. He was unhurt, but what he saw as he got up struck him cold.

"I got up and noticed something out of the corner of my eye,” he said from his room in a freshman dorm at the University of Wyoming on Wednesday. "At first I thought it was a scarecrow, so I didn’t think much of it. Then I went around and noticed it was a real person. I checked to see if he was conscious or not, and when I found out he wasn’t, I ran and got help as fast as I could.”

As the former high school crosscountry runner traversed the quarter- to half-mile of scrub prairie between him and the nearest house in the nearby Sherman Hills subdivision, his thoughts froze before quickly accelerating.

"It was distressing. I was panicked for a couple minutes, because I wanted to make sure I could do all I could do to help save him,” he said.
-The Denver Post

 

Officer Reggie Fluty: When I got there, the first – at first the only thing I could see was partially somebody’s feet and I got out of my vehicle and raced over – I seen what appeared to be a young man, thirteen, fourteen years old, because he was so tiny, laying on his back and he was tied to the bottome of the end of a pole.

I did the best I could.  The gentleman that was laying on the ground, Matthew Shepard, he was covered in dry blood all over his head.  There was dry blood underneath him and he was barely breathing…he was doing the best he could.

I was going to breath for him and I couldn’t get his mouth open – his mouth wouldn’t open for me.

He was covered in, like I said, partially dry blood and blood all over his head – the only place that he did not have any blood on him, on his face, was what appeared to be where he had been crying down his face.
-The Laramie Project

 

Shepard suffered a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate.
-Wikipedia

 

At the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, Matthew lay in bed down the hall from Aaron McKinney. Matthew was comatose; his brain stem which controls heartbeat, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions – was severely damaged. He also was suffering from hypothermia and had a red welt on his back, a red mark on his left arm, bruised knees, cuts on his head, neck, and face, and bruising in his groin. 
-Vanity Fair

 

Dr. Cantway:  I was working the emergency room the night Matthew Shepard was brought in.  I don’t think, that any of us, ah, can remember seeing a patient in that condition for a long time – those of us who’ve worked in big city hospitals have seen this.  Ah, but it’s not something you expect here.

Ah, you expect it, you expect this kind of injuries to come from a car going down a hill at eighty miles an hour.  You expect to see gross injuries from something like that – this horrendous, terrible thing.  Ah, but you don’t expect to see that from someone doing this to another person.

The ambulance report said it was a beating so we knew.
-The Laramie Project

 

Exactly a week after his tragic discovery, Kreifels, 18, an architectural engineering major from Grand Island, Neb., said he tries not to think about the condition in which he found the classmate he had never seen before. Authorities say Shepard’s assailants repeatedly beat him with the butt of a .357 Magnum, fracturing his skull. Kreifels doesn’t talk about it.

"I don’t really want to go into details about that,” he said.
-The Denver Post

 

Aaron Kreifels:  I keep seeing that picture in my head when I found him…and it’s not pleasant whatsoever. I don’t want it to be there. I wanna like get it out. That’s the biggest part for me is seeing that picture in my head. And it’s kind of unbelievable to me, you know, that – I happened to be the person who found him – because the big question with me, like with my religion, is like, Why did God want ME to find him?
-The Laramie Project

 

[Edited a tad…]

This came across my Facebook stream this morning…a status post from a frustrated federal employee…

I’m really tired of being vilified as a federal worker. I WANT to WORK. I want to support myself. My colleagues do as well. We want to be productive and we don’t deserve to be accused of living off the backs of taxpayers or lazy and worse. I’m truly offended that members of my own family and some that I thought were friends have bought into this crap. I’ve tried to hold my tongue but I’m pissed off! If you truly feel that way, then unfriend me and don’t let the door hit you on the way out of my life!

I remember a time, in the afterglow of the FDR days I guess, when “public service” jobs were considered noble work done for the good of the nation. I have watched the right wing, over time, chip away at that notion, not because they genuinely thought that government workers were lazy but because they hated democratic government and all that liberty and justice for all stuff. It seemed in my lifetime to culminate in that famous Ronald Reagan campaign quote, “”The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”

Think about what he’s saying there, the next time you call for a policeman or a fireman, or listen to the hurricane track forecast from the national weather service, or you throw away some food in your pantry because it was recalled due to salmonella and you’re glad you heard the warning before you ate any of it. Think about it the next time you drive on the Interstate Highway System, or fly somewhere. Private enterprise wants to help only its bottom line. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a different thing from work that benefits the nation as a whole, and we have seen clearly now since the phrase “trickle-down” became an economic policy how that simply does not work.   The libertarian pipe dream of a society that magically assumes a stable, productive shape solely by the force of the invisible hand of the marketplace is a fantasy held on to by people who want that free lunch of a nation they don’t have to be bothered with the work of maintaining.   When it’s not the carefully crafted propaganda of sociopaths.   A civilized society needs people to work for the government and be here to help us all.

Once upon a time the saying on Wall Street was what’s good for business is good for America, but that has it backwards, tragically, woefully backwards. It’s what’s good for America is good for business. What’s good for democracy is good for business. What’s good for the people is good for business, because without customers no business can prosper. But there are some who don’t give a good goddamn about America…or business. They care only for their own private wealth, their own power and glory. Reagan was half right about those words being the most terrifying words in the English language. To him and others of his kind, second only to the words “Liberty and justice for all.”

[Edited a tad…]

@Sherman_Alexie: “#2 reason for divorce: Belief in “soulmates.” #1: shagging someone else’s “soulmate.””

I guess he hasn’t seen very many long lived couples.   I have.   Soulmates is a real thing.   But not everyone has that temperament for monogamy.   People who don’t should leave people who do alone, and vice-versa.   I would submit that a big cause of divorce is our culture places too much emphasis on monogamy and not enough on trustworthiness.   But before you can be honest with others you need to be honest with yourself.   You need to cultivate that habit of truth telling internally.   The culture that discourages that is cutting its own throat.   Not everyone is heterosexual. Not everyone is innately monogamous.

Some of us are.   And we who are and those who are not seem always to be staring at each other in disbelief and fussing with each other about all the wrong things.   Belief in soulmates isn’t a problem…soulmates are a real thing…belief that only monogamy is moral is a problem.   Cheating is immoral.   Lying just to get inside someone’s pants is immoral.   Sex for its own sake is not in and of itself immoral.   You live long enough and you will see lots of long lived happy couples and lots of thoroughly decent moral trustworthy people who’ve had lots and lots of lovers.   Monogamy is a temperament, not an ideal.

@JohnnyGWeir: “I’m sorry to you all for wearing daisy dukes in October.”

Pics or it didn’t happen.

Debunking Stephen Jimenez isn’t hard…he was involved in the ABC 20/20 whitewash of Matthew Shepard’s murder and makes the same claims here that 20/20 did years ago.   But it is necessary, not only to defend a kid who can no longer speak for himself, but because it is a trope of the anti-gay industrial complex that hate crimes against gay people are nothing the nation need concern itself with.   Nothing to see here folks…the homosexuals bring it on themselves…and even like it.   There is no pattern of violence.   Homosexuals are not being targeted.   Nothing to see.   Nothing to see…

Debunking Stephen Jimenez’s Effort To De-Gay Matthew Shepard’s Murder

Journalist Stephen Jimenez’s  The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard makes the bombshell claim that illicit drug use, not homophobia, was the central factor in the gay University of Wyoming student’s brutal 1998 murder.  Shepard truthers in  the  right-wing media have pounced on the book to  assail hate crime legislation and the larger push for LGBT rights. But Jimenez’s argument is tainted by its reliance on wild extrapolation, the use of highly questionable and often inconsistent sources,  paranoia that critics of his work are engaged in a “cover-up” of politically sensitive truths, and the cavalier dismissal of any evidence that runs contrary to  his central thesis.

Go read the whole thing…you are going to be hearing more about it soon. His book comes out on the anniversary of the murder because that is the perfect time to spit in the faces of people who are still appalled at what happened that night, and determined to put an end to the hatred that fueled it. Jimenez and his soul brother Andrew Sullivan need everyone to stop making such a big deal out of one little gay kid because, perhaps for different reasons, perhaps not, they think it ridiculous.There’s a nugget in this article that I hadn’t understood before, which might explain Sullivan’s need to whitewash Shepard’s murder…

For an author trying to make the case that homophobia played no role in Shepard’s murder, his killer’s use of crude, anti-gay language would seem to pose a significant problem. Not so, Jimenez assures us. McKinney – who described himself as a “drunk homofobick [sic]” in a letter written from prison – was merely trying to imitate the thug image of the gangsta rappers he admired, according to Jimenez. This explanation  is  just as implausible as Jimenez’s bizarre speculation that President Bill Clinton spoke out on Shepard’s murder and championed hate crime legislation in order to divert public attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

(Emphasis mine). So it’s about Sullivan’s Clinton hatred again.   Or back when the 20/20 episode was production it was, and now he’s just sticking to it because it’s out there, and anyway, isn’t all this outrage about what happened to a little twink a bit overwrought? Sullivan has always been an outspoken critic of hate crime laws, and the narrative that hate played any role that night in Laramie had to be debunked.   Because…liberals.

There is nothing mysterious or hidden about the murder of Matthew Shepard. The trial transcripts themselves show clearly, convincingly and overwhelmingly that Shepard not only did not know his killers, but that they beat the 112 pound Shepard mercilessly to the brink of death precisely because he was gay.   Some have said, a tad more plausibly, it was merely a robbery gone bad. But they targeted him because he was gay, and I have been to Laramie, I have driven the route that McKinney and Henderson took as they drove Shepard out of town to the isolated place where they tied him to a deer fence and beat him…I drove it at night around the same time…and I promise you that if you do the same you will, if you are even slightly open to the evidence, come to the only possible conclusion: that they had more than robbery on their minds on their way to the killing place.

Who can say why some people prefer their comfortable conceits to reality. Stephen Jimenez may simply be a publicity seeking asswipe. Or he and Andrew Sullivan may really believe that the facts in front of one’s nose are merely a veneer behind which the hidden conspiracies and plots that really move human events lurk. Perhaps they find the idea that the beating death of a pretty gay boy might genuinely shock anyone ridiculous, the thinking being Shepard was a little twink who went looking for rough trade and got what was coming to him. He’d already allowed himself to be raped once didn’t he? Whatever the motivation, ask yourself who is deeper in the human gutter, the knuckle-dragging killers who hated or the respectable upright whitewashers of hate.

This, from Der Spiegel this morning…

German Press Review on US Government Shutdown

“What Washington currently offers up is a spectacle, but one in which the spectators feel more like crying,” writes the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.”Because Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, Congress and president could not agree on a stop-gap budget, hundreds of thousands of federal employees were sent on involuntary leave and many agencies were forced to shut down,” continues the editorial. “The main actors in this dispute, which brings together many factors, both ideological and political, took a huge risk and, unhindered, proceeded to validate everyone who ever accused the political establishment in Washington of being rotten to the core — by driving the world power into a budgetary state of emergency. The public is left wondering how things could have been allowed to get to this point and why there is so much poison in the system.“

(Emphasis mine…)   Poison in the system…did you ask…?

I became an American citizen only so I could own some U.S. TV stations…

Oh…I dunno…

This came across my Facebook stream just now…

Deceptive Clichés: Oktoberfest  and Bavaria’s Recipe for  Success

Non-Bavarians and other foreigners tend to believe that the raucous festival amounts to nothing more than a collective drinking binge, a massive party with rollercoaster rides and erotic displays of tight dirndls and deerskin trousers set to the oompah-pah of brass bands. But there is something more refined going on beneath all the noise and clinking of beer mugs.   Oktoberfest is actually a 35-hectare (86-acre) stage where performances of great importance play out simultaneously.

They are about the odd, prosperous southern German state of Bavaria, which at its heart has remained a small, proud nation. They are about the state party, the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), which, in the frenzy of costumes and successful election campaigns, portrays itself as the legitimate successor to the abdicated monarchy. They are about a society’s touching devotion to tradition and local celebrities. And they are about a city where six global corporations listed on Germany’s blue chip stock exchange, the DAX, compete for power and influence — and thus as many seats as possible in Oktoberfest beer tents…

Ah yes…   the odd prosperous southern German state of Bavaria.   It is not the Bavaria you see in Epcot Germany.   Something I learned: You can take the boy out of Bavaria, but not Bavaria out of the boy.   He might flee to Disney’s Bavaria, which as you would expect is a happier, small world after all kinda place.   But that is the Disney version, in a place where dreams come true, and all the ever afters are happy, and the Bavaria in the boy will always remind him that it isn’t real, dreams are merely dreams, life is short and bitter, but at least there is beer.

Prost!

Pencils done on the cartoon for the next issue of OUTLoud…finally. With enough time left over to spend the rest of this lovely day inside carefully doing the inks and charcoal. I am not nearly good enough at this that I can rush it and expect to produce anything other than crap.

One of the great masters of the political cartoon art form British cartoonist David Low, once said each of his cartoons took three days, “two days in labor, and one day removing the appearance of labor.” Mine take about that long, mostly because I spend a ton of time redrawing and correcting. But I can’t put in full days on a cartoon like a full time professional artist can, so I need to have about a week to do one and that’s really putting it behind events for something that’s supposed to be as topical as a political cartoon. I’m doing something about an event that happened earlier this week that won’t appear in the newspaper until next Friday. Hopefully it’s good enough that it won’t matter too much that it’s old news.

I read the English language version of Der Spiegel and get the German news magazine’s posts regularly in my Facebook stream in both English and German. The native German version usually contains a bunch more than the English translated one, and this morning the following appeared in my news page:

Im neuen DER SPIEGEL geht es besonders um die Steuerpläne der Union, mit denen der SPD eine Koalition schmackhaft gemacht werden soll. Ein weiteres Thema ist die Steueroase Deutschland: Weil in den Finanzämtern Fahnder und Prüfer fehlen, entgehen dem Staat Milliarden.

Außerdem: Schlechtere Schulnoten bei übergewichtigen Kindern, “Ermüdungserscheinungen” bei Bundespräsident Gauck, BND belauschte im Kalten Krieg führende Ost-Politker.

Facebook helpfully provides a translation link, powered by Bing which seems to be using the same translation engine that Google does. That last paragraph is translated as…

Also: Lower school grades in obese children, “Fatigue” President Gauck, BND overheard in the cold war leading East leaders.

What catches my eye is how “Ermüdungserscheinungen” is translated simply as “Fatigue”. The concept of a President of Fatigue is delightful somehow, but I know from  looking at it this is one of those massive German words made up of other German words all strung together, so I decide to try and decode it to see if I can figure out what they’re trying to say about the President of Germany.

Google also translates “Ermüdungserscheinungen” as simply “Fatigue”. Beolingus doesn’t know what the hell that word means and it usually gets German words Google and Babelfish doesn’t (Babelfish doesn’t seem to be with us anymore). But enter “fatigue” into Google Translate and you get a bunch of possible German words back for it.  Ah…of course…

Think of how it is that Eskimos have so many words for snow. It’s not that Germans are always tired, they are an existentially weary people and I guess weight of their lives gives them a need to keep cobbling together new German words every so often to describe how existence is a never ending drain upon the human soul. My Baptist grandmother was like this, but unlike Germans who just accept their lot in life, she hated everything which made her unpleasant company.

The root word in this string is “Ermüdung”, which means “Fatigue” Pulling apart the rest of it in Google Translate I get something about “these phenomena”. I think the word is trying to describe fatigue that is the consequence of localized phenomena, and the sentence is trying to tell me that poor President Gauck creates an atmosphere of fatigue everywhere he goes, or that he’s President of Germany because Germans are tired of everything.

Cartooning. I’m trying now to get back into the routine of regularly producing my political cartoons, at least biweekly for Baltimore OUTLoud. This next issue’s cartoon will be the first I’ve done in nearly a year. It’s topic is the Met Opera’s giving the stage to several Russian opera stars, putting on an opera by Tchaikovsky, and refusing to condemn the horrific outbreak of anti-gay violence in Russia. In its way it’s similar to what the International Olympic Committed is doing. They’re all looking the other way to protect their profits and their access to power.

But in order to do this cartoon I needed to go online for images I could reference in the cartoon, images we’ve (most of us paying attention) all seen from the wave of violence in Russia. Images that will stick in the collective memory of our people for generations I am convinced. And that is reminding me now why I needed to take a break from doing the cartoons. Looking at all those pictures makes me so angry I keep having to walk away from the drafting table.

I keep telling myself it’s okay if I can just channel that anger into the cartoon. I keep telling myself that this kind of thing is Exactly where the political cartoon art form can be at its most effective, and that I need to get this out because it’s necessary. But it’s difficult trying to work when I’m this angry.

When you gaze long into an abyss…

I still keep flashing back to the memory of seeing Claudia thrashing on the street after she’d been hit, and bending over her as she died. It’s a horrible memory but it isn’t sticking to me as much now, or coming back as often.   I told some co-workers that BGE was coming to my house today to install the new smart meters and one of them who didn’t know asked if I had a pet and I said that I used to and I guess something in my voice told her to leave it at that. Then I flashed back for a while but it stopped pretty soon after.   It isn’t cutting me up so much now that I don’t see her coming to greet me, tail held high when I come home.   I’ve pretty much stopped calling her name quietly while standing alone out on my porch at night.

So it goes…

Let’s see if my Facebook posting rights get pulled by an advertiser there.   I just posted the following comment on the Mercedes USA page, to a photo of their brand new GLK BlueTEC SUV, driving through the wild wide open wilderness…

“When you sell these, do your dealers tell their customers that diesel fuel that satisfies the warranty on the engine, fuel and emissions systems (no greater than B5 bio content) is getting very hard to find in some states, and the problem is getting worse, not better? I mean…that photo looks like you’re saying enjoy the wide open spaces in your GLK BlueTEC because it’ll go just about anywhere, and it will, but only where B15-B20 isn’t all you can find. Like, so I hear, Illinois, Minnesota… “

I mean…what is this ad photo telling you… That the car is made to go Everywhere…

But no…it isn’t.   It’s made to go only where you can find diesel fuel with no greater than B5 biodiesel content.   And that’s getting to be a problem in the mid-west, and that situation is getting worse and worse.   For a year and a half after I bought Spirit I never saw Any bio diesel on I-95 between Baltimore and Key West.   This summer when I went to Disney World first time I stopped for fuel on the way home I was confronted by B20, and then again at the next place I tried.   Third time I stopped I was able to get fuel that met the factory specs.

It’s one thing for Daimler to point their fingers at the states and the biofuels industry, and I’d be 100 percent on their side in that, but for the fact that they don’t seem to be telling their customers at the point of sale that they’re buying cars they may not be able to get fuel for later on, or if they go traveling. You have to figure that’s because they know they won’t sell diesels if they do. But it isn’t like they don’t have the engineering talent to make their cars compatible with B20 if they wanted to.   It looks to me like they are just digging in their heels and hoping biodiesel goes away or remains a small niche market.   But that isn’t going to happen if I know my country’s agribusiness lobbyists.

This is a problem that is going to blow up in their faces eventually if they keep ignoring it.