STOP THE WEEK, I WANT TO GET OFF!

FX&MM Editor, Drew Hillier, back in the office after contemplating the meaning of life from the business end of a dentist’ chair, reflects on a week of deepening gloom, not least when faced with expensive fillings and some painful extraction… and that’s just at the fuel pump and his wallet!

Elvis has now left the building… in a V-6 4x4.

With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac looking set for a spot of long-overdue relationship counselling, with a possible new suitor on the scene in the form of the US Treasury, I see it’s UN World Population Day. What? Let’s go Googling. Here we are, and they’ve even got a catchy theme: "Family Planning: It's a Right; Let's Make it Real," which apparently provides a chance to raise awareness of the many benefits of family planning, including its vital role in enhancing maternal health, gender equality and poverty reduction. And that’s fine, just as long as they don’t all expect to own cars – or at least, if they do, then not to drive them anywhere!
But as the fertility rates in the UK reach their highest in thirty-five years, a bunch calling themselves the Optimum Population Trust have published a study arguing we don’t have an inalienable right to have as many children as we want. The Trust’s patron, Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health at University College London, John Guillebaud, was on the radio recently, explaining how there are currently “six-thousand-seven-hundred million people on this planet, to which, crucially, we’re adding another seventy-nine million extra people a year – the equivalent of a million-and-a-half people per week, meaning a city to accommodate them has to be built every week somewhere in the world, with all the environmental ramifications that involves.”
Of course, there are others who totally disagree, saying we are not in fact crowded, pointing to the phenomenon of how the world has become richer and better fed as the population has sextupled. And of course, people do tend to die. Indeed, it would seem that those such as the Optimum Population Trust have peddled an erroneously bleak view of the planet to look after itself under the guidance of humans. But this, as Professor Guillebaud tells us, is an inherently economic standpoint, (as if that in itself was de facto incoherent). “If the world was run by biologists, rather than economists” he says, “we’d have come to our senses a long while ago. Biologists know that any species cannot grow beyond the sustainability of its environment.”
I suppose the Prof may have a point, not least in light of the performance of the global economy, a touchy subject about which I asked US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson when I interviewed him during his stopover in London recently, (go to our Members Area for the full works). Taking into account the phenomenal rise of the Chinese economy, with its very different structure to ours, how would Hank characterise the performance of the Anglo-Saxon free market economic model which leads so many times to boom and bust – for instance, would he agree it’s failed?   
“Ha, well”, he replied ruefully, “I wouldn’t quite go as far as to agree that it’s failed, but it could have performed better!”
Paulson, Bernanke and Bush are of course ‘working hard’ to avoid a summer of unmitigated road fuel misery, not least in the wake of an Opec warning that the cost of oil will increase sharply to between $150 and $170 a barrel. We can all speculate that things could’ve performed better, though perhaps ‘speculate’ is not quite the correct word in this instance, conjuring as it does the spectre of the bogeymen at whose doors many observers lay the blame for the breathtaking rise in crude prices.
Of course, there are many ways of measuring the scale of the crisis now gripping the global economy – Fanny and Freddie aside – from the fall in the value of property to rising interest rates. But there’s one indicator that works only in the United States: sales figures for the pick-up truck. With a throaty roar, it’s the four-point-seven soundtrack to one of the enduring love stories of history; the romance between the American motorist and the pick-up truck – that curious coming together of flatbed farm wagon, family car and five bedroom house on wheels, which for decades has been the best selling vehicle in the US.
Of course, it’s not the first love affair to hit hard times when the money runs out, but with gas at four dollars a gallon and rising, Americans can simply no longer afford to go on buying motorcars with enough pulling power to drag a fully grown rhinoceros up a mountain only to use it for popping to the shops. Nonetheless, whilst the relationship is undoubtedly going through something of an all-terrain rocky patch, the affection is still there, and it runs deep in the American psyche – as Mike Levine, who runs his own website - pickuptruck.com – (yes, I know… only in America…) explains: “I think it’s almost like going back to having your own horse as a cowboy; the thought that Americans could go anywhere they wanted to at any time and basically charting out their own territory. There’s nothing like a big, shiny pick-up truck to say ‘hey, I can take any situation you throw at me and conquer it!’”

As a charmingly odd little country songs goes:
I’m geddin’ married to my pick-up truck,
It never leaves me when I’m down on my luck.
It doesn’t shop at fancy stores,
Or have a lawyer, or want a divorce!

Whether Elvis Presley sang anything to do with pick-up trucks, I don’t know. He certainly rode around in plenty of them, especially towards the end when his burger-fuelled diet meant the only means of transport man-enough to cart him from the fridge to the lavatory involved him lying prone on the flatbed of a six-litre Dodge pick-up.
I mention Elvis merely so as to leave you with a curiously synergised mental image that neatly draws together this week’s motif: when Elvis Presley died in 1977, there was estimated to be 37 people impersonator him in the entire world. By 1993, however, after an exponential increase, there were 48,000 of them. Extrapolating from this, by 2010 there will be 2.5 billion Elvis impersonators; in other words, by 2010, every third person living on the planet will be an Elvis impersonator! And that’s a lot of 4x4s…

Are YOU lonesome tonight?
Drew