Occasionally, when discussing biking, one or another putatively “conservative” critic will sound off with one or another of the following:

• “Hah!  You are rilly a librul looser!  Because other biker riders are also teh librul!”.  Disposing of this one is fairly trivial; a real conservative doesn’t define people by the group their part of; that’s the road that leads you to endless affirmative action, quotas and “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”. Conservatives are’t supposed to support this sort of thing, preferring instead to tie individuals to their individual records; in my case, as a thoroughgoing pro-free-enterprise, free-market, strict-constructionist, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, pro-traditional marriage, low-tax, high-growth, high-fence/wide gate, parental school choice libertarian conservative.
• “I haven’t seen you explicitly attack the funding that goes toward bike transportation”.  So if we’re defined by what we haven’t written, then I’ll take the liberty of pointing out that by the same logic, my critics all support building concentration camps for dwarves.  I mean, they didn’t say they don’t  support it, and nothing in their record shows their eliminationist hatred of little people, but they never really ruled it out, now, did they?
• “Most Minnesotans drive!”  So?  Most Minnesotans voted for Obama, too.  Numbers don’t make you right.

No, I bike because I enjoy it.I always have.  It’s great exercise and, unlike most exercise, the scenery is never the same twice.  For over 30 years, I’ve enjoyed the feeling you get from finding ones’ limit (which, at 46, is a lot easier than it used to be) and pushing it back.  I just plain feel better when I’m biking, which is nothing to sneeze at. How many of you car drivers look forward to your morning and afternoon commutes?

As I noted last year when interviewed in the Utne Reader, there are those that have politicized biking.  I respond to that politicization to wit: “Not me”.  Of course, there are impeccably conservative reasons to bike: it saves money; you pay less taxes (and what conservative doesn’t relish that thought?); you are happy not to pay for someone else’s vision of Minnesota.
That should take care of that, right?

Well, hopefully.  With some of the (let’s just say) less-creatively-dogmatic people on my side of the aisle, you have to get mighty specific, lest they take the word “bike” like a bull takes an inadvertently-exposed bit of red underwear.

With that established, though, there are some bikers that deserve rhetorical wedgies.

One of them – Matthew Modine, former famous actor – gives one all the ammo one needs in the biograf of a HuffPo post, “Cars Are Like Cigarettes; The New Pariah“:

Matthew Modine is a Causecast leader, a dedicated and passionate individual who is an enigmatic voice for change.

And it’s a good thing he’s got that, since he hasn’t had a decent movie since Full Metal Jacket.

Causecast leaders are a prestigious collection of athletes, artists, students, actors, musicians, politicians, teachers and more. These individuals have set themselves apart from their contemporaries with a spirited dedication to their ideals…

…which are then expressed on…a blog.

Modine:

I am often asked, “Why do you love bicycles?” For a few reasons, but mostly because I am in love with self-propulsion and self-motivation.

So far so good; most of us like “self-propulsion” for some reason or another.

I love finding solutions to problems and I want to leave the world in better condition than when I arrived. For too long we’ve behaved as if the resources of our world are infinite.

On the one hand – nothing is infinite.  But lots of people “want to leave the world a better place”; fortunately, many of them are more concerned with finding ways past our limitations than being held prisoner by them.

Sometimes I feel like I am flying when I ride my bike. It’s exciting to turn a corner and suddenly find myself in a sea of other bicyclists.

[CLOSED CIRCUIT TO MR. MODINE AND BIKERS ONLY:  Ugh.  No.  I mean, different strokes and all, but biking for me is always a solo thing.  Hell, as this article shows us, is other bikers].
Modine is now going to shift into 10th gear, settle his feet into the clips, and pedal like hell into the Smug Zone:

The statistical truth is that 90% of trips made in cars are less than five miles from our homes. A very comfortable journey made on a bicycle.

Mr. Modlne, I’ll give you your due: you’ve certainly put your money where your mouth is on quite a few issues.  You turned down Tom Cruise’s role in Top Gun because you didn’t like the politics; I disagree, but I can respect someone who lives his beliefs.  Unlike most of Hollywood, you’ve also been married to the same person for almost thirty years.  You have two grown children.  Good on ya.

Now – in all those years of raising kids in New York or LA, how many of those “90% of comfortable trips” to the UrgentCare, to the pediatrician,  or to the MiniMart for midnight diaper runs did you make by bike?  How often did you do a week’s worth – even a days’ worth – of shopping for a family of four on your ride?  Or even by subway, bus, taxi or any other “environmentally responsible” form of transportation?

And if you want to say “most of them”, that’s great. Now – if you weren’t a famous, well-paid actor, how might that have worked out?

Behind every transit-uber-alles advocate is someone who’s never had to haul two kids to the urgent-care after work.

Perhaps the best part of choosing a bike instead of a car is what you are saying by pedaling. You are saying to yourself, your friends, your family, and the cars that clog our roads and highways, that you care about the air we breathe and that you care about the environment. You’re saying you want to do something to reduce carbon emissions and that you want to improve your health. This personal and environmental awareness is the legacy that you want to share with your friends and family.

Well, no. I mean, believe what you will, but the only legacy I’m going to leave my kids is a father who hopefully doesn’t drop dead of a heart attack at 50.

Next: Proof that Modine really is from Planet Manhattan:

Our country has had a long love affair with the automobile. Since its invention, the automobile has provided us with the freedom and liberty we yearned for since we took those first baby steps. The automobile took us further and faster than we could have ever done by self-propulsion. But that speed and distance has brought the world to the edge of extinction. We must now look at the automobile with an understanding of what it really is…as a cigarette–a cancer stick–a nail in our collective coffin. The sexy lifestyle that the tobacco industry sold to us contains the same advertising lies and poison which the automobile industry sold and continues to sell to the world.

Let’s ignore for a moment the extent to which Modine’s transit-friendly world – New York – was built to a great extent with profits from slave-grown tobacco; does Modine realize how many millions of Americans were dragged out of poverty by the changes to society that the car brought?  How many good, family-supporting, transit-friendly-city-building jobs came from building, supporting and repairing cars?   How many places like Modine’s native Loma Linda, California were opened up to the rest of the world. enabling wide-eyed Mormon kids like Matthew Modine to think of futures that didn’t involve farming? Indeed, how they paid for Modine’s childhood itself (his father ran…a drive-in theater!).

But Modine’s right.  Like cigarettes, cars have their problems; they are also the butt (heh) of a wave of ill-informed PC lunacy, dished up in the service of people who want to re-engineer society in their image, and damn the unintended consequences; damn the jobs lost, cities swept into ruins, lives altered.  Damn the waitress thrown out of work by the smoking ban, along with the assembly-line worker, and the city in which they both live.

Modine’s right.  Gasoline is literally finite.  But the market will find an alternative long before government will.

Look at the ads for automobiles and you’ll begin to recognize the lies. You’ll see open roads with happy smiling drivers. Ask yourself, When was the last time I was NOT stuck in traffic? When was the last time I was not pissed off and stressed out after just a few hours spent driving behind the wheel of a car? The automobile ads always present cars in a setting that is free of traffic and the drivers appear powerful, happy and liberated behind the wheel. Yeah, like that ever happens in the modern world.

Dunno if Matthew Modine’s ever tried driving in the vast majority of this country between the Sierras and the Hudson.

Hey, he should try biking it!
Yeah.  Like that ever happens in Matthew Modine’s world.