Re: we are talking bicycle revolution here

Originally Posted by Treespeed
"Like most revolutionaries you spout utopia, but at heart you are a
closet totalitarian.
You spout and spout and I don't think you have an idea in your head
about what you are talking about.

You might want to check out the following from Vaclav Havel, a true
revolutionary:
VACLAV HAVEL"

Vaclav Havel is part of the lie-on game. He comes to Miami (capital of
the Banana Republic) to lecture about democracy in Cuba. Dali Lama
too, and so is Mandela. They all part of the power game.

The heroes are the Proles (the survivors of both Capitalism and
Communism) who know the truth is beyond the media and Nobel Peace
Prizes. In capitalism you are enslaved by unncessary consumption just
as you are by the Party in communism. There's no democracy just as
there's no communism. But there's hope: just grab a bike and a
banana...

'The bicycle, perhaps surprisingly, has always been faintly suspect
and subversive -- something of a threat, as the poet says, to
lucrative patterns of repression, even before there were cars...
cyclists have all the responsibilities and limitations of both cars
and pedestrians, but none of the privileges of either.

The car is best seen as a mechanization of the horse, that archetypal
appurtenance of a privileged class. But the bicycle, on the contrary,
is a device for magnifying the truly personal, physical powers of the
individual human body. The car creates a lumpen-aristocracy of ersatz
cavaliers -- a particularly unlovely version of Yeats' "beggar on
horseback"; but the bicycle gives Everyman and Everywoman seven-league
boots. The car recruits low-quality junior-grade auxiliaries to a
devalued gentry. It does nothing for the human material, apart from
moving it into a different box on the social Monopoly board. But the
bicycle works its magic on the most essential, intimate and
inalienable possessions of humankind -- blood and muscle and sinew. It
does not pur****t to make the prole a patrician (although, under
present social cir***stances, it does rather have the opposite effect,
at least pro tem). But then, the bike-borne prole need no longer
assume or aspire to a shoddy, Brummagem, third-class gentryhood in
order to get quickly across town; the prole who puts a bike between
his legs appropriates to himself the freedom of the city, without
restriction of caste or guild. It is surely this radically democratic
character that has made cycling, from its infancy, a source of such
uneasiness for those heavily invested in order and control, or in the
maintenance of privilege and inequality.'

http://www.rightofway.org/littera-scripta/dodge.html