the Bondo-mobile comes to Saudi Arabia

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On an automobile, the rocker panel is "the lowest body panel on the side of the car located between the two wheelwells." The vehicularly-challenged may not know what it is, but after a couple of hard winters, they learn quickly enough: Rocker panels, due to their proximity to wet or snowy roads, have a way of rotting out -- of rusting through and needing repair.

Rocker panel

And this is where the Bondo comes in. Bondo is a putty-like substance used for automotive or marine patching. Slap this goop in a hole, allow it to dry, sand it off, paint it and voila, the holes in such items as rocker panels are fixed ... for the moment. All of this presumes that a car owner does not have the income necessary to actually replace the rocker panels -- a more long-lasting, though never perfect, solution. Replacement is costly, but more effective. Bondo makes things look better, but the initial, more basic problem remains.

This morning, a friend passed along an article about a cultural Bondo operation under way in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia may have more money than God, but it is not about to replace its cultural rocker panels. So ... Bondo to the rescue!

The problem is this:

About 60 percent of college graduates in the country are women, and 78 percent of them are unemployed, according to recent surveys; only 15 percent of the Saudi workforce is female.

Bondo solution? Starting next year, create the first women-only city. According to Sarah Goodyear,

"Restrictions on women's lives and productivity there are so extreme -- Saudi women need a male guardian's permission to travel, seek employment, or marry -- that the country is in effect letting a potentially huge sector of the productive economy sit idle."

 The bedrock of the Saudi Arabian vehicle is patriarchy. Men are bigger, better, smarter, stronger and therefore deserve to rule the mustachioed roost. Women are smaller, weaker and dumber and deserve to be as tied-down and bound-up as a Chinese woman's feet. All of this may be cloaked in religious gimcrack, but the men are the guys with the guns. They are on top and they do NOT intend to relinquish or revise their patriarchal status. So ... let's not fix the car; let's patch it up.

The easy social rant in all of this is pretty ho-hum. As a westerner, I can enjoy social outrage as well as the next fellow. Ain't it awful?! And sure enough, it is.

But then the mind cannot help but ripple outwards: Institutionally, isn't this like the Vatican trying to patch up its clerical abuses or the banks promising not to indulge in future risky behavior of the kind that lit the fires of the current economic Depression? Keep the vehicle, but apply the Bondo. Structural change gores too many oxen; it would require vast expenditures of money and thought ... new rocker panels are too expensive and ... and ... it would require a willingness to take a leap into uncharted waters. Honesty is just too fucking expensive.

I'm sure there are wise and thoughtful people in Saudi Arabia -- people capable of thinking these thoughts -- but the vehicle has been in the family for a long time and there is no way in hell anyone is going to pay for new rocker panels or, worse, get a new car.

And then there is the ripple that is wider still: How many human beings do precisely the same thing, over and over again, until the car they drive can be most aptly described as a Bondo-mobile. A little patch here, a little patch there, a little sanding, a little paint, and my life is more or less good looking and stable. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water -- dig down to the structures of patriarchal or matriarchal, self-serving or altruistic, existence to which the Bondo is applied. Sure, I can mend my ways, but don't ask me to mend "me." That would be too expensive and too scary.

Religion, sex, politics, love, hate, meaning, learning, belief, marriage, employment ... add it all up and pretty soon I am applying Bondo to the Bondo. It's pretty expensive, and all that sanding and painting sure are tiring, but it still seems easier and less scary than getting new rocker panels ... or even a new car.

Those inclined to investigate the matter may suggest that there is a better mouse trap -- an easier and more peaceful way to live -- but I'm too old to dish out that pablum. Go ahead ... apply the Bondo and then apply some more. Keep applying it and sanding it and painting it and being pleased with the results until it gets too tiring or too stupid or too obviously ineffective or too out of synch with the empirical ways of the world.

See what happens.

And then ask, as Sarah Palin, the darling of American political nitwits, might:

"How's that Bondo thingie working for you?"
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