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There are no HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes in Communist China.

I checked.  There aren't.  Zooming through LA on I-5 South yesterday I understood why.  The fundamental contradiction of a HOV in a communist society.

Here you have the working man trying to get back to his proletariat housing (Bauhaus aside) of suburbia, traveling with the rest of the working class.  United, they drive towards their stucco encrusted livable spaces at a slow pace, shoulders hunched, amazed that traffic is as bad as it is, despite the fact it's as bad as it was yesterday.  The common man united in cause, smog, and direction, travels in the 6 lanes of the highway.

But soft, what light beyond yonder lane doth not even touch the break, it is the HOV lane and they are moving FAST!  Why, because more than one person got in that car and decided to go home.  They are traveling at or above the posted speed limit with nothing in their way.  Are they some privileged class, some haute bourgeoisie, something worth kicking in the door of the Kremlin and stabbing Nicholas and giving Anastasia a good story?

No, they are the common man united in cause and latte.  They cruise by because they've gotten another warm body in the car, or at least a believable dummy (the giant panda dolls from the San Diego Zoo do not count as person, I've tried).  

Communists everywhere would be pleased.  The proletariat in their Hyundai, zipping along as the rest of the proletariat waits in congestion.  No, that can't be right.  One group of the labor class is favored over the other.  There is an elite, formed by the uniting of the common man into a single cause/4 door Rodeo with broken EGR valve.  But that is the elite that Communism is based on, the common man, working together, in cramped uncomfortable conditions complaining about the direction of the A/C registers.  But that's what's happening in that miasma of smog and Lexi (the plural of Lexus) in the main lanes.

One group cannot be more equal than the others.  That was  the whole problem with the pigs in Animal Farm.  We can't go Orwellian on the Freeway, can we?  Too late, the mule is heading for the glue factory in that Expedition over there, the dogs are sniffing at your tail pipe, the rooster is checking his rear view for a rotisserie, Charlotte has weaved her last web (sorry, I got carried away there, wrong story).

The ideological benefits of a HOV lane in a capitalist society (cost / resource savings allow for benefit eventual or immediate) are the same issues that would lead to the collapse of Eastern Communism.  This would never work in Cuba, everyone there rides bikes.  What about tandem bikes? Hmm.  Bet you weren't thinking of that mister "I can eat food from my beard for three weeks after Dia de Populista" were, ya? (If you are Fidel Castro and you are reading my site, your country makes great cigars, I miss Che Guevara's idealistic charm, and can y'all claim Ricky Martin, because I'm from Puerto Rico and everyone keeps asking me if I know him or I'm related to him or something, and he's really more hype than talent and he seems to be setting back our music, Cuban and Puerto Rican with it's strong African influence, many, many years).

For those of you sitting in traffic, dreaming the American dream of being able to afford Hickory Farms cheese logs in and out of Christmastime, and driving in the HOV lane, take heart.  You are riding by yourself.  You can shut all the little voices off in your head by turning on NPR and listening to All Things Considered.  Those people in the HOV lane can only pray that enough exhaust will leak only into the passenger side of the car to induce sleep in their companions, but not enough to kill them, because finding a place to dump a body in Southern California is never easy, mostly because everyone  always picks the same places and the cops just go out there once a day and arrest all the cheerleader moms, Heaven's Gate members and lesser noted Scientologists (Note, if you are a member of the church of Scientology, don't you think that if most of L. Ron Hubbard's fiction sucked that his prose would also share its feceltude, however if you are still with me on this, I'd love to meet Kelly Preston, so you can show this to her when you go to service on Sunday or whatever the heck day of the week y'all get together and do whatever you do).