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Gas prices 'hover,' we say, 'Whatever'

By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published September 11, 2006

In May, shortly before I departed on a trip that would cover nearly 10,000 miles and take me through 23 states, I wrote this:

"Gas prices will remain ridiculously high - maybe even increase - during the summer and will begin to decline in late August or so and decline throughout the fall until early November."

The price for a gallon of regular gasoline that week, according to other published accounts, was "hovering" around $3 per gallon.

You might have noticed that gas prices always "hover," and one would wish that meant that they were about to plummet or swoop downward, when what it usually means is that they are just catching their breath like a recently launched Polaris missile does right after it is expelled from a submarine and right before its rocket engines kick in and it goes up until it is out of sight.

Anyway, the prices were hovering around $3, and I, cynic that I always am, was implying - okay, stating - that they were, as usual, being artificially manipulated by oil companies wanting to squeeze a few more drops of blood out of us before beginning a pre-election downturn.

That downturn, I said, was aimed at taking advantage of our short national attention span (known as the "Look ... something shiny" syndrome) and placating us so that the members of the oil companies' wholly owned subsidiary, the U.S. Congress, could keep their phony-baloney jobs, get re-elected and then stick it to us for another two years.

On Sept. 3 , I bought gas for $2.64 and nine-tenths of a cent. They just love that nine-tenths thing.

And that was before the end of what I predicted would be the final gouge of the pre-election season - in celebration of Labor Day for working Americans everywhere.

I had been waiting for someone to call and tell me that I was wrong, that I was a hopeless cynic, that oil prices were the result of economic forces too complex to be understood by the likes of me and my proletariat cronies.

But that is no longer the style of government communications.

No weapons of mass destruction?

No cheap oil from Iraq?

No significant progress in cleaning up after Katrina?

Obvious manipulation of oil prices so clear that a high school dropout columnist with a big chip on his shoulder can see it through the scratched bifocals covering his rheumy, aging eyes.

Shrug.

So what?

Look! Something shiny!

Drugs in the Tour de France.

Some total whack job confesses to the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

Lindsay Lohan parties too much.

Actually, the only folks to catch a break in the last couple of months have been at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where workers can now post signs proudly proclaiming: "At Least We Aren't the Boulder DA's Office."

Keep in mind also that the $2.64 figure looks inviting only because we have gotten used to blowing up to $3.60 for a gallon of regular, more in some areas. I remember, on the same basic journey last year, keeping my eyes open for (and finding) prices of less than $2 per gallon.

The oil establishment was lining up the usual suspects: pipeline troubles for BP, Iran getting feisty again, that kind of stuff, but the election season just sort of snuck up on it, and it had to suck it up and lower prices.

If you own oil stock, don't fear.

It's a cycle.

Prices can start to go up again after the election, and the oil companies won't even have to bother with excuses.

It is because, I said in that May column, they suspect, correctly, that we have the attention spans of gnats on crack.

In retrospect, that was a gratuitously cruel thing to say.

About gnats.

Even the ones on crack.

[Last modified September 11, 2006, 08:14:04]