An Unreasonable Man

An Unreasonable Man

Dropping the name of Ralph Nader in front of Democrats is like mentioning to a bunch of nuns the idea of holding a wet t-shirt contest at the abbey. Without him, many in the Party of Jackson believe George W. Bush would still be the grammatically-challenged governor of Texas who spends his Friday nights frying retarded prisoners and could proudly still maintain with a straight face that the worst decision he ever made was trading Sammy Sosa when he was owner of the Texas Rangers. Let it drop, tit for tat, you got 8 years of William Jefferson Clinton because nutball H. Ross Perot received 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992, most of which would have gone to daddy Bush. Four years later, he was able to siphon 8 percent of the vote. Without H. Ross, Bill Clinton would still be hitting on waitresses at the Little Rock Hooters, and claiming he only goes there because they have great wings. Okay, basically what he is doing today, but America would have missed out on all those great Hillary Clinton jokes and those wonderful novelty watches with Bill Clinton on them showing time running backwards. If Democrats should be mad at anyone, it should be their last two candidates who ran awful campaigns. The reason you never saw Al Gore and John Kerry together is that a charismatic black hole would have developed that might have swallowed the entire known universe. Getting beat by George W. Bush is like losing a spelling bee to Timmy on South Park, even if Cartman is tutoring him.

You have to have a strange kind of admiration for Ralph Nader’s Presidential runs, the same kind of admiration you have for a cow who tells the butcher to bring it on or a mouse that gives the bird to the swooping hawk inches from his face, but admiration all the same. He had to know that he was going to lose. He had to know that a lot of his friends were going to turn on him and that he would become a staple of late night talk show humor, but like Thelma and Louise, Nader hit the campaign trail, leading humorist Garrison Keillor to describe his campaign as "an air bag without a car." It is the same kind of insanity and unreasonableness that led this humorless, odd-looking, asexual man to save thousands, perhaps millions, of American’s lives, one of them being my conservative brother’s. Any time a right-winger claims that the free market fixes all problems. All that is needed is a 2-word retort… Ralph Nader.

Most Americans forget what cars were like before Nader. Automobiles were built like steel coffins. No padding on the metal dashboard. Seat belts were hard to find even in an auto parts store. Window glass that could strip a person’s face off. Doors that were not attached firmly to the car’s body. Best of all, cars had nice sharp gearshifts and steering wheels to be impaled on. Basically, to sum it up, if you got in an accident, at even a low speed, the only question was how long it would take your relatives to hose out the interior so they could sell it to the next potential victim. In 1965, Nader published his book, Unsafe At Any Speed, which focused on the Chevrolet Corvair, but really dealt with the needless hazards the consumer dealt with because Detroit refused to design safer cars. Nader’s book led to Congress passing the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. Air bags, required crash tests, recalls for faulty parts, and seat belts are the legacy of Nader’s book and lobbying. (An interesting side note is that when Nader was an undergrad at Princeton, he barely slammed on the brakes of his 1949 Studebaker in time to avoid hitting a jaywalking Albert Einstein.)

Directors Henriette Mantel and Stephen Skrovan’s documentary, An Unreasonable Man, tries to do the almost impossible and give an overview of the life of America’s favorite and now almost forgotten consumer advocate. Some people are born old men and Ralph was probably one of them. Born to Lebanese immigrants who ran a restaurant where there seemed to be more talking about politics that eating, Ralph was never allowed to play with toys as a child because his mother considered them “a waste of time.” A loner as a boy, yet, among his classmates he had one good friend, David Halberstam, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Maybe it was listening to his father badger customers and rage about how the common man was not represented by either the Republicans or Democrats, but young Ralph was always driven. As an undergrad, he organized protests and crusaded against the college’s use of DDT. When he moved on to Harvard Law School, he became editor of the school’s paper and turned a pretty banal school newspaper into an advocate of reform. Graduating in 1958, he hung up his shingle in Hartford, Connecticut, handling divorce and real estate cases. Bored out of his skull, Nader would hitchhike the 26 miles to and from work for excitement. Over the next 7 years, Nader researched his attack on the auto industry.

Now for most people saving thousands of people’s lives from dying in car crashes would be enough, but not for Nader. In the afterglow of his book, Ralph formed a non-profit consumer advocate group popularly called “Nader’s Raiders,” which fought for much needed reform in a variety of industries. But even that was not enough, Nader also found the U.S. Public Interest Group (PIRG), which addressed issues as diverse as tax-funded major league stadium for sports teams to pollution to prescription drugs. With whatever time he has left over after all this and an active public speaking schedule, he also established, the Disability Rights Center, the Pension Rights Center, the Center for Study of Responsive Law, the Center for Auto Safety, the Project for Corporate Responsibility, and the Clean Water Action Project. Without Ralph Nader’s unreasonableness, there would be no Freedom of Information Act, no OSHA, no EPA, and no Safe Drinking Water Act. Ralph Nader will never get the credit he is due, but this documentary is a reasonable tribute to an unreasonable man.

Verdict: A Nice Overview of Nader's Life