The DeflatedJust the sort of story which stirs the latent eco-guerilla lurking within (from the LA Times)...

If the French marauders known as The Deflated waged their brand of urban subversion in Southern California, the mecca of the sport utility vehicle, by now they would probably have been jailed, beaten, shot or at least sued.

But five weeks after the clandestine crew of environmentalists launched a low-intensity war on SUVs in Paris, there are no casualties to report. Except, of course, for dozens of deflated gas-guzzling vehicles, said Sous-Adjudant Marrant (Sub-Warrant Officer Joker), the mysterious, masked leader of Les Dégonflés.

Marrant (unemployed after dabbling in journalism, so the article reports) is quite the budding French intellectual revolutionary...

We use the mud to say that if the owners will not take the four-wheel-drives to the countryside, we will bring the countryside to the four-wheel-drives ... We emphasize the comic, the burlesque side ... We don't slash tires, we deflate them. Air doesn't cost anything ... Our rules are to never run from the police. And always run from the owners.

Sebastian Rotella - the LA Times reporter covering the story - gets into the Parisian swing of things in this paragraph from the story, where, he describes Marrant...

...spewing smoke from a Gaulois cigarette into the haze shrouding the crowded cafe.

How, um, evocative. Marrant continues his spiel to Rotella, presumably while sipping a filthily strong short black inbetween drags from the Gaulois...

We have to get past the idea that there's always a single, identifiable villain: the president, the corporation, the chief executive. Our campaign has to be very marketing, shocking, provocative. I want to make it fashionable to be anti-4X4.

Fashionable.

Full article here | Mirror @ MueveloNYC | the Deflated blog
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