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One of our state's zanier and more prolific right-wing mass e-mailers circulated a warning a couple of days ago that Barack Obama and the liberals intend to turn us into a carless society.

Not "careless," but "carless," meaning one without automobiles.

This is a supposed conspiracy, you see, of which the government takeover of General Motors represents but a sinister step.

This new right-wing paranoid delusion would seem to supplement the other one, meaning Obama's reported conversion of ours to a gunless society.

Without guns and cars, emergency rooms could well be shut down and health care costs dramatically reduced. Seriously, if we could keep from getting shot or run off the road, we'd stand a good chance of being old and sick when we die.

But actually, the president is not trying to take anyone's guns and the only substantive advocacy I've seen for doing away on anything resembling a short-term basis with American automobile travel -- a fine if utopian idea, generally impractical and specifically out of the question in rural areas -- was an essay of typical agitprop by the liberal documentary filmmaker, Michael Moore.

Moore advances thought and dialogue. He provokes. He makes watchable and entertaining documentary films that, by design, are polemical, not objective. But he's not a serious American policy-maker. Any chance of his emerging as that, remote already, ended when he seemed to be saying our sick people would be better off if we boated them to Cuba.

The problem with these zany right-wing extremists is that they get a little essay by Moore e-mailed to them and they see not a lone marginalized author doing a little provocation, but a vast and dark liberal cloud threatening them with the very thing they fear most -- a change in the way they live, forced by government policy.

"They" -- it's always "they" -- are going to take our guns or our cars and make us live differently from the only way we know to live, and this scares us because we don't think we're capable of living any other way. That's the real meaning of these paranoid screeches.

Moore's essay came down to this: Let's use all these car plants to build high-speed rail cars. Let's build a few energy-efficient buses for rural areas where there isn't enough population density to make rail construction practical. Let's put people to work building rails and train stations. Let's build a few electric cars for the transition. For those still driving gasoline-powered automobiles, tax them $2 a gallon to try to get them to quit and to help pay for the rail project.

Let me be candid: I know some liberals very well and these expressions of Michael Moore reflect exactly how they talk among themselves. They believe government policy can compel better and more responsible human behavior and force us, if that's what it takes, to operate more co-operatively and efficiently. They think cars are destructive to the earth both in what is required to run them and in what they emit. They sit around counting all the one-driver SUVs going down the road and wail and moan about our collective stupidity. They do this at their parties. Then they go get in their cars, two to a vehicle, some of them SUVs, and drive home.

Their preaching is right, if not their practice. But these kinds of things take time.

We're currently only in the embryonic stage.

Someday, after today's right-wing fear-mongers are gone, we'll have transformed ourselves into something resembling the very kind of society they feared. And their kids or grandkids will be happy as clams in it.

But fear not: People don't turn smart overnight. That takes evolution, which, actually, now that I think about it, these alarmists don't believe in.

P.S. A carless society could work already in rural Arkansas, actually. One without pickup trucks wouldn't.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.