THE BELL CURVE:

I hate SUVs, even though some of my best friends own and drive them and sometimes take me along. SUVs are the embodiment of American excess, the symbol of what most of the rest of the world hates about the U.S. More size, horsepower, weight, technological muscle — and arrogance. Enough power and fuel to pull a platoon of troops through a swamp devoted, instead, to transporting the infield of a Little League team.

SUVs habitually pull into parking spaces clearly marked “compact,” obliterating the division lines and making it impossible for me to open the door of my Toyota Camry when I squeeze into the space between them. They gulp gasoline like a dehydrated camel gulps water at a desert oasis and are probably the greatest single source of the carbon dioxide being spewed into the atmosphere that is causing a dangerously accelerated rate of global warming.

And because more and more well-off Americans like to gallop into traffic shoot-outs from the raised saddle of their family SUV, gutless politicians and an administration in Washington devoted to the money — and therefore the wishes — of large corporations have refused even to consider legislation that would require these behemoths to be redesigned to a moderate fuel consumption. At the very least, every SUV owner should be required to see “An Inconvenient Truth” at their neighborhood theater.

The two local governments that represent the residents of Newport-Mesa are choosing to deal with policy problems in ways that provide almost a test tube example of contrasting styles, especially vivid and significant in an election year when so many council seats are up for grabs.

The City Council of Newport Beach has responded to a near-hysterical level of division on the location of a new city hall by finding repeated ways of avoiding a decision. This is all dressed up in an unctuous show of determination to explore every possibility to a point where council members can discern — or think they can — majority public approval, which simply isn’t going to happen.

This path has inevitably taken them to seriously consider supporting a referendum that would throw the onus of a decision on whatever percentage of voters turn out rather than on the council where it belongs. This is the ultimate extension of town meeting democracy that made a lot more sense in the 18th century than it does today.

The Costa Mesa City Council, on the other hand, has gone the opposite route. Its near-hysterical issue is the training and use of local police to augment the work of federal immigration agents. And the approach of the 3-2 majority to this issue is administrative muscle, unhampered by such niceties as prior hearings or internal debate. Instead, we have the mayor and his two sidekicks telling Costa Mesa citizens what is best for them and then imposing it. Big Daddy at work.

The Newport Beach City Council should make the decision it was elected to make and answer to the voters if a majority of them feel in November that it was a wrong choice. Same thing for the two empty seats on the Costa Mesa Council, where a strong local group has surfaced to oppose the mayor. This is how the system should work. The council should do the job it was elected to do, but only after it has observed proper procedure leading up to that process. Then its members should face the voters.

Have you been following the adventures of Mel Gibson this week? If hypocrisy is ever elevated to the Number One Sin, he will be solidly in the running.

Remember how eloquently he denied any anti-Semitic leanings in defending “The Passion of the Christ”? You want prize-winning hypocrisy? Compare those statements with the comments attributed to him about “Jews” when he was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in Malibu last week.

Maybe the most important fallout from this episode is to call attention, once again, to the phony cops called reserve deputies who are found in force (some 330 of them, according to the Los Angeles Times) in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. These are mostly wealthy political donors and top business executives who have been given badges and sometimes concealed-weapons permits with no police training.

They have been very much in the news this year. Most recently, a gun found in the home of the driver, accused of embezzlement and grand theft, who smashed up a Ferrari at an estimated 160 mph in Malibu was registered to a Newport Beach businessman who was one of Sheriff Michael Carona’s deputies. Earlier another Carona reserve deputy flashed his badge and gun in a dispute with a group of golfers playing ahead of him. In a similar episode, a reserve deputy flashed his badge in a parking lot argument.

Gibson had such a relationship with Sheriff Lee Baca and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He served as a “celebrity representative” for the department and filmed public service announcements in uniform. As a result, the report of the arresting officer describing Gibson’s resistance and his slurs was pigeon-holed and only made public when it was leaked to a celebrity news website. The sheriff’s henchmen look out for his pals, but this time they got caught.

A Minuteman member, ever on the prowl to bust crime, discovered recently that the Laguna Beach Day Labor Center — philosophically supported and partly financed by the city — was illegally operating on land the state didn’t even know it owned. So, by gum, she got the center closed because “what they were doing on that property is illegal, and it wasn’t done to benefit Americans.”

City and state officials promptly got together, figured it out, and got the center back in business. It occurred to me that Costa Mesa Mayor Mansoor and his two fellow crime busters might profitably study this example — especially the back-in-business part.