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Page Two |
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| The
End of Our Love Affair With Cars |
| By P.J. O'ROURKE
30 May 2009 |
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| The fate of Detroit isn't a matter
of economics. It's a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats,
bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O'Rourke on why Americans fell out of love
with the automobile. |
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| Source: Wall
Street Journal - Online |
| Copied here in June 2009 |
| Sid's
copying disclaimer |
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| The phrase "bankrupt General Motors,"
which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic
shock. The words are as melodramatic as "Mom's nude photos." And, indeed,
if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should
give up on economics and turn to melodrama.
Politicians, journalists, financial
analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if
a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate
of Detroit isn't a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate
greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of
the footprints in the carbon. It's a tragic romance --- unleashed passions,
titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.
Foremost are the horses. Cars can't
be comprehended without them.
A hundred and some years ago Rudyard
Kipling wrote "The Ballad of the King's Jest," in which an Afghan tribesman
avers:
Four things greater than all
things are, --- Women and Horses and Power and War.
Insert another "power" after the horse
and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was
in the Khyber Pass. |
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| Horsepower is not a quaint leftover
of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of
the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a
measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time --- what we
call energy.
(What we call energy wasn't even an intellectual
concept in the late 18th century --- in case you think the recent collapse
of global capitalism was history's most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt
did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions,
a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute.Mr.
Watt --- the eponymous watt not yet existing --- called this unit of energy
"1 horse-power."
In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand
name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of
one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds.
And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the
roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the
driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the
block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and
main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth
to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.
Horses and horsepower alike are about
status and being cool. A knight in ancient Rome was bluntly called "guy
on horseback," Equesitis. Chevalier means the same, as does Cavalier. Lose
the capitalization and the dictionary says, "insouciant and debonair; marked
by a lofty disregard of others' interests, rights, or feelings; high-handed
and arrogant and supercilious." How cool is that? Then there are cowboys
--- always cool --- and the U.S. cavalry that coolly comes to their rescue
plus the proverbially cool-handed "Man on Horseback" to whom we turn in
troubled times.
Early witnesses to the automobile urged
motorists to get a horse. But that, in effect, was what the automobile
would do --- get a horse for everybody. Once the Model T was introduced
in 1908 we all became Sir Lancelot, gained a seat at the Round Table and
were privileged to joust for the favors of fair maidens (at drive-in movies).
The pride and prestige of a noble mount was vouchsafed to the common man.
And woman, too. No one ever tried to persuade ladies to drive sidesaddle
with both legs hanging out the car door.
For the purpose of ennobling us schlubs,
the car is better than the horse in every way. Even more advantageous than
cost, convenience and not getting kicked and smelly is how much easier
it is to drive than to ride. I speak with feeling on this subject, having
taken up riding when I was nearly 60 and having begun to drive when I was
so small that my cousin Tommy had to lie on the transmission hump and operate
the accelerator and the brake with his hands. |
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Click for full image
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A 1950 Studebaker Commander
Convertible, with its famous
‘bullet- nose' front end.
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After the grown-ups had gone to bed, Tommy
and I shifted the Buick into neutral, pushed it down the driveway and out
of earshot, started the engine and toured the neighborhood. The sheer difficulty
of horsemanship can be illustrated by what happened to Tommy and me next.
Nothing. We maneuvered the car home, turned it off and rolled it back up
the driveway. (We were raised in the blessedly flat Midwest.) During our
foray the Buick's speedometer reached 30. But 30 miles per hour is a full
gallop on a horse. Delete what you've seen of horse riding in movies. Possibly
a kid who'd never been on a horse could ride at a gallop without killing
himself. Possibly one of the Jonas Brothers could land an F-14 on a carrier
deck.
Thus cars usurped the place of horses
in our hearts. Once we'd caught a glimpse of a well-turned Goodyear, checked
out the curves of the bodywork and gaped at that swell pair of headlights,
well, the old gray mare was not what she used to be. We embarked upon life
in the fast lane with our new paramour. It was a great love story of man
and machine. The road to the future was paved with bliss. |
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Click for full image
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Henry Ford and his Model
T
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Then we got married and moved to the suburbs.
Being away from central cities meant Americans had to spend more of their
time driving. Over the years away got farther away. Eventually this meant
that Americans had to spend all of their time driving. The play date was
40 miles from the Chuck E. Cheese. The swim meet was 40 miles from the
cello lesson. The Montessori was 40 miles from the math coach. Mom's job
was 40 miles from Dad's job and the three-car garage was 40 miles from
both.
The car ceased to be object of desire
and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications
hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin --- a motorized cup holder. Americans,
the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover
SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees
in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-
Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-
climate wine cellar. That was a day's walk away.
We became sick and tired of our cars
and even angry at them. Pointy- headed busybodies of the environmentalist,
new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed
the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great
wasteland of big- box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just
get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an
archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled
together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically
unimpactful way,
But cars didn't shape our existence;
cars let us escape with our lives. We're way the heck out here in Valley
Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the
cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies,
corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies.
Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let
us scout the terrain and probe the enemy's lines. And thanks to our cars,
when we lost the cities we weren't forced to surrender, we were able to
retreat. |
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| But our poor cars paid the price. They
were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances.
Or worse. Nobody's ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less
the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the
other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all
the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart's
more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from
breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at
gophers with a mashie.
We've lost our love for cars and forgotten
our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting
their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown,
but we won't be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of
safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance
of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible.
One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary
motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and
sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren't squawking at me
like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open.
You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the
bedroom floor.
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Click for full image
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Louis Chevrolet sits behind
the
wheel of his prototype car in
1911.
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I don't believe the pointy-heads give
a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive
a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they
want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas
look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air
bags, 5- mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the
tail?
And there's the end of the American
automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that
bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more
conveniently located. |
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| The American automobile is --- that
is, was --- never a product of Japanese-style industrialism. America's
steel, coal, beer, beaver pelts and PCs may have come from our business
plutocracy, but American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic
fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp
of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard
brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North
Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were
designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who
founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke
twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic,
but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool. |
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Click for full image
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Preston Tucker, in one of
the few
Tucker cars produced, celebrates
being acquitted of charges of
fraud
over thefailure of his automobile
business in 1950.
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America's romantic foolishness with cars
is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old
boys haven't got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the
Obama administration's Department of Transportation is even now calculating
a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations
to locate and subdue these reprobates.
Among certain youths --- often first-generation
Americans --- there remains a vestigial fondness for Chevelle low-riders
or Honda "tuners." The pointy-headed busybodies have yet to enfold these
youngsters in the iron-clad conformity of cultural diversity's embrace.
Soon the kids will be expressing their creative energy in a more constructive
way, planting bok choy in community gardens and decorating homeless shelters
with murals of Che.
I myself have something old-school under
a tarp in the basement garage. I bet when my will has been probated, some
child of mine will yank the dust cover and use the proceeds of the eBay
sale to buy a mountain bike. Four things greater than all things are, and
I'm pretty sure one of them isn't bicycles.
There are those of us who have had the
good fortune to meet with strength and beauty, with majestic force in which
we were willing to trust our lives. Then a day comes, that strength and
beauty fails, and a man does what a man has to do. I'm going downstairs
to put a bullet in a V-8. |
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| P.J. O'Rourke is the author of 13 books,
including "Driving Like Crazy." |
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