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The phrase “bankrupt General
Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday
(i.e June 1, 2009), 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.
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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.
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 power
“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.
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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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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.
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.
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| Henry Ford and
his Model T. |
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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.
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.
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| Louis Chevrolet
sits behind the wheel of his prototype car in 1911. |
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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.
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.
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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| Preston Tucker,
in one of the few Tucker cars produced, celebrates
being acquitted of charges of fraud over the failure
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.
P.J. O’Rourke is the author of 13 books, including
“Driving Like Crazy.”
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P.J. O'Rourke points
out the obvious future that awaits is one
of small, economical hybrids and electric
cars that will replace today's cars. But
just like in the mid-1970s, when high gasoline
prices, environmental controls, safely features
and inflation resulted in high-priced cars
and poor quality, we had to endure what
we drove instead of enjoying what we drove.
But there are still some enjoyable cars
being built. And there will be in the future.
Just fewer and fewer.
On the positive side, the cause does have
an effect. What happened in 1970s grew in
the 1980s, 1990s and is still growing. The
old car hobby has blossomed and now will
grow even more, long into the future. Those
old cars that O'Rourke appreciates are still
with us and more are being restored ever
day because now they are more desirable
than ever.
Don't be sad and decide to give up on the
real enthusiast cars. Get one if you do
not own one already. The place to start
looking is McLellan's
Automotive History where you can do
some research and collecting — over
150,000 brochures, books, dealer albums,
paint chips, press kits, memorabilia, handbooks,
manuals, etc. A good investment in O'Rourke's
future. — Robert Mclellan
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