Looking in the rear-view mirror

As we wait for GM to announce its descent into bankruptcy, P.J. O’Rourke drives a big car with fins down memory lane for the WSJ.

It doesn’t entirely resonate with me, but I’m sure it represents the Y-chromosome set's attachment to American cars. And it does touch on the massive post-WWII changes in the American national landscape wrought by the auto industry.

You can certainly see it in any housing built after around 1950: there’s always a carport or garage, and usually it’s the first thing you see when you drive up to a residence. Which veritably screams, “We’ve got wheels!”

(Don’t get me wrong—I’m an LA native and where my car goes is pretty much as important to me as whether the place has indoor plumbing. And when I was looking for a house in Seattle I reconciled myself to the fact that there isn’t going to be any street parking for guests because so many of the houses were built in the expectation that no one would have cars, much less three per household, so the curbs are chockablock with residents’ SUVs and Lexuses.)

I myself never owned anything with more than four cylinders, although the vehicle has to be equipped with a sun roof. (A fact that stymied the car dealer in Wales: “But, madam, you’re in the UK!”) Well—and it does need to possess scoot; I’d never drive a Saab without the turbo charge.

But I take O’Rourke’s point: just as Gen-Yers grew up never knowing existence without PCs and video games, I cannot imagine a world without cars, highways and assigned parking spaces. (In my recent house-hunting forays there were townhouses I rejected because it was impossible to get the car into the attached garage.) Even in London that was one of the absolutes of finding a flat.

We’ll see in the next quarter whether GM emerges from its self-inflicted time of trial. But the era O’Rourke reminisces about is definitely long gone.