Manifest Destiny and The Theory of Pure Mass
People ask what my position is on SUV's. I say I am staunchly opposed to Harley Davidson motorcycles; where do it come down on the SUV problem, then?
Now, owning an SUV in San Francisco is as politically correct as riding around on a palanquin carried by slaves. That doesn't mean people here don't have SUV's -- there are probably as many as anywhere else, if not more so, and San Francisco's SUV's do tend towards the egregiously ostentatious: Range Rovers, BMW X-5s, and Porsche Cayennes -- but on the other, more P.C. side of the cultural divide, SUV's are real lightning rods, inciting a degree of vitriol far beyond what might be called for by their admittedly poor emissions, gas consumption, and safety record.
At this point, it is appropriate for me to disclose that until quite recently I owned a 1967 Dodge Coronet 440 convertible. Midnight blue, with a white top and interior, vintage Cragar mags and a finely aged glass-pack muffler. A thing of beauty. 12 mpg. I wholeheartedly support the maintenance and operation of vintage automobiles -- particularly those over 17 feet long, and with engine displacements exceeding 350 cubic inches. I feel that vehicles of this sort say good things about America. They are a clear affirmation of our cultural and historical identity.
I also feel that, ultimately, they are good for the environment.
I will return the environmental benefits of the full-size American automobile. I feel first it is important to give weight to the significance of the full-size American car -- and I do say "full-size" as we once thought of it, when we were a strong and confident nation, a nation capable of shouldering the defense of the free world and manufacturing a surplus of Chrysler Cordobas -- at the same time, mind you -- as a metaphor for who we are as a nation. For where we came from, and for where we might find ourselves again.
Think for a moment of the Mini. Of the VW Bug. Think -- those who have seen one -- of the Smart Car. What these automobiles have in common, of course, is that they are small. They are...tiny. And they speak to a continent long settled and circumscribed. To a world of boundaries. Of limits. The Mini, appealing as it may be, says "I have found a small pocket in which I can breathe, a small little niche in which I can express myself, a small scrap of largely recycled aluminum I can use to manufacture a machine from. I exist and define myself within boundaries." This is Europe. A place where all land has been demarcated, all thoughts thought, all social possibilities long ago clearly and restrictively defined. A place whence our forefathers came, seeking a new life, new freedoms, new possibilities, and much more leg room.
Next, consider, if you will, the 1958 DeSoto Firestar. The 1970 Plymouth Fury III, perhaps. Yes, and the 1974 Lincoln Continental Mark IV Bill Blass Edition....or, for that matter, of the recent Ford Excursion! Massive, lumbering vehicles, conveyances on a truly staggering scale, with the handling characteristics of a swimming pool, requiring inconceivably powerful 400 and even 500+ cubic inch engines simply to get them across the intersection -- to say nothing of taking them to Interstate speeds. Speeds at which, flying along with an inexorable force too great to bother with the principles of aerodynamics, and given that F=MA -- force = mass x acceleleration -- a wall-fronted '73 Mercury Montego Brougham could easily generate enough force to level a whole Belgian village.
These are automobiles that say: "I live in the new world, a world of inexaustible resources. As far as I can see, all this is mine, to use as I see fit, to harvest, mine, process and squander!!!" Ah, the orgasmic pleasure of squandering!!! O the ecstacy of waste!!!! A bacchanalia of resource extraction!!!!
For these are the children of Frederick Jackson Turner, of the Monroe Doctrine: latter-day industrial symbols of Manifest Destiny. Their chrome-plated tonnage and unimited power challenge nature itself: the land to restrain them, the wells to power them, the mines to build them. "I am Roadmaster, car of cars! Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Fast-forward to the Chrysler K-Car, a sea change for the U.S. auto industry. How the mighty had fallen: Chrysler, the makers of the Fury, the Polara, the Newport, and the Royal Monaco -- the Imperial, for all love, the Green Hornet-mobile itself, a statement of aggressive luxury with cosmetic fore-and-aft bulk so gratuitous that the car was banned from the demolition derby circuit -- now reduced to eking out anemic Aireses and Turbo Colts. As the oil embargo and stagflation hobbled America, it could be seen in the uncomfortable, dispeptic winnowing-down of tonnage, displacement and fuel consumption that has continued to eat steadily away at our national spirit.
The Harley Earls and the Virgil Exners are gone from the Big Three. And they took their rococco stylings with them, their fins and bulbs and nipples and chromium wet dreams. The wind tunnel now serves as head designer at every car company in Detroit. Not again in this life will we see the agressive, confident, forward-canted, Kennedyesque look of the 1965's: the Imperial, the Ford Galaxie, the Pontiac Le Mans/GTO...oh, never mind that JFK was already dead by the time they hit the showrooms; they were designed under his administration, and are clearly imbued with the clean-lined, hard-edged optimism, the modernistic vigor of that era. The hot car in the showrooms twenty years later: the ovoid, stringently neutered Ford Taurus. A Europhile exercise in moral timidity. And a dark night of the soul for America.
Yet all is not lost. No, hope springs anew at, of all places, Chrysler. Never mind that it's now a German company, we need not speak of that. What matters, more even than the fact that it has re-entered NASCAR, is that Chrysler has re-introduced the hemispherical-chambered engine. A 460. Evocative of the 426 of yore, the power plant of the fearsome Coronet and Road Runner R/Ts.
I feel that this bodes well for America. We may yet enter another golden age of unbridled power and resource consumption!
But to return to the question: what about the SUV's?
I cannot in good conscience approve of their driving characteristics, of course, their tendency to tip over. I do not, as a principle, approve of the attendent needless endangerment of lives, particularly since (A) it is a documented fact that only 12 people in the United States actually took their SUV's off a paved surface last year and (B) the only acceptable context for an SUV accident is on a butte or wash, or possibly an arroyo. Nor can I approve of the tendency of SUV's to drive over smaller cars, because, though there is a certain symbolic appropriateness to that particular type of collision, there are fine and worthy people who drive small cars and who may lose their lives in the process. I am foursquare against the pollutants that SUV's add to the environment. (Although it's true that cars from the 60's and '70's are also held to looser emissions standards, the environmental laws that grandfather them in recognize, entirely sensibly, that technologically unsophisticated manufacturing technologies at the time they were manufactured preclude them from meeting contemporary standards and so, really, what is one to do?)
But I am strongly FOR the complete and total exhaustion of fossil fuels that the Ford Excursion, Dodge Durango, or Chevrolet Suburban have continued to make a real possibility in our lifetime, carrying on the proud tradition of the Oldsmobile Belmont, the Pontiac Grand Safari station wagon, and the mighty, V-16-powered 1936 Cadillac Sedan de Ville. American automobile makers proudly point the way for the rest of the world, churning out full-bodied, confident, swaggering battle-wagons that will accelerate the country's industrial engine into a glorious, grating, sparking, rod-throwing, Tinguely-like demise as the last very drop of gasoline is squeezed into a GMC Jimmy on a dusty back road in New Mexico.
Forced from our dependence on fossil fuels, the United States will be a happily quiet place, powered by sail and hand cranks.
