There are few political humorists who have P.J. O'Rourke's instinct for what's important about a story or a pen as sharp and witty to describe it.
Car lover and brilliant satirist, O'Rourke nails it in this Wall Street Journal column:
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..
Read also P.J.'s hilarious take on horses vs. cars. And make sure you read the whole thing...
[I.e., cars are liberating and among the highest contributors to our standard of living, allowing us to go anywhere at anytime with all the people or stuff we want - all completely paid for in perfect proportion by those who chose to do so. What's not to like? Given even a casual glance at our highways each day, despite the daily liberal diatribe against them and every conceivable effort by our elites to make their use less attractive, there we are: the overwhelming majority who chooses to drive because it suits our lifestyle best.
Who is anyone to gainsay our choice - to say noting of public 'servants' chutzpah to do so?]
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