On GM

And so it's come to pass... the largest industrial bankruptcy filing in American history went down today, as dreaded and expected. I can't come close to expressing my sorrow and dismay over this horrible, terrible turn of events... so I'll let P.J. O'Rourke speak for me. Here are the first few grafs from a piece he wrote in the WSJ last week:

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.
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.

And Mr. O'Rourke continues on in a manner that I cannot even come close to duplicating. Except perhaps for the same sort of sadness bordering on despair that I think we share. I'm older than Mr. O'Rourke, but not by a whole helluva lot (a mere two years, actually). Mr. O'Rourke... at the risk of giving away the entire thrust of his most-excellent piece... argues that America fell out of love with the automobile, and that's what killed the automotive industry. Not the credit crunch. Not the "bad" cars GM-cum-Detroit made all those many dismal years after the first gas-crisis. Not the bean counters. Not the Japanese, and now the Koreans. Us. You and me.

Well, you, maybe. I never lost my love for cars... in that I never bought an econo-box, a minivan, or a "practical" car. Nope... all my purchases have been affairs of the heart, with only one or two exceptions... which were driven (heh) entirely by financial circumstance. If I had the wherewithal I'd be Jay Leno II... and I'd need a warehouse to shelter all the rip-roaring automotive goodness I'd own. But I'm an anomaly... an exception to the modern day automotive zeitgeist. And more's the pity.

I rarely use this tone of voice... read as: attitude... in my postings, but I can't help but think GM would still be a going concern if there were more like me out there. Make of that what you will and feel free to call me any sort of name you choose. Or even posit a rational counter-argument if you feel the need. But this ain't about rationality, Gentle Reader... this is nothing but pure, raw emotion.

I mourn.

(h/t for the WSJ article: Gordon)