The Internaut
A man and his engine
by Deborah Hill Cone
As car firms succumb to the recession, what phallic symbol should men turn to?
‘General Motors goes bankrupt” is as shocking a combination of words as “Mum’s nude photos”, according to PJ O’Rourke in a petrolhead’s requiem for the romance of the car. Cars used to be thrilling but their sex appeal has been killed off by bureaucrats, busybodies and bad taste, O’Rourke writes. “Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism … Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.” The word cavalier comes from chevalier, or a guy on a horse. “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.” O’Rourke doesn’t seem to think he needs to spell it out, but presumably the horniness of cars is linked to individual freedom: you can pick up your girlfriend without waiting for the Link bus – putting climate change aside, that would have to be irksome to control freaks. Still, O’Rourke is delighted to see there are still a few blithe boy-racers around. “The pointy-headed busy-bodies 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.”
President Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Labour Robert Reich takes an unseemly amount of pleasure at how the mighty have fallen. Despite being on Barack Obama’s transition team, Reich says – hands on hips – in the Financial Times that the new president is wrong to spend US$60 billion to bail out GM. “In 1953, GM was the world’s biggest manufacturer, the symbol of US economic might.” It generated 3% of US gross national product and was the nation’s biggest employer. Today Wal-Mart is the US’ largest employer, Toyota is the world’s largest car maker and General Motors is bankrupt.
The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker isn’t likely to be popular with the lads after suggesting women should run the world for the next 10 years because chaps have bollocksed it up. “Men love machines, because machines remind them of themselves. As a result, men quickly became very, very good at building machines and then driving them round rather too quickly, shouting, ‘Toot toot! Look at me in my brilliant car!’ This was cute for a while, but the novelty’s worn off now that the planet’s teetering on the brink of becoming an inhospitable cinder. Please, women, for all our sakes, just lock us in a room with some Lego or something.”
I confess, mainstream journalists are a bit sensitive about the fact any old nincompoop thinks they can do our job these days. So I doubt economist Robert Picard is too popular for saying “journalists deserve low pay”. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Picard says journalists should stop thinking we are special little snowflakes and get real: we don’t produce value. “It is clear that journalists do not want to be in the contemporary labor market … Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue.”
The Spectator’s Rod Liddle is little impressed by North Korea’s amateurish nuclear test – “like being threatened by a psychopathic gerbil” – and he takes issue with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ warnings about Armageddon since the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists contains no atomic scientists. “Most of the board members these days are what I would call, perhaps unfairly, anti-American left-wing international bearded lesbian peace monkeys. There’s the curator of a peace museum in Chicago, for example (I bet that’s a real draw for the kiddies), the publisher of the famous old left-wing US magazine Mother Jones, a woman from Unicef, a lecturer in peace studies also in Chicago, and a doctor who is a member of an organisation comprised of doctors opposed to nuclear warfare (as opposed to those doctors who think nuclear warfare is a bloody good thing, by and large).”
