THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPTED OPINION FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, WITH MY OWN ADDENDA BELOW IN ITALICS
How long before the midnight drag races return on dark and dusty roads?
When Barack Obama announced that the government will use its fist to wave onto the highways of America cars that get 39 miles to a gallon of liquefied switch grass or something, he said, "Everybody wins."
Everybody? What country has he been living in? This marks the end of the internal combustion engine as we knew it, and it is the way Americans have defined, designed and literally driven much of the nation's culture for as long as anyone can remember. Car culture is America's culture.
Mr. Obama is fond of giving people iPods as gifts. I've got a playlist for Mr. Obama's iPod.
Track 1: "Shut Down" by the Beach Boys. Clip: "Superstock Dodge is windin' out in low/But my fuel-injected Stingray's really startin' to go. To get the traction I'm ridin' the clutch/My pressure plate's burnin', this machine's too much."
Track 2: "Little Deuce Coupe" by the Beach Boys. Clip: "She's got a competition clutch with a four on the floor, and she purrs like a kitten til the lake pipes roar."
It's 2016. Imagine a Brian Wilson ever thinking to write: "And she'll have fun, fun, fun til her daddy takes her Prius away."
At Mr. Obama's "Everybody wins" announcement ceremony in the Rose Garden, no one knew better how much has been lost than the cowed auto chiefs arrayed behind him. CAFE, the fuel-mileage standards Congress mandated 34 years ago, gradually squeezed the size and life out of America's cars. But something's getting phased out here other than gas-fueled cars.
Some of the most famous celebrity converts to the politics behind this new, shrinking world of plug-ins once wrote and sang paeans to muscle cars and a more muscular culture.
Track 3: "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen. Clip: "Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard."
Time was Bruce Springsteen knew that "Jersey boys" mainly meant steel, chrome, rubber and auto tech. Check out the lyrics to "Pink Cadillac" ("but my love is bigger than a Honda") or the car-crazy "Racing in the Street," invoking Chevys with 396 Fuelie heads, Hurst speed-shifters and Camaros running "from the fire roads to the interstate."
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Track 4: "GTO" by Ronny and the Daytonas. Clip: "Turn it on, wind it up, blow it out -- GTOoooo."
We are being offered a different world now. One designed, defined and driven by a new set of un-fun obsessions -- carbon footprints, greenhouse gas and alternative energy. This large transition passes before us, barely seen, as the gray water of public policy. Hardly anyone notices how much is being changed.
To put a stop to the new sin of spending too much time out on Highway 9, we are getting the mark-up hearings this week in Washington for the Waxman-Markey climate bill. It's 900 pages long, dripping with thousands of Mickey-Mouse rules to reorder how we live. A Senate Finance Committee document last week on the Obama health-care plan proposes "lifestyle related revenue raisers." Lifestyles like drinking beer. This is the "taxing bad behavior" movement. They get to define what's bad.
Track 5: "Hot Rod Lincoln" by Ann Arbor, Michigan's own Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. Clip: "We had flames comin' from out of the side/Feel the tension, man, what a ride!"
This tension over how we live arrived before the world began standing on its head over global warming. The guys in the hemi-powered drones used to mock the granola and Birkenstock crowd. Look who's on top now.
"Everybody wins?" Not quite. What's winning is a worldview that goes deeper than the data beneath global warming. The gasoline cars they want to turn into scrap were about a lot more than the thrill of roaring on.
The cars and their culture were a manifestation of what made the U.S. really different. The cars, like the country, were big, fast and unfettered. Their drivers were delirious with the possibility of finding something new in life. "It's a town full of losers, and I'm pullin' out of here to win!"
When Americans grew up, that's just what a lot of them did -- win. Now, it looks like we're being asked to throttle down to government-approved survival. They're even running the car companies, telling them what to build, and then they'll pay people to buy the product. Save the planet and lose the nation's heart.
The likelihood of resistance to this timid ethos from anyone in politics is remote. It was tough to watch former A-4 Skyhawk pilot John McCain try to outbid Barack Obama for the green lifestyle vote in the debates. We'll see what happens when people walk into auto showrooms (if they exist) and every car has a wheelbase of about 100 inches.
Maybe they'll bolt. Maybe the car culture will revert to where it began, when the whiskey runners in the South ran from the revenuers. This time the cars themselves will be bootlegged -- fat, fast and gas-powered -- racing through the night on off-map roads while the National Green Corps -- enacted by Congress in the second Obama term -- looks for them from ethanolic choppers overhead. Reborn to run.

Agreed. There is very little in the way that the American automotive market is being reformed that one would ever categorize as "sexy." "Little Prius Coupe?" Nah, it just doesn't have the same ring to it. Same for "Hot Rod Nissan," although having driven more than a few hot rod Nissans, conceptually, that still has some teeth in it. The nature of the industry has just gone way too "world." Theoretically, the only real "engineering" ever done when any new car comes out has to do with the engine, drivetrain, and other major component systems. (And, of course, styling, but even that has gone all copycat.) Wiring systems? Between Yazaki and Hitachi, the entire car market in that area is covered. Which is probably just as well, given that in days of yore, when Lucas and other smaller manufacturers were infesting particularly British brands, they did indeed have what my engineering friends refer to as "thermal events" (what the rest of us call an electrical fire,) at relatively regular intervals, especially after they started getting old. Seating systems? Give Lear-Siegler a call, everyone else does, along with Sparco, Recaro, and some others. Wheels? BBS, Keystone....same routine. I could go on, but you get the picture. Overall, it does much to explain the whole "tuner" aftermarket segment, but....dammit, something is still missing. A '69 Camaro with headers and a Flowmaster exhaust sounds masculine; same for a similar vintage GTO (or any GTO, for that matter.) A tunerized Focus, or even something like a 300ZX that's been done in a similar fashion, sounds flatulent at best. If you're going to personalize, the car should reflect your personality, not your gastro-intestinal issues. Consider Harley-Davidson events, and how they normally look like a Vietnam veterans reunion in this day and age; for the most part they really are, and that's probably nothing like beside the point, it is the point. Stock or customized, there is a demographic dichotomy among vehicle buyers, amounting in great part to what we grew up with. Growing up in the "limbo" 80s, there was as many guys at my high school who were running classic musclecars as were running all manner of newer, hotter, (although not nearly as hot as the old ones, or so we thought,) rides. To me it's lamentable as hell that it's all headed the way it is in the new vehicle market, but it's not unforeseen, it's not without it's inherent virtues, no matter what I may think, and being over 40, well, especially amongst the hot rods, I'm not really the point anyway. The carmakers fully expect that guys like me will be wanting a Buick or a Lincoln in a few years. Sigh. Well, to borrow from Van Halen, where have all the good times gone? Right by my nose, yeah, I know.

Having thought about it, none the less, the idea that the possibility of fun with cars still exists, however changed the face of it might be, is still heartening. Alternative fuels? The way I see it, Indy Car, Formula One and the highest ranks of drag racing (funny cars, dragsters and Pro Stocks,) have all been using alcohol and ethanol-based fuels for eons now. All we really need to do is lure some of the guys who engineer racing engines away from racing teams and into the Big Three, (although I shudder to refer to the Detroit automakers as such at this point,) and let them ply their talents on cars for all of us to drive. If anybody can get American cars to run great on alcohol-based fuels, particularly, it oughta be these guys. It doesn't have to be the death of the internal combustion engine, masculinity, or anything else. It just requires "thinking outside the box," much as I hate that phrase. And, yes, I understand that alcohol fuels are no more of a panacea to the current crisis than any other possible alternative, but there has to be options for those who'd prefer not to drive a hybrid (an automotive Sienfeld; it sounds like...NOTHING! Much to the dismay of dogs and blind people, who are routinely run over by the earth-friendly-but-inattentive.) Diesels? Decidedly improved over what they were when I was growing up, but something about a car with a 4500 rpm redline still just fails to "get it" for me. Fuel cell vehicles? They're in the future, somewhere. Plug-in electrics? If you're driving anywhere beyond the bounds of a golf course, I can't really see why you'd limit your driving range (pardon the pun,) so significantly. This is America, home of the road trip, and discovering the undiscovered no matter where, or how small it may be. There are still old folks, I suppose; the ones who for years have driven whatever car they do less that 30,000 miles in ten years. Plug-ins might suit them fine. The end result is my usual admonition, I suppose; THINK.