Editorial/Radial Politics

...Joan Claybrook) surged ahead with such lunacies as the 55 mph speed limit (utterly unenforceable and statistically unsupportable with regard to either life or energy savings), the 5 mph bumper (grotesquely more expensive to repair in collisions over 5 mph), ignition interlocks (such a farcical aggravation that even Congress had to renege), the 85 mph speedometer (will governors be next...

...If one seeks 'iove affairs" with cars, one is advised to travel to Italy, where people are truly lustful about fast, glamorous automobiles...

...The benefit in terms of cleaner air is still being debated...

...Nearly a decade later we have feeble automobile powerplants that are fiendishly complicated to maintain, run lumpily, cost at least $200 extra, and consume about 15 percent more gasoline than otherwise might be expected...

...But as a new Washington cabal of fossilized New Dealers, career bureaucrats, messianic environmentalists, consumer crazies, and ethnic pressure groups has congealed into a powerful political monster feeding off federal tax revenues, a significant shift in sentiments toward the automobile has taken place...

...Much of Senator Muskie's 1970 Clean Air Act was directed at the automobile and established standards for exhaust emissions so severe that one might think they arose from the foaming brain of a latter-day Cotton Mather...

...And there is little debating the fact that such gbals as "two cars in every Brock Yates, a guest columnist, is editor and publisher of the Cannon-ball Express, a journal of automotive news and opinion...

...Sadly, Detroit has dissipated much of its energy in arrogant resistance to the regulations, rather than recognizing the presence of a new automotive era and getting on with the chore of designing lighter, smaller, safer, and more efficient cars...

...Encouraged by its initial meddling, Congress and its henchmen in the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Agency (presently headed by a certifiable automotive ingrate, the former Naderite, Ms...

...the confusion arises over whether the turbulence has been good or bad for us...

...Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., will return next month with his regular editorial) garage" and Ike's wondrous network of interstate highways had broad support across the political spectrum...

...But in the United States people for the most part treat their vehicles as functional (if comfortable and visually pleasing) adjuncts to their way of life...

...Surely there is general agreement that during the first half of this century the Tin Lizzie and its offspring were powerful engines of change...

...No longer is the cozy populist notion of the automobile as a liberator of the masses accepted...

...Environmentalists claim big gains...

...They use them because automobiles provide (continued on page 32...

...And with a budget of 30 billion dollars, a cadre of bureaucrats, propelled by the recent oil crisis, will continue to try to intercede between the average citizen and his automobile by making it more expensive and difficult to buy and operate...

...the rigid, astronomically expensive, so-called CAFE fleet fuel mileage standards (which, along with over zealous emission and safety standards, threaten to leave only Ford and GM as major American automakers by 1985), the soon-to-arrive air bag (assaulted by critics as vastly more expensive and less effective than combination seat-belt/shoulder harnesses), etc., etc...

...Instead, the car has become a mechanical locust, whose hordes scour the land of its riches and throw the populace into turmoil...

...A his relationship is blithely referred to as a "love affair," implying some perverted union between the American driver and his car-dark fetishes linked to exhaust pipes or spinning wheels understood only by clinical psychologists...

...Nonsense...

...Concomitant with these distress signals we have witnessed a great irony: The health, wealth, and wisdom of the American body politic have leapt forward at a stupefying rate, prompting some to credit the automobile with a substantial part of the improvement...

...While European Common Market nations adopted less stringent, more cost-effective, and more practical emission standards, and while automobile manufacturers argued that the toll in dollars and gasoline consumption would be enormous, the stern measures were signed into law...

...To be sure, even the most som-nambulant student of Sociology 101 is aware of the upheavals triggered by the presence of cheap, reliable automobiles in America...

...Ever since the fabled wizard-hick named Ford unleashed these infernal machines on a gullible citizenry, conscience-ravaged social engineers, high-minded editorialists, bureaucrats in endless permutations, and legions of neo-Luddites have been braying constant alarms about the universal auto-borne devastations just around the corner...

...critics who lay air pollution at the doorstep of other sources, including industry and the government itself, are not as enthusiastic...

...A deluge of regulations relating to everything from ashtrays to door locks poured out of the newly-formed Department of Transportation, causing manufacturers to form massive engineering staffs to interpret and act on the effluvia...

...Compliance would come from the recalcitrant manufacturers by "holding their feet to the fire," so said the Washington establishment...

...We have also seen Washington leap into the automotive realm in the sacred name of safety...

...EDITORIAL RADIAL POLITICS Consider the automobile: alleged killer of our golden youth, rapist of our landscape, poisoner of our clear blue skies, disseverer of the cuddly American family, the landborne Stuka of our inner cities, the life force of urban sprawl, germinator of Big Macs, Whoppers, Buckets a'Chicken, Jumbo Jacks, Frostee Freezes, Egg McMuffins, and other gastronomic insults, raison d'etre for such cultural mutations as drive-in faith healers and adult book stores, and, in general, a four-wheeled Waring Blender of the basic ideals, manners, and morals we have come to know as the American Way...

...Since 1966, when the Ribicoff hearings produced the first spate of federal automotive legislation (as well as that raving Jeremiah of the parking lot, Ralph Nader-who became America's foremost authority on automobiles while refusing to drive himself), we have seen increasing Washington-born efforts to collar the stampeding mechanical beast...