OLD AND CRUDE: Looking Back On The Golden Age of Driving.

We lived in our cars back in the Fifties and Sixties. We dined and went to movies in them hoping to get into a little hanky-panky, and some of us even went to drive-in churches. According to a wag disk jockey of the time named Emperor Hudson, their slogan was, “Come as you are, but stay in your car.” I didn’t go to a drive-in church, but I went through recaps on an annual basis back then.

And when I say driving, I am referring to accelerating, shifting, back-shifting, cornering, and braking—and occasionally, should the opportunity arise, going fast. As Alodus Huxley once said, “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.” And when you think about it, not too many years before his day, 40 mph on a horse was about it for most people.

But for how long? As the late P.J. O’Rourke warned in 2009:

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.

Why, it’s as if, “At some point in the future, be it years, decades, or a century hence, the federal government will seek to ban driving.”