Nathan Heller
Leave it to the New Yorker to assign appraisal of some automotive-think books to a Jewish nerd who doesn’t know how to drive and who is afraid of cars.
Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?
For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.
According to Heller, the triumph of the internal combustion engine was just another expression of toxic masculinity. He looks forward approvingly, from his Blue perspective, to a future of self-driving cars. No more autonomy. No more individualism. What could be more Blue State? What could be better?
You kind of wonder if the New Yorker would have given John Ruskin space for a column on making love to a woman or assigned Helen Keller to review Impressionist paintings.
Come friendly bombs and fall on Brooklyn!
Steverino
I am struck by one woman’s comment about the introduction of automobiles when she was a farm girl: Our world expanded over the horizon.
On flat land, the horizon is about three miles away, about as far as you would walk on a casual trip. A car can take you ten times that far on a casual trip.
The author also doesn’t bring up how much good cars did for the economy, allowing people to deliver their goods and services beyond the horizon and allowing customers to access those goods and services which were out of their reach without cars.
And, it’s worth pointing out that in places like New York City, horse manure collected on the sides of streets like snow drifts. If a horse died, they left him in the street to rot until he was soft enough to easily cut in parts and haul away. A whole horse was too heavy to move. Cars were much cleaner than horses. I doubt anyone missed the dead horses and manure clogging the streets.
gwbnyc
is this the same twit who fired am AR platform rifle and wrote he was devastated by the “kick�
Mike-SMO
What does New York City know about cars [except for all those yellow ones with foreign drivers or the ones they see in movies]? I guess we are lucky, otherwise they might swarm, leave their nest, and infect reality.
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