Time For Auto-Reprimitivization

Talk about the right and the left coming full circle–and then some.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg of the conservative National Review on the role the automobile played in reshaping society:

I think conservatives let their admirable attraction to ideas distract them from other sources of change. Many conservatives like to blame all of our modern ills on those horrible ideas that escaped German laboratories at the beginning of the 20th century and then mutated in French cafés. And while I think nihilism, moral relativism, existentialism, etc. have had serious consequences for society, it’s impossible to deny that the automobile, birth control pill and the telephone have done more to unsettle traditional arrangements than anything Heidegger ever wrote or said. The problem is that it’s easy to argue with Heidegger (or his writing); it’s really hard to argue with a Buick.

How ’bout a Model-T then? The far left’s Pete Seeger, who had no problem with technology when it was transporting people to the gulag, was later quoted as claiming, “I like to say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.” (At least until the NKVD knocked upon their door.)

In a similar attempt at leftwing self-reprimitivization, Time magazine’s Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dan Neil kicks off his look at “The 50 Worst Cars of All Time” by bolding going far more conservatively than Henry Luce would have ever thought to go and railing against the very machine that made weekly home delivery of his publisher’s magazine possible:

The Model T – whose mass production technique was the work of engineer William C. Klann, who had visited a slaughterhouse’s “disassembly line” – conferred to Americans the notion of automobility as something akin to natural law, a right endowed by our Creator. A century later, the consequences of putting every living soul on gas-powered wheels are piling up, from the air over our cities to the sand under our soldiers’ boots.

As we’ve noted before, look who’s standing athwart history these days and yelling stop.

Update: Backwards ran the SUVs until reeled the mind. Where it all will end, only knows Gaia.

(H/T: I/P)