Batteries Will Get You Nowhere
...in which Ashley celebrates accelerants.
Our story so far: It seems some South African tech-bro billionaire, who made his mark in the US as a pioneer of electric cars, has aligned himself with the “drill, baby, drill” Republican party (the political body the oil companies purchased a few generations back) in its pursuit to suck and frack the earth's last dollops of dinosaur resin. Meanwhile, said bro's contemporary claim to fame is a Bauhaus Batmobile that, while battery-operated rather than gas-powered, is nevertheless prone to internal combustion. Resembling a metal disposal bin as it does, the Tesla Truck emerges as a perfect symbol of modern America: a dumpster fire one can drive around in.
So which is it? Is the ruling business class leading us to an alt-energy utopia of e-lek-trical LeBarons or holding firm to the petroleum-based economy that will Make America Gassy Again? What exactly is today's Republican platform going forward? Is America's new CEO committed to a future of flammable electric vehicles or is he still planning to rocket to Mars* when the world goes to war over the last Citgo pump?
In more eco-rational parts of the world – the “greener pastures,” if you will - we seem to be advancing toward the post-petrol Future that Liberals Want: nuke-free, wind and solar-energized, speed-railed, and recyclable. To hear the prevailing low-carbon lefties tell it, our days of climate-changing fossil fuels are behind us, with our leading industries answering the call for renewable resources. We are this close to green-energy hovercars.**
But as the right-wing populists know, nostalgia for the Good Oil Days will keep the mod-phobic moderates lining up to Vote Backward eternally. In the heart of devoted regressives, no promises of wind-powered high-speed rail or holographic teleportation pods can compete with their warm memories of grandma's Plymouth. And these days, I myself reminisce somewhat dreamily over America’s gas-powered legacy.
Not only because of America's heralded Eisenhower Interstate System, its Route 66 romance, its drive-in movies, its roadside attractions, its Lover's Lanes, its convenient mall parking, its curbside service, or its luxury carwash emporiums. These are all elements of the steel-belted destiny that put the “United” in United States, to be sure. But for the Southerner - particularly Southern American males such as myself - the relationship between 20th-century man and his automotive glory has a deeper connotation. As the farmer relates to his cattle, as the cowboy relates to his horse, the Southerner sees car ownership not as a mere consumer transaction, but as a partnership he must preserve and cultivate. His mind-meld with the piston engine, his intimate handling of its filters and fluids, constitutes a ministerial practice. And I too, despite my automotive agnosticism, was baptized in the Valvoline of the Carolina auto yards.
Because, frankly, every yard was an auto yard. In that swampy suburbia of my youth, the ranch house lawns, intended for family cookouts and Christmas decorations, were motorcar laboratories, littered with half-assembled jalopies and their rusting accoutrements. Engine compartments may have had full-grown oaks emerging from the chassis, but that didn't mean the repair projects had been completely abandoned. The hulks of classic Firebirds and Pintos resting in the weeds were eternal works in progress, for the Bud-guzzling elders of my boyhood were not merely car owners, but car surgeons, defibrillating dead roadsters and transplanting their vital organs.
Which is not to say these Southern grease healers were not adaptable to alternative practices. Certainly, every white-collar IT department I’ve dealt with in the Carolinas has been staffed by these same classic, auto shop chaw dippers, now supercharging microprocessors in their CPUs in addition to jacking up their John Deeres. Carburetored or not, if it can be disassembled, overheated, and duct taped back together, Clem and Travis will apply their Appalachian expertise.
But without the incendiary liquids, these revved-up rebuilds just don’t have the same fire-and-brimstone transcendence. Fiddling with traction motors can never compete with the successful reassembly of a 12-cylinder, fuel-injected, Ford Mustang inferno. Not to mention the inevitable, castrating influence should EV vehicles fully infect the Southern sports arena. No one wants to see an electric demolition derby or hybrid monster truck rally. Rechargeable NASCAR could never have the thunder and velocity of the original, gasoline-fired Sport of Dales. These devotional spectacles lose all their majesty in the whisper-quiet world of battery packs and DC converters.
Hence Price Ketamine’s attempt to militarize his plug-in dune buggy with warzone hummer styling. His Tesla Truck may not emit sun-swallowing clouds of diesel smoke, but it still looks capable of crushing a passing Prius.
And, you know, blowing up real good. Yee haw, et al.
I don’t have a cock in this fight because I’ve given up driving and now live in a techno-futurist city of green-energy public transportation. Plus I never fully adopted the Way of the Engine Block as my greasier contemporaries did. Oil change, radiator flush, headlight replacement, sparkplugs, fuses, wiper fluid, and Turtle Wax – that was as much car care as I could master on my own. Anything more complex necessitated a repair shop, but I must say my allegiances here, in retrospect, may betray a closer comradery with the crankcase class than I care to admit.
In those days, when fanbelts snapped or radiators cracked, I chose only the most rustic and filthy of cinderblock hovels as my repair facilities, and I only trusted the most twang-tongued, blacklunged socket jockeys to even pop the hood. My favorite shop was Scruggs’ Garage, a heap-strewn, grassless, gas-guzzler burial ground near the intersection of Cudd Road and Cowbridge. Randy Scruggs was my black-smudged serviceman, and what he lacked in teeth he made up for in automotive aptitude. My heart warmed instantly to Randy and his battle-scarred bunker, his junkyard complete with hubcaps decorating the trees and a three-legged dog.
What bonded Randy and me in these repair jobs was our shared adversary, The Dealership. That slick, big-city, automotive service center, with its digital diagnostics and dipstick-ignorant staff, was a Northern invader of corporatized carpetbagging, bleeding the locals dry as surely as the private equity pirates and title lenders. I needed only to quote to Mr. Scruggs the crippling, 4-figure estimate The Dealership had given me for a new timing belt, and he would proudly counter that he could do the job for twenty-eight dollars and change.
We shared our distrust of The Man and an inherent, Southern-baked understanding of the grumbling innards under that hood – its hoses, crankshaft, and intake manifold – and that our being Sons of the Oil-Stained Soil meant that we lived by the drivetrain’s momentum in a way those air-conditioned Pep Boys could never know.
But the day came when Randy and I looked under the hood together and spied an intruder, a foreign agent. Among the familiar gaskets and valves in my engine, a little black box, included with the new-model Hondas, impossible to open and incomprehensible to either of us. Something computerized, performing something digital and unknowable. Gathering information, monitoring the car’s behavior and our attempts to influence it. Spying. Sending god-knows-what intel about our sacred mechanical traditions into the ether, to be collected by Them, who are systemically altering our provincial lifestyles.
Deep State, Inc. Sure, they’d like us to give up our petroleum practice and “plug in” to the mainframe, handing us that high-falutin’ claptrap about the climate. After all these generations of motor mastery, they’d like us to forget everything we know and just trust them and their alt-energy propaganda. We’ve built a way of life in these greasy scrapyards, filling our cars, trucks, tractors, mowers, and generators with the lifeblood of the earth, lubing the crankcases and greasing the flywheels we reconstructed with our own hands just like Grandma used to do. Now they want to take it all away from us and replace it with some federally-formulated, Californian, green-energy, socialist utopia.
And that’s why we need our guns, locked and loaded and ready to defend our freedom.
Make sure you keep ‘em oiled.
- A.H.
* You know why all the billionaires want to live in outer space? Because guillotines require gravity. (Thank you, folks, goodnight, don't forget to tip your servers.)
** Until the Musky One purchases the German government, his electric Tesla Tank is not allowed on the Autobahn here in Deutschland. You can purchase the vehicle here, but only if you want to park it in the yard, where it can be used to collect construction waste. It's well over the weight capacity for German roads, such are the strict requirements for highway safety in Regelnland. During my decades in South Carolina, I witnessed the steady erosion of vehicle inspection regulations and, I must admit, reaped the benefits. Where once we Carolinians were forced to test each blinker and brake pad for road readiness every year (and pay for the privilege), we swiftly reclaimed our God-given right to drive motorized shopping carts and homemade mopeds through Taco Bell drive-thrus with abandon. I never had to fret much over the duct-taped side-views of my open-hood Honda. However, South Carolinians are still bound by draconian federal seatbelt laws, the tyranny of which was, contrary to mainstream narrative, the primary motivation behind the January 6 Revolution.
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)