What if Americans aren’t buying American cars because they aren’t buying any cars?

What if no one else on Earth is buying cars either?

What if this has nothing to do with gas prices?

What if mortgages are failing because the houses are mainly vinyl shacks built fifty miles from economically-productive cities?

What if the cost of owning a car was too great for most families, even if gas were free? (And what if gas prices went up again?) What would happen to the value of those vinyl shacks then? (And why haven’t all the mortgage-company bailouts fixed that problem yet?)

What if cars are a fantastically stupid thing around which to organize America’s productive activity? What if we talked about organizing it around something else?

• Only building contractors and heart surgeons carry cell phones.
• My guidebook to the Pacific Northwest, in describing the burgeoning Seattle coffee culture, mentions in passing a local chain called “Starbucks.”
• It also contains a sidebar of bands you should try to see if you brave the seedy Belltown neighborhood; said sidebar includes Alice in Chains and Mudhoney.
• The Soviet voted itself out of existence and now Russia is going to get better, right?
• Country music still sounds like country music
• Only porn stars shave their pubic hair or get tattoos right above their asses. (Corollary: “porn star” is not a flashy compliment used when dispensing fashion or romance advice.)
• Only rock stars are ballsy and/or dumb enough to grow those little soul patch things.
• Tattoos, piercings, and facial hair make you marginally unemployable. And thus actually cool.
• American-led wars in Mesopotamia are winnable.
• Celebrity gossip and non-scripted television are
  1. confined to the National Enquirer and COPS, respectively
  2. correctly regarded as the pop culture equivalent of pro wrestling
  3. unworthy of polite discussion by the educated middle class.
• The Internet = Usenet + E-Mail
• “Have you heard of those SUV things? I think I saw one last Tuesday.”
• “Then, on Wednesday, that stinky hippie chick in my Zoology lab went off about this ‘Global Warming’ thing.”
• The world leader called “George Bush” is widely regarded as mildly incompetent and slightly out of touch with reality. American Democracy will easily survive his tenure.

In late 1998, I had a vision about energy. This was at my last archaeology job, in Southern California. I was "monitoring" a large construction project in the Mojave desert, which mostly entailed standing around with a clipboard, taking the occasional photograph, and daydreaming. As I watched this enormous earth-mover scoop up and plop down ton after ton of loose sandy soil, I thought a little bit about how long it would take me to move that much dirt. (I actually did the math — monitoring is hatefully boring.) The short answer: a very long time. I don't recall the exact number, but I think it worked out to:

1 Komatsu earthmover = 300 150lb. archaeologists

(And I was a pretty fast digger.)

As an archaeologist, I knew a thing or two about digging; about how hard it is, how slow it is, and how many strong human backs it takes to move any significant amount of dirt. But modern people have lived for so long now (4 generations and counting) with so much promiscuous energy at our command that we lose track of how hard it is to actually do work. With fossil fuel–powered technology, every modern American has the equivalent of about 200 ghost slaves. Magical, electrical pixies who wash our dishes, mow our lawns, do our laundry, take us to the shopping mall, and (indirectly) grow our food.

That's when I had my vision. It was a simple one, related to a game I used to play as a child where I would imagine a landscape without people, depopulated by the horrific effects of nuclear war. Only in my adult vision, the landscape isn't depopulated, it's full of people. Human beings trying to do the work that machines powered by cheap energy once did for us. How many man-months would it take to dig a 100-mile-long pipleine through the Mojave desert? A dozen mechanized men can do it in a few months. It would take an army of thousands of strong men with shovels to accomplish the same task in the same time. And how do you coordinate that army? How do you feed it? There's a reason Pharaoh made slaves of the Israelites. You can't build cost-effective pyramids (or water pipelines) with union labor.

I play this game a lot when I'm riding my bike through the suburbs. What would this landscape look like if we couldn't buy all our vegetables for a pittance from Mexico? What if Mexican strawberries cost $40/pound? That would create some incentive to grow strawberries instead of parking lots, I'm sure. But of course, you'd have to tear out the parking lots. By hand. The prospect of back-breaking labor doesn't scare me at all. It's the other part, the part about Pharaoh and Moses. I think about that part every time I see the price of oil creep up a few more dollars.

Needless to say, this is a big topic.

Today's Salon features an interview with William Easterly, who criticizes U.S. foreign aid as stuck in a top-down model that hasn't worked since the 1960s. This jibes with a recent trend of ideas recycled from the era before my birth: building moon cities, spreading democracy in hostile nations, or protesting en masse. Cripes, it appears Neo Marxism is poised to make a comeback. It's not as if all the recycled thoughts are liberal either — I'd argue that conservatism since Goldwater has pretty much been a constant reaction to the Permanent Revolution founded in the summer of love. The End of History, indeed.

Which leads me to suspect that either a) all the ideas we had in the 1960s were so good that we simply can't top them, or b) Western (in particular American) culture reached its creative apogee in about 1969, and it's just been all downhill since. Of course, it could also be c) we're still waiting for the Baby Boomers to enter their long-anticipated dotage, at which point the era will lose its freshness altogether.

While I hope the answer here is c (I'm looking forward to a presidential election in which the Vietnam War is not an issue), I sneakily suspect we might be looking at a combination of a and b. The creative impulse of Western culture peaked in 1969, approximately coincident with the peak output of American oil fields. Civilization runs on more than just Big Thoughts, it requires actual physics. The more machines we can employ in the service of, say, food production and household chores, the greater effort we can invest in, say, hippie love-ins and movement conservatism. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, all that cheap energy lurked, literally, beneath our feet, but as it began to decline we had to pump ever more energy into obtaining it from other sources. This makes Reagan's "shining city on the hill" look a little less hopeful and a little more wistful.

I am just old enough (barely) to remember being told fantastic-yet-plausible stories of moon cities, twenty hour work weeks, and robot butlers. Kids only a few years younger than myself will find this notion ironic, but in all seriousness, there was a time in (my!) living memory when the world really felt like it was getting better.

Describe a perfect machine.

Its energy source is abundant, universally abundant. Its energy source, in fact, is surplus -- something that will not decrease or fail, and of which we may have too much. It has ideal energy properties -- it converts nearly all its input energy into output work, with almost no energy lost to heat.

It is constructed of inexpensive, widely-available materials. It can be made from recycled materials, and can itself be recycled. It requires almost no additional materials to function, beyond a little lubricant and the occasional replacement of worn parts. It can be maintained by its owner, and requires very few specialized tools to repair. If properly maintained, it has an almost unlimited use-life.

It is inexpensive. Almost anyone on earth can buy one.

Its use is democratic. Children as young as five can use it, as can very old people. It requires no license to operate. In almost all cases, if it is used improperly, its operator will sustain trivial injuries, requiring at most a few stitches.

It does not contribute to urban sprawl, global warming, air pollution, crime, obesity, or lung cancer. It will probably never require involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts. If we used this machine more frequently, all of these problems would improve.

It makes you healthier the more you use it.

The perfect machine is useful beyond description. It expands the world for its owner, and produces almost no harmful side effects. Its owner gains freedom of movement, independence. It can be used for transportation, exercise, haulage, recreation, nature appreciation. It exposes its operator to life.