two best friends apart. part of c-span2's book tv weekend. >> in an age of automakers bankruptcy, p. j. o'rourke examined america's love affair with cars which he believes has contributed to its cultural decline. the automotive museum in los angeles hosted this event, it is 45 minutes. >> i want to thank you for coming to this book signing. i am the director of the museum here. earnings is an honor for me personally as well as the museum. .. >> pretty well rounded

writer and what i love most about him is his ear refer vans and the way he turns a phrase and honest to god, i twant say it, it's the truth he is by far my favorite author and i have all of his box and the first part of the book it lists all the books he has written and i think 3 or 4 of them are "new york times" best-seller books, and, if you hand read "parliament at wars" or "give war a chance" or "all the trouble in the world" read those books and what is interesting about pj and, interesting in the book, and one of my question to him later, are they going to make a movie about your book, a lot of stuff he talks about, that goes back to the '70s and

'80s is as true today as it was then and you keep reading the stuff and i appreciate you purchasing the book and pj being here and it is a great honor for us and let's get with it. here's pj o'rourke. [applause]. >> thank you. >> thank you. thank you so much for coming here. i really appreciate it. and, i really appreciate being here. i have tended to make these flying visits to los angeles and i've never gotten a chance to go to the museum. today is me first day at the museum and after i get done talking to you guys and sign some books i hope if you want them signed and they are probably more valuable if they aren't signed... but! [laughter]. >> you know, but, i'm going to spend some time and then i've got a five-year-old that like, if it has wheels, it rules! you know? and i have to go down, i have been on book tour three weeks and cannot come home empty

handed and i have to go shopping here today, too. anyway, it is i'm afraid a last time to say, how shall we put it, sayonara to the american car. american automobile companies, ford, gm, chrysler will live long in some form, a kind of marley's ghost dragging their chains and -- at takes pairs's expense and you know, and the fools in the corner uses detroit and the fool officials at detroit unions will retire to their vacation homes in palm beach and st. petersburg, respectively, i mean, and don't deserve our sympathy, any more than the malevolent trolls under the capitol dome in washington do. but, pity the poor american car when congress and the white house get through with it. i mean, a light weight vehicle with a small carbon footprint using alternative energy and renewable resources, to operate in the sustainable way, when i was a kid, we called it a should win.

-- schwinn! [laughter]. >> it has been a great, 110 years, been a great run, 110 years since the daurier brothers built the first american automobile in springfield, massachusetts and if the motor wagon company, if it had been a success, springfield massachusetts might be today's motor city full of abandoned houses and drug dealing and violent crime an racial tensions which, it happens, springfield, massachusetts is full of anyway and we owe the american car, a lot more than the entertaining speck tack of detroit's verse fe -- spectacle of detroit's felon mayors and people of my age owe our existence to the car or the car's back seat, anyway, where if you check our parents' wedding anniversary, with our birthdate and find them like a little too close for comfort that is probably where we were conceived and there was no

premarital sex, in america, before the invention of the internal combustion engine! [laughter]. >> it's true! you couldn't sneak a girl into the rec room of your family house, because your mom and dad, they didn't have a car and they couldn't commute and were stuck home all day work on the farm. and your farmhouse didn't have a rec room because, recreation had not been discovered, due to all of the farm work, you know? and odd saturday night you could take a girl out in a baggy but it was hard to get her into the mood, to let you bust into her corset, because two of you were facing this hind end of a horse and it spoils the atmosphere. so the car let us out of the barn and, while the car was at it it destroyed the american nuclear family and anyone who has had an american nuclear family can tell you it was a relief to all concerned. and cars cost america to be paved. -- caused america to be paved and there are worse things that do to a country than pave it that's sudanese have proven in

darfur and i wonder, we never hear a thank you, a word of thanks, us car people for getting america paved from those kids in the body casts who skateboard all the time, not a word of thanks. you know, cars provide an america with an enviable standard of living. you could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the general livestock corporation assembly line putting udderses on cows. it couldn't be done, you know? and, i think that the american car was a source of intellectual stimulation. intellectual stimulation because you can think of the innovation and the invention the sheer genius that transformed the 1908 model-t ford into the 1968 shelby cobra gt-500, in the course of one single human

lifetime. compare the progress in the previous mode of transportation. horse production? horse design? unchanged for thousands of years. you know? and you know, when it comes to creativity with the horse i actually did a little research on this when i was writing and i look it up. you know, nobody thought to put a stirrup, nobody thought to hang a stirrup from a saddle. until about 500 and d., the stirrup was invented in 500 and people have been riding horses for thousands of years and it took them until 500 and d. to invent this. where are they putting their feet? and if automobile design and engineering had proceeded at the same pace as horse design and engineering, we would be powering ourselves down the road boo running with both of our feet stuck through a hole in the floor like fred flintstone though it may come to that with the 2010 obama mobile! [laughter]. >> but most important of all, most important of all, was the

cars -- that cars fulfilled the ideal of america's founding fathers. of all the truths that we hold to be self-evident, of all of the unalienable rights with which we are endowed, which one is most important to the american dream? it is right there, front and center, flat in the name of the declaration of independence, freedom to leave, freedom to get out of town. freedom to get the hell out of here, you know? king george, can't i have the keys? that is what the -- declaration of independence -- what it sechsays, you know? the saga of the american car is not an abstract matter to me and nancy pelosi may think she was transported home from the maternity ward on pink fluffy clouds supported by ceraphim and

low carbon ceraphim, anyway but i know it was the car that got me to where i am. and my grandfather, jacob o'rourke, he was born in 1877. he was born on a farm about the size of this podium here, you know? in lime city, ohio. which was not a city. and didn't even have any lime. he was one of ten kids, grandpa was one of ten kids and this grew up in a one room unpainted shack and i have a photograph of them lined up by age, and steering at the photographer, amazed to see someone in shoes. you know? my great-grandfather, barney, he was a wood-cutter, in the midwest. where there are no trees. [laughter]. >> unemployed quite a lot. also, drunk, also illiterate. i have a copy of barney's marriage certificate, with barney's "x" right there, you know? his only accomplishment aside

from ten prizes he won on the corn shuck stuffing of the poor man's roulette wheel, the only thing barney accomplished in his wife is he trained a pair of old nags to haul him home dead drunk, he'd fall out of the tavern, and pass out in the wagon and the horses would bring him home, that was what he acop published in his life and grandpa jake, he left home, armed with a 5th grade education, heading for the bright lights of toledo, ohio. and he went to work as a buggy mechanic. a buggy mechanic and then, one day, a horseless buggy pulled up at the shop. and grandpa saw that, and he saw the future, you know? and he fixed that, too. and it didn't take him long to realize cleaner hands were to be had and more money was to be saudi selling the things instead of repairing them and also may uncle arch's birthdate and grandma and grandpa's wedding anniversary were a little too close for comfort and so, anyway, he got into the car

business, and by the time that a came along in the 1940s, we had o'rourke buick, and grandpa and my uncle arch owned this dealership and my father was the sales manager, and dad's younger brother, joe, ran the used car lot, and baby brother, jack was the salesman and cousin i development ran the parts department and the girl cousins worked in the office and boy cousins and me worked out on the car lot, cleaning and waxing the cars and my cousin hep would run the ohio car dealer association and i would go on to do whatever it is that i do in this book, writing about cars and stuff, i tell you, though, even in these dark days for the american automobile there are times i wish they stayed in toledo and take overnight the buick agency and really, just to be on those late night tv local car dealership ads... i got the whole idea, i wanted to pirate pat's treasurer island buick

with a parrot on my shoulder and big patch, eye patch and head on down to pirate buick where pirates walk the plank and don't miss our pieces of v8 car lot and free trunklet doubloons for the kiddies. a great life, grandpa died in 60, from honors from the rotary and the moose lodge and lions club and my family, we owe everything to the american car and without the car, i mean, you know, we -- no food and stuff and our history begins with the beginning of the american car. and, by now, you know, some o'rourkes, some of us have gone to college, we didn't go far in college... do very well there but we went, you know? so see you took the demise of the american car, i take this personally. i am looking around for somebody to blame. i'm mad. you know? i mean, i want to blame somebody

like ralph nader, you you know? what fun it would be to jump on ralph nader with both feet and send a pink marxist go. squirting out of his egghead, and we should do that even though he's 75 and clearly insane but it took more than one man and his ignorant and ill-written book unfit at any speed to wreck the most important industry in the nation and the corvair is what he was attacking in "unsafe at any speed" and he was wrong about it because my high school girlfriend coin had accor various and con if, connie was the worst driver in the world. and one of the fastest and if she couldn't get herself killed in the corvair it couldn't be done, he was all wrong and the pundits are telling us there is plenty of blame to go around for the death of the american car and i'm not sure about that, either. you know? the -- now, it is true, that the car executives are knuckle heads.

you know, but all executives are knuckle heads. you know? i mean, look at bill gates. now, if you were worth a godzillion dollars, wouldn't you go to a barber college and get a decent $5 haircut? come on, you know? labor union leadership is maddening, but it is one thing to be mad at the labor union leaders, and another thing to have expected those labor union lieders to be down at the u.a.w. hall standing on a chair, yelling, "we demand less money from bosses." i mean, that was not going to happen and car workers make $600 an hour or so i'm told, and you know, they get laid off every time a camel fartk at an opec meeting and it is not like they are getting the pay and i think to understand what damned the american automobile, we have to give up on economics and we have to turn to melodrama, see, politicians, journalists, financial analysts, all the other purveyors of the banal

have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. fire the mbas and hire a poet. the fate of detroit is not a matter of financial crisis, of foreign competition, of corporate greed, union entrance gens, energy -- intransigence or energy costs, the footprint of the carbon, it is a tragic romance, about unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love, and wild horses. especially wild horses. because you cannot understand the automobile unless you understand horses. hundred years ago, rudd year kipling wrote a poem called the ballad of the king's jest and he has this afternoon tribes man, up to state, he was ahead of the curve on the current events poetry subjects, an afghan tribes man says, four things

greater than all things are women and horses and power and war. now, if you insert another power, after the horse, in that verse, the verse was as true in the suburbs of my boy hood as it was up in the khyber pass. horsepower, horsepower, horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or some sort of vague met forric anachronism, james watt, pro generator of the industrial revolution did hath not have the term and lacked the measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time. and what we would call for short energy, and, what we would call energy, this was not even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century. imagine living in a world where energy is not even an intellectual concept, you snow and watts started from scratch

and did all of the research using draft animals and found out under optimum conditions a big draft horse could lift 33,000 pounds, one foot off the ground, in one minute. now, watt because the watt that was named after watt had not been named yet, didn't have a name for it and he called it logically one horsepower. you know? and, incidentally, one horsepower is equal to 746 watts. and your supposedly thrifty prius could illuminate much of l.a. causing enough harmful light pollution to offset the detrimental global warming that you prevented by not buying an escalade, you know? by 1970, a pontiac gto, may the brand name rest in peace, had horsepower to the number of 370. in the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, that gto

could move 12,210,000 pounds and it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel.

>> fiscal crisis let alone in the car industry, one of the reasons it is impossible for me to keep a straight face about this, is just the mental picture of barney frank astride a prancing horse, you know? in a lone ranger manner, you know and can you see it? hi-ho executive compensation and away, you know?

[laughter]. >> ain't happening, you know? early witnesses to the automobile urged the motorists to get a horse. but, that in effect was what the automobile would do. it would get a horse for everybody. once the model-t was introduced we all became sir lancelot an gained a seat at the roundtable and we're were privileged to joust for the favors of fair maidens at drive in movies and the pride and press teenage of a noble mount was vouchsafed to the common man and vouchsafed to the common woman, too, no one tried to get the ladies to drive side saddle with both legs hanging out this car door, no. and now a car is not necessarily cheaper than a horse. it is just cheaper than a horse you want. you know? i mean, about the same time that henry ford -- i looked this up, same time henry ford, pedaling model-ts for $780, the initial price of the model-t, and it would go down over the years with the original price, for

model-t in 1908 was $780. and that same time, at the same time there was a year ling philly, sceptor, untried resource, admittedly from a good blood line, but had never been raced sold in new market, outside of london, for 10 tors -- 10,000 guineas. and that is a pound plus a schilling and if you put 10,000 guineas into current american dollars, let's just say that if rick wagoner, you know, the fired gm chief, rick wagoner had been the stud hos that siered sceptor, if rick wagoner had been the stud horse it would have been -- gm would have been telling the obama white house to go get some new management. is what would have happened, you know? see, cars, now cars, cars aren't

that reliable, especially the cars of yore but neither are horses, at least with cars it isn't personal. horses have complex psychologist, and they have itty-bitty brains and horses are like your adolescent children and cars are like your computer, you know and the computer may be ballky and slow and may even be worstless but it never dresses itself in all black and gets every part of its keyboard pierced and screams that you just don't understand, and goes out and takes drugs and is brought home by the police at 3:00 a.m you know? actually horses don't do that, either but you understand what i am saying and changing a tire on a car is no fun but easier than shoeing a horse and you will not get kicked orbit en or have manure dumped on your head while changing this tire unless you change it in a bad neighborhood and take a car and put it in a dark space and leave it there for months, and the aspca will not get on your case, and for that matter you can beat a car in the street, you know without

raising any public protest as long as you own the car that you are beating. and even when opec is doing its worst, cars are more efficient to fuel than horses are, although a roll in the hay is preferable to a roll in the petroleum and anyone who thinks the cars have the greenhouse gases and horses do not has not spent enough time behind a horse, you know? for the purpose of ennobling us schlumps, the car is better than a horse in every way, you know? it costs less and is more convenient and we don't get kicked and smelly, and it is much easier to drive than toit to ride and i took up horseback riding when i was almost 06 and on the other hand, i began to drive, when i began to drive i was so small that when i was driving my cousin, tommy had to lie on the transmission hump and

operate the accelerator and brake with his hands because i couldn't reach them with my feet and all this grown-ups, after they had gone to bed tommy and i shifted the buick into neutral and this very car, as a matter of fact, one very like it, pushed it down the driveway, out of ear shot and fired up the engine and toured the neighborhood. now comparatively speaking the difficulty of horse manship versus driving can be illustrated by what happened to tommy and me next. which was nothing. nothing. we maneuvered the car home and turned it off and rolled it back up the driveway and were raised in the blessedly flat midwest and it was easy to do and during our for ray, the option buick speedometer reached maybe 30 miles an hour but 30 miles an hour is a full out gallop on a horse. and, for those of you who don't ride horses, forget everything you have seen about horseback riding in the movies, forget everything you have seen on t.v. possibly a little kid, who had

never been on a horse, could ride a horse, at a full gallop without killing himself and possibly, one of the jonas brothers could land an f-14 on a carrier deck. so, tires, this is why cars took the place of horses in our hearts. you know? once we had caught a glimpse of a well-turned good year and checked out the curves of the body work, the fenders, well, the old gray mare, she just was not what she used to be, you know? and we embarked upon life in the fast lane with our new paramour, a great love story of man and machine and road to the future was pave with bliss. and then, we got married and move to the suburbs. you know? being away from the central cities meant americans had to spend more of their time driving. and over the years, our away got farther and farther away and eventually, this meant that americans had to spend all of

their time driving. i mean, the play date was 40 miles from the chucky cheese and swim meet 40 miles from the cello lesson and montessori 40 miles from the math coach and dad's job 40 miles from mom's jobs and both jobs 40 miles from the three car garage and the car ceased to be object of desire, and equipment for adventure and turned into office and rec room and communications hub and breakfast nook and recycling bin, a motorized cup holder is what the modern car has become. americans, the richest people on earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover suv. squeezed into less space than tech support call center employees at a mumbai cubicle farm, you know what i mine? and we became sick of our cars and tired of our cars and angry at our cars, and the pointy headed busy bodies of the environmentalist new urbanist

utopian community tearian ilk blamed the victim and blamed it was the car the car forced us to live in widely scattered settlements and a wilderness of big box stores and the olive garden and if we would all just get on our segways, or hop on a trolley, and they said america could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the portlet oregon model and everyone nestled together in a carbon-neutral and ecologically unimpactful way but cars didn't shape our existence, cars let us escape with our lives, you know? we are way this heck -- living way the heck out there in valley bottom heights and trout antler estates, because we were at war with the cities and fought rotten public schools an idiot municipal bureaucracy and

rampant criminal enactment and the pointy-headed busy bodies and cars gave us our dragoons and lent us speed and mobility, they let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy's lines, and thanks to our cars when we lost the cities, we were not forced to surrender, we were able to retreat. but our poor cars paid the price and they were flashing swords, beaten into dull ploughshares. cars became appliances. or worse than appliances, i mean, nobody is ticked off at the dreier or the dishwasher. you know much less at the fridge. i mean, we all recognize these as labor-saving devices. the car on the other hand, seems to create labor. we hold the car responsible for all of the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. we're thinking, hell a golf cart is more fun, and you can ride around in a golf cart with a six pack, saved from the

breathize,and chasing canada geese on the fair ways and swinging at the goef,with a nine iron, you know, and we lost our love for cars and we forgot our debt to cars. and meanwhile, the pointy-headed busy bodies have been exacting their revenge and we escaped the poke of their nose once when we lived downtown but we will not be able to peel out so fast this time, because, in the name of safety and the emissions control and fuel economy and global warming and all of the rest of it, the simple mechanical eloquence, elegance of the automobile, it has been rendered ponderous and umber som and incomprehensible and you pretty as well pry the back off an ipod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. aging shadetree mechanic like myself i look in there and i sit back down in the shade, you know? or i would. if the car weren't squawking at me like, rehearsal for a divorce. you know?

bzzment you left the key in, you left the door open, you left the lights on and dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor. drives me crazy, you know? i don't believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change, or gas mileage. much less about whether i survive a head on with one of their tax sucking mass transit projects, you know? all they want to do is make sure i hate my car. you know? because, how proud and handsome would, say, rachel al examined dra, how proud and handsome would the horse look with seat an shoulder belts an airbags and file mile-an-hour bumpers and a mis of pollution control equipment under her tail? you know? and that's it. that was it. that was the end of the american automobile industry. because, you no when it comes to dull practical ugly things, that bore and annoy me, japanese things cost less, you know, and the cup holders are more conveniently located. you know? now i, myself, i got something

old school under a tarp on my basement garage but i bet that after my will has been probated some child of mine will yank the dust cover and use the proceeds of the ebay sale, you know, to buy a mountain bike. four things greater than all things are and i'm pretty sure bicycles aren't one of them. you know? those of us who have had the god fortune to meet with strength and beauty and majestic force in which we were willing to trust our lives, and a day comes, that strength and beauty fails, and a man does what a man has to do, and i'm going to go downstairs and put a bullet in a v8. anyway, thank you very much for that, that is everything i know about cars. [applause] but sh shg, -- >> but if anybody has any question i'll make up some other stuff and i have bad news on the question in front, however, not that i will not answer any question, however ridiculous or

personal it may be, not that -- i'm not saying i'll tell the truth but i'll answer. can i come up -- you have to use this mic because we're recording this, and if you don't come up and use this mic all you get is my stupid answer and don't get your intelligent question. so anybody volunteering to step up, the fright -- there you go, sir. >> and take your time, i'm over 62. we aren't moving as fast as we used to. >> i must admit i got my first karen 1953 from my -- for my 14th band i'm pretty old. >> bless your soul! 14th birthday. i lift. yeah. -- >> model a 5, and it cost $50 and five recaps cost another $25. >> those were the days and i had my first car before i was 16, and -- >> i want to ask you what was the greatest car you ever owned? >> you know? it is really a matter of affection. and i got a 19909/11 which is

the porsche at the end of the simple porsche air rachlt you know, the beginning of the complicated power be area, by 190, they began to figure out they were not -- nobody under 50 could afford these cars and us old guys like me bought the car but, they hadn't yet gotten onto the, you know, producing a sort of like a rocket lexus. which is essentially what it is now, and still an old-fashioned, but with the -- what the german calls a barefoot car with the key, the key on the left in a porsche and the reason for that is so that you can start it on the track without being in it and start it up while working on the thing and don't have to sit in the car and turn it on and i love that thing. so that is mine. my little baby. that's actually what is under the tarp, i say v8 because putting a bullet in the a horizontally opposed 6 does not have the same resonance. >> i read that you said you became a conservative as soon as your daughter was born.

i was just curious if that was only on certain issues, like, drugs for example, or if that was, you know, the panorama of social issues. >> oh, it is everything but really, i became a conservative when i got my first paycheck, i shouldn't say that, i became a right winger and i became a conservative when my daughter was born because sent the world is a threat, you know? i was like libertarian until my daughter was born, drugs, okay, you know, whatever anybody wants to do. marry a hippo, fine, okay, and then you get the baby girl and think about the world out there and my motto on everything now, now that i have seen gran torino, which i haven't seen, totally recommend, get off my lawn! get off my lawn! oh, thank you, mr. kowalski for saving the neighborhood from the gang. >> get off my lawn. but anyway i became a -- became a -- when i ceased to be a liberal, ceased to be a leftist

i was a communist, socialist and i got a job. and it didn't cure me. i was still a nut for the first two weeks of the job, and i got a job for $150 a week and paid every two weeks and i was really looking forward to that $300 and so was my landlord, $300 was a lot of money and i got my paycheck, and i netted out at $185.63. after federal tax and state tax and city tax and social security and contribution. and pension fund and i was really interested in that age and health care and union dues and i go wait i'm a socialist and i have been screaming and yelling and demonstrating in the street and i get to a job and find out we already have socialism, they took half my money, i'm not rockefeller. what is going on here! that snapped me out of that. but it is different, and that is one thing, but then when you have a kid like, then, then you really turn against the whole world. dick?

>> p. j you dedicated the book to david e. david and david e. davis an icon but you made him more of an icon by associating with him and first car and driver and automobile magazine and explain the sim relationship, how it came about and how you got to know him. >> david davis for those of you who don't know about david davis, an absolutely amazing legendary character in the car world. he was the original editor of car and driver magazine, and car and driver had like a pre-history, it was called like "sports car too complex to read" "sport an boring car" and he created car and driver and ran it for a long time and quit and was a car advertising guy for a long time and and brought david back to run car and driver a second time in the '70s when i met him and david loves language

and loves writing and had really great writing and eventually when "car and driver" magazine was sold he quit and started automobile magazine and ran it for a long time and now is back at car and driver, around -- round three and he is absolutely great and what makes david great is an interesting story, back story to this. david was like a lot of us gearheads who is like a -- back in the 1950s a race bum and had an mg-td and was selling mgs and other sports cars and stuff for a living, such as it was and he really lived for racing cars and he had this mg-td and i forget which track he was on, in l.a., and he flipped it and in the old days, there are no roll bars in these things and you had one of those pudding bowl helmets on and he took the -- took his face off, voop! and david, big, good looking guy, i have seen pictures of him and all of a sudden he was so sar scary looking he couldn't go

out in public and went out in public on a foggy day on the beach and a woman saw him and threw up. i mean, he was so horrible and had no eyelids and they rebuilt his eyelids and a steel pin through his cheeks and these were the days before face transplant and spent years getting his face rebuilt. and at least he was completely out of action for a year. and this was a guy with a high school education, like a working class guy, worked in factories and sold cars and race cars and he spent that year, getting his face rebuilt, reading everything about the automobile. and the not only did it teach him, there is nothing he doesn't know about cars and the not only did it teach him everything about automobiles, but taught him everything about writing, too. and he began to realize that he really -- really loved and cared about words. and so he emerged like a sort of accidental intellectual from the end of the ordeal. and it was -- a terrible thing to have happen to david but it

was a wonderful thing to have happen to the car culture, you know, the guy emerged in the late 1950s from having his -- a pretty good looking guy now and wears a beard and if you look at him carefully, it is a good face but is not symmetrical. it is like different on one side, like old italian body work on some of those specials in the 1950s and luigi did this side and guido did that side... and that is one thing that made david a force and such a power and david wrote the quote at this beginning of the book why politicians hate cars, they make people free like i say in the declaration of independent here, make them free to leave and politicians hate that, they want you around. here we go. sir? >> i was curious about your view on the chrysler-fee at merger.

>> the two car companies who could never fit a door are now one! [laughter]. >> it will be interesting to see what happens here. i really don't care who owns who. you know, but the thing is i do care about government money, our money because the government doesn't have any money, that is our money, i'm sorry. i mean, they may print it, you know, out of nowhere, you know? but it is still us, who are going to have to pay for that. and i don't like our money being used for these things, not that i don't want to see these car companies survive, but, that is a big part of freedom, is failure, everybody thinks freedom is all about success, and capitalism is all about success and it's not. it's about failure and when a company quits making products, that people want, at a price people want to pay for them, it is time for that company to go away. and if you keep that company around, with government infusions, what you get is everything they had east of the berlin wall before the berlin wall fell over. you know? i spent a lot of time as a

foreign correspondent, i spent a lot of time in oneurope, back during the cold war and people said what do you think caused the end of the cold war in the fall of the berlin wall, was it "star wars," was it reagan's foreign policy? was it the war of afghanistan, was it this or that? and i said, no, it was bulgarian blue jeans, and nobody -- they couldn't get anything but bulgarian blue jeans over there, big old baggy and they weren't even blue, you know and you know, what color, whatever color they felt like making that day, they were government blue jeans and one size fits all. bulgarian blue jeans and fine they'll the people, you know, east of the berlin wall, the iron curtain said we are -- we aren't wearing them any more and came into the streets and said shoot us and we won't wear bulgarian blue jeans, we've hat it and we ain't wearing that stuff any more, we want a pair of levi 501s, open up that wall! and it happened. and the pressure was too great.

and so you just don't want government running industry. even if it seems like -- i hate to see those jobs lost out in detroit and hate to see the secondary, especially the secondary companies that made the parts and the fasteners and stuff, not their fault and they didn't do anything wrong and hate to see them go under but i hate to see the government get involved more thani i hate to see that. and we can come back, and -- that is the thing about money and freedom, you know, when your your freedomiest -- lose your money you can maybe more and freedom is taken away you cannot make more freedom. money is not zero-some and your getting rich doesn't make me poor and because you have too many slices of pizza doesn't mean i have to eat the domino's box and money is not zero-sum but freedom is, freedom you take from me is freedom i don't have, i can't go out and make more freedom. sir. >> do you see us regaining the

freedom? where do you see the car industry, putting it in terms of the car industry, where do you see that. >> i don't see us regaining the freedom to have -- i mean, basically what made the car so appealing i think people my generation, was that it was simple. and modern cars are tinker-proof and are tirnker-proof with the emissions controls and safety stuff and gas mile stuff, essentially makes them -- and there are kids that can make fast automobiles out of new cars and i admire those kids but primarily they are computer programmers, and that is really what they are doing, most of all, to those cars, is reprogramming the computers in them. bless them but it's a bit beyond me. i have to say, you know? and one thing to go out in the garage and say, see you later, honey, tell me when the kids are in bed, i'll be out in the garage, you know, tinkering with the car and you can't do that with a computer. sitting right there in the middle of the living room, you have to read the little devils

and go to sleep. and i'm -- i don't see us getting out from under this. you know, now that the car is has officially become an appliance and that is why we love old cars and we'll be sticking around with them but i'm afraid as a culture, it is probably going, you know, the -- you know, kids don't -- already figured out new ways to hurt themselves and skate boards an extreme sports an bmx bikes and stuff. >> i was thinking, there is a successful car industry in the u.s. in the south. building bmws and things like that. >> absolutely. >> yes. >> yes. yes. and i don't think there is a damn thing wrong with that, when you buy an american car you are very likely buying more foreign content than you are when you are buying certain foreign cars. you really can't tell. that -- somebody pointed out that there is one model, the cam

ray actually contains more american parts and labor than the jeep patriot. [laughter]. >> it's an international economy and we want it to be an international economy and it is j--- you know, entirely old-fashioned to regard these things as not being international. so i'm actually, all in favor -- and, you know, gm and chrysler are going under, by no means puts an end to american car industry and shifted -- you know, the focus of the american car industry is going to be here and has increasingly been moving here over the years as the japanese cars headquarters are here, and i think once when we get chinese cars their headquarters are likely to be here and the design facilities are out here. this is going to be the detroit of tomorrow, if it isn't already, you know? and the detroit -- factory part of detroit, the flint, the river rouge, all of that will be scattered around and -- in the south and small towns. and, that is not a bad thing. you know? but, still, i -- what worries me that is -- not worries me but i

think is inevitable is that the car as we knew it and we loved it has morphed into something far more complex. and not as much fun. and probably safer and more efficient and better for the planet and all that crap, but it is just isn't a car and i don't see us going back on that. it is sort automotive like cuban cigars, okay there is one up side to electing the obama guy, all right, i'm not happy about electing obama and i think he's a socialist, but he's -- i think he's a pinko bend what is the upside of big pinkos, we'll get trade with cuba and i'll get my cigars back and i love cuban cigars and i find out the fda is now taking over tobacco. you know? and the big pinko, cut me off at the pass and i can get the cigars but they will not have any nicotine in them, now? [laughter]. >> and like, if i wanted to roll up a big wad of plant and smoke

it, i have grass clippings, i have -- i've got the recycling bin, i have that -- i have the stuff left over from the tomato garden i could have rolled up and smoked if i wanted something without nicotine, so... but i was glad to see in the newspaper they'll -- they'll ban banana flavored cigarettes. [laughter]. >> yeah, i never -- now that i've heard of it, now auto want one! banana flavored cigarettes, i'm glad we got that out of the way! there is a menace to america banana flavored cigarettes. anybody else? anybody who would like their book signed? i will be right here. and i'll be glad to do it. and thank you all very much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations].

>> pj o'rourke this is author of nine previous books, including "keep the rich" "all the trouble in the world," and republican party reptile, a freelance writer for numerous magazines, "playboy," "vanity fair," the new republic and harpers and currently writes for rolling stone and the atlantic monthly. for more information visit pjorourkeon-line.blogspot.com. >> joseph lowndes, from the new deal to the new right you argue that modern conservatism was founded in the south. why? >> the reason i make that claim is that i think, often people talk about southern strategy and capture of the south guy the g.o.p., after that he 1960s, beginning with goldwater and then, in nixon's 1972 election but i think in some ways, the situation is the reverse, that southerners played a key role in

the development, both first in the conservative capture of the republican party, itself, and then, of republican ascendancy nationally and southern segregationist politics and northern conservatism were blended over time by various political actors in a way that allowed a national language of kind of racial resentment and opposition to federal state power and the democratic party generally. >> well, two questions arise from that answer, number one, how did they blend, and when did it begin? >> i think the story begins, decisively in the 1940s, the 1930s in congress, there is a conservative coalition which comes together after 1936, to resist some of fdr's political imperatives but really is after world war ii when during the truman administration, when he begins to push for a federal employment practices commission,

and desegregation of the military that you have southern political leads declare independence from the national democratic party, and dixiecongratulate, states rights revolt in 1948 -- dixiecrat, it was to get enough electoral college votes in the south and throw the election into the house of representatives which didn't quite work but began a process of separating southern democrats from national democrats, generally. and from the growing racial liberalism of the national democratic party. and i think then what happened is that conservatives in the north frustrated with eisenhower and frustrated with the -- what they saw of the me-tooism of the republican party in the new deal era, began to look southward, for allies, and kind of the new coalition to rebuild a conservative party and push back against the new deal, so, so "the national review" magazine, for instance, begins inviting

segregationist writers and journalist and others to pen editorials and write articles for "national review" and some conservative republican strategists begin to try to build a republican party, in the south, which had not ever been a viable party, you know, certainly not after reconstruction. so, both at the level of kind of intellectual discourse and party strategy, it begins in the 1950s and northerners begin to look southward. >> the shared interests were economic. >> economic and racial. i think. partly, it is southerners, southern segregationists saw -- elites saw their struggle would remain regional unless they could find allies outside the region and convince other southerners loyal to the new deal they needed to abandon the democratic loyalty for politics that would really resist the racial liberalism of the national party. and so, partly, northern

conservatives who didn't have a big stake in race, prior to the 1950s, began to find ways to see how racial politics would animate northern audiences, and begin to peel off segments of the white working class, and others, from the kind of a hegemonic democratic party and it is really kind of a -- kind of both i think. >> who were some of the leaders of this movement? >> i trace it to the 1940s to certain dixiecrat leaders, charles wallace collins, the intellectual guru of the dixiecrat revolt and not only a hard white supremist segregationist leader but one who really seeks to convince strom thurman mond and john temple graves and other southern elites they have to articulate a conservative anti-government politics, a business conservatism as well as a kind of a racial anti-government politics. and so he's one of the leaders.

and the 1950s and 1960s, buckley, william f. buckley, its not often remembered that he really makes dramatic efforts to bring southerners into the conservative coalition, and he pens an editorial in 1957, arguing that denial of the vote to black citizens in the south is perfectly justifiable because these people have not reached a level of civilization that would allow them to participate democratically and buckley is another figure and goldwater, clearly, is someone who when he runs in 1964, outside of his own state of arizona, only wins a handful of deep south states. nowhere else in the nation is he a strong figure. >> why did he win those states. >> he -- in the 1964 election, one of the major issues was that the great civil rights bill that johnson proposed, and

goldwater's opposition to the civil rights bill, was one of the things used by his southern supporters over and over to try to get his -- votes for him and so really it was, civil rights in south for him articulated as kind of a strong constitutionalism, and a states rights and individualist kind of ideology. >> joseph lowndes, what is this southern strategy? how would you define that. >> >> people people refer to it as that and begin with goldwater or nixon and the idea is that northern republicans hoped to win over southern voters and to win southern states and -- in national elections by pushing the race issue, by articulating kind of a either a coded or open language, of -- for nixon's anti-bussing and for goldwater oppositoin to the civil rights bill and that is what people are referring to when they talk about this southern strategy.

but, again, what is missed in that is the agency and activity of southerners themselves, who help put this on the table and provide a language of racial politics that will play not just in the south but in, you know, gary indiana and in detroit, michigan. and in baltimore, maryland, and in philadelphia, pennsylvania. where issues of open housing, and open unions, other anti-discrimination measures and things that are focused indirectly on race potentially can reach a broader white audience. >> so how do you get from the new deal to the new right today? >> the new deal to the new right today, well, i begin by -- the story i tell is by looking the at elements, both in and outside of the new deal, southern democrats, and northern republicans, conservative republicans, and western republicans, who begin to bring

their political perspectives together, in opposition to the new deal, and until finally a place where, by 1980, ronald reagan wins, decisively, 1984 even more so and the beginning of a national realignment, national regime change, which is what we i think are at the end of now. >> ronald reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign i believe in mississippi. why was that significant? >> well, it want just in mississippi, it was in the -- in a county in mississippi where the site of the e three civil rights workers, james chaney and andrew goodman were slain by collaps klansman in 1963 and it was a place steeped in racial history and steeped in meaning for mississippi and trent lott brought him to give a speech there and reagan says in the speech, like you i believe in states rights which is, he could

have meant any number of things but a certain message was carried forth in that moment. >> what is the state in your view of state today's new right or the conservative movement? >> i think we are kind of in a twilight of the reagan revolution and, in fact, many of the soldiers of the revolution say the same thing, pat buchanan, newt gingrich and others, that i think what happens in american political history is that certain ideas dominate and certain political imperatives shape the landscape, and then over time they start to wayne as new political question arise and circumstances arise and new players come onto the scene to change political identities. and i think now, in some ways, like democratic liberalism in the 1970s, the republican right has kind of run out of gas or is in an era of splintering and

major internal fights, over the future direction of the party. i mean, it was interesting to see in the primaries, the republican primaries, you had a whole range of candidates, none of whom could fully creditably claim conservative credentials and yet all of them invoking reagan, over and over. >> and, what does that mean for the south? >> you know, the south is very much in play, in a way it has not been in a generation, and in this last national election, presidential election, north carolina, and north carolina, south carolina, georgia, mississippi, across the south, i think black voters are playing a more decisive role and latino voters are playing a more decisive role and white voters are much more fragment and it has to do with changing political identities and part of it has to do with strong enforcement of the voting rights act in the south and more so recently which opened up a lot of territory to exciting change.

>> this is your first book and what is your day job? a political science professor. i teach at the university of oregon in eugene. >> and what are you teaching. >> i teach american politics, right now i'm teaching a course on comparative conservatism, and u.s. and europe with my great colleague, cass muhda and a course right now on racial politics from the 20th century to the present. >> comparative politics between this u.s. and europe, in conservatives, what is the difference? :