[slowmover]

(I'll have to write this quickly)

Differentiate between town & country.

A car in the city is the normal Coasty viewpoint, West or East (and irrelevant ethnic takes; plus boring suburbia), but for 80% of America it was access to goods/services over part of a larger region that the car was revolutionary. Steinbeck is a better choice, both Grapes and Travels than opium-eater Kerouac. One needs the memory of the hatred for the railroads, but also the limitations of the horse. Damned both ways. The "car" as that synthesis of liberation from the problems of both.

The Wild Bunch is a much better choice than T&L, for the car represents the old nomad versus land-tied problem anew -- Gypsy versus farmer, Jewish mendicant versus city-dweller; nomad fear meme -- and fits better with Pirsig though that both use motorcycles is irrelevant; stage-props; Wagner stripped down. We come and go as we please, but we are thus tied to the machinery irrevocably.

Tying it together under Hucho ought to be interesting: the lowest cost over a maximum distance (as motorcycles are useless) for the transport of persons & small goods. Comancheros and coastal schooners are an even better set of analogies: willing to risk the frontiers external and internal. A sci-fi novel of asteroid-mining by huge numbers of skilled individuals -- risk-takers, loosely co-aligned -- is another (even if perfectly unlikely; as a thought exercise by some authors; maybe an excerpt from K.S. Robinson Mars series).

Fossil fuel meant dominion over climate & terrain. Cast it against Vaclav Smil and societal time-frames of energy-sources. An individual can find ways to transport high btu liquids. Good luck, only, that he is not in Vichy France keeping a charcoal-burning car supplied. The navel-gazing version of cars is long-dead. Corpse a'horseback since 1973.

Forests and coal mines once, electrical generation next -- all are tied to economies of scale.

Personal "independence" may as well have been the ad slogan. But to cast it as energy independence among small groups would be a better realization. Isolation didn't work out.

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