Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed To Be – With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac … of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn

by P.J. O’Rourke

-Reviewed by Byron Perry

It may come as a surprise that P.J. O’Rourke is a full-blown car nut. Yes, aside from all the political satire and cigar-chomping snarkiness, this son of a Buick salesman has written about automobiles for over 30 years. In Driving Like Crazy, O’Rourke combines his most memorable car pieces with some new insights on the rise and fall of the American automobile.

O’Rourke reworked and edited the articles for Driving Like Crazy, combining them into a larger narrative. Consequently it’s sometimes hard to tell whether O’Rourke wrote any particular piece a few months or a few decades ago, but the format mostly works as a trip down his memory lane – and a look at his lifetime of writing on cars – sprinkled with modern asides and commentary.

O’Rourke kicks off with a National Lampoon essay he wrote in 1979 called “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink,” so it’s obvious from the beginning that we’re not dealing with a dry take on the automobile industry. O’Rourke does look back on the essay with a cringe, saying, “to not despise yourself when you were a twerp of thirty-one requires a more philosophical mind than this old fart possesses.” Indeed, the book may actually be more about self-reflection than automobile, as O’Rourke examines his earlier self through the lens of his auto journalism.

One of O’Rourke’s favorite things to do is romanticize the good ol’ days of magazine journalism, when young writers with expense accounts could arrange a Harley Davidson trip through the Midwest, write about it, and get paid. Those days are long gone now, but he has a good time reminiscing about the wacky fun and trouble he got into: the road trip across the country in a lunker of a ’56 Buick; adventures in the Mexican desert while covering the Baja 1000 off-road race; and the aforementioned motorcycle ride – all undertaken in a seemingly constant state of drunkenness.

But Crazy isn’t all nostalgia trip and O’Rourke does offer some opinions on current affairs. On the state of the American car industry, O’Rourke says good riddance to the “fools in the corner offices of Detroit” who ran it into the ground. But he laments the end of the American automobile – the sense of freedom it stirred, the livelihoods it supported, the source of innovation it provided. “We owe the American car a lot more than just the entertaining spectacle of Detroit’s felon mayor Kilpatrick,” he proclaims. O’Rourke goes far enough to say that many Americans owe their very existence to the car – or more specifically to the back seat.

The conservative O’Rourke foresees an America where GM, Ford and Chrysler are run by Nancy Pelosi and where hybrids (he calls them “Schwinns”) run amok through the streets. It’s a future he dreads. But he admits that he still holds out hope for the nation: “Young lads of courage and lasses brave at heart, spit upon the hand that offers you the keys to the Prius. Freedom will dawn again.”

Excerpt: “Cars fulfilled the ideal of America’s founding fathers. Of all the truths we hold self-evident, of all the unalienable rights with which we’re endowed, what’s most important to the American dream? It’s right there, front and center, in the Declaration of Independence: freedom to leave! Founding fathers, can I have the keys?”

Further Reading: A Savage Factory: An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry’s Self-Destruction and The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market