Good-bye to all that, fellow car nuts. Barak Obama has been elected, Congress is overrun with Democrats like cooties on a spelling bee winner, and the Supreme Court will be next to go. Poor Chief Justice John Roberts did the best he could to save us by muffing the oath of office. But they forced him into a do over. And it’s only a matter of time before Roberts is exposed as having once written a legal brief where “she” wasn’t used as a collective pronoun—thereby proving Roberts’s deep-seated phallocentric bias, anti-inclusive prejudice, and insensitivity to hurtful language. When Roberts is impeached Al Gore will be named to replace him and the Fun Suckers will be fully in charge.
We have the ugly mug of liberalism right in our face or, rather, the armpit of liberalism’s left wing. The progressives are back, the community activists, the collectivists, the socialists, the Bolshie scum—call them what you will. Reagan throws pinko politicians out the door of human liberty and they come back down the chimney of climate change. Globalization tosses pinko environmentalists out the window of free-market opportunity and they crawl back through the rat hole of fiscal crisis. Pinko economic reformers will be given the bum’s rush in their turn. But they’ll be back in yet another guise. It’s a battle that won’t be won in my lifetime.
I’m not saying there’s no hope. Young lads of good courage and lasses brave at heart, spit upon the hand that offers you the keys to the Prius. Freedom will dawn again.
The beauty of communism is that like all great projects of social engineering it contains within itself the mechanism of its own destruction. I know because I drove one.
A few years ago I was on a horseback trek across the Chatkal Mountains (another story entirely) in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz-where? Well you might ask. Kyrgyzstan is the southeasternmost of what used to be the U.S.S.R.’s central Asian provinces. It lies between Kazakhstan and China (more alpine than the latter and less the subject of a comic movie than the former). If you were to go due south about five hundred miles from where I was you’d be in India. Kyrgyzstan is the place that Sean Connery and Michael Caine ended up ruling in the movie of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. I didn’t actually see any polo played with a human head but I’m not saying it doesn’t happen.
Anyway, I was on a horse. I like horses well enough—although better when they win, place, or show—but what I loved was our support vehicles, which traveled down the logging skids and sheep trails of Kyrgyzstan’s wilderness. These were a pair of magnificent seven-ton, six-wheel-drive 1984 Zil trucks, Soviet army surplus left over from the Afghan war. One truck carried all our tents and gear and the other contained a complete camp kitchen.
We would ride our horses along the mountain ridges all day while the trucks made their way through the mountain valleys. They’d meet us each night. We’d come down from the heights with the setting sun and find the tents pitched, a trestle table with vodka bottles set in a row, and a lamb turning on a spit. I was off the horse and into the trucks as quickly as I could. They were wonderfully engineered machines. By that I don’t mean that their engineering was wonderful. It was wonderfully big and wonderfully simple, so simple that it was comprehensible to me. And wonderfully repairable in the middle of nowhere.
We’d passed beyond the end of the road into a place with no power lines, no phone towers, not even any vapor trails of airplanes in the sky. We met only a few people, nomads grazing their flocks in summer pastures, living in felt yurts. We found one small village with one old blacksmith who had one small boy operating the bellows of his forge. He could make engine parts for the Zils—such were the tolerances and metallurgy involved.
The Zils were classic vehicles, almost unchanged in appearance from the World War II Red Army trucks. They were built on ladder frames with roly-poly 1930s-style cabs in front of plywood sheds with ordinary house windows, barn doors at the back, and a stove pipe out the roof of the camp kitchen. “It comes with just cargo container,” said driver Valerii Katalukin. “It must be modified.”
Valerii and his codriver Andre Akimenko put me in the driver’s seat and let me run through some of the plentiful shift positions—five unsynchronized gears and two much less synchronized axle speeds. We drove around in a riverside meadow undeterred by boggy footing at speeds ranging from the preferred pace of my trek horse (less than zero) to the fastest rate at which I’m comfortable on a horse (grudging trot). Wheel, pedal, and gear lever efforts were as large as the Zil but not without a coarse-grained precision.
The Zil’s engine was a six-liter V-8 with a 1950s Ford look. There was a Ford engine about this size, a 352 cid, introduced in 1957 as an option in the Ranchero pickup. The Ranchero, however, had two four-barrel carburetors and three hundred horsepower while the Zil had one two-barrel and 150 hp.
The detuned V-8 had a good deal to do besides moving fourteen thousand pounds of truck plus whatever was loaded onto it. Each Zil had a hydraulic system so that it could be fitted with a tractor bucket, plow blade, or backhoe. Three different wrist-thick V-belts spun from pulleys at the front of the engine, one to run the hydraulic pump, one to turn an air compressor, and one to operate the radiator fan and the ninety-amp alternator. A second drive shaft powered a twenty-ton winch with seventy meters of steel cable wrapped around an oil drum–sized reel on the front bumper.
We obtained firewood for our camp by finding a dead pine in the forest, wrapping the winch cable around it, and yanking the whole tree out of the woods.
Why not diesel if all this power was needed? Valerii and Andre laughed. Russian winter temperatures turn diesel fuel into a mold of Jell-O shimmying on a plate.
I looked under the truck. The three live axles were mounted on leaf springs with torsion bar assists. If the engine was nabbed from a ’57 Ford, then the suspension was nicked from a Plymouth of the same era.
The Zils were primitive. But when America’s Fun Suckers nationalize the car companies they will be surprised by the primitivism that will ensue, as no doubt the Soviet Union’s nationalizers were. GM, Chrysler, and Ford will be run by Nancy Pelosi. The Fun Suckers and the climate-cleansing creeps think government-spec cars will run on wind power from the breeze that cars encounter when they drive down the road. They think cars will run on tofu farts. They think cars will run on solar energy. And maybe they will, if you roll up the windows and take away the bottled water and lock your family in the car on a hot, sunny day and figure out how to harness the energy of furious death throes. They think cars will run on six AA batteries. And that might work too. Put half a dozen batteries in a sock, hit a gas station cashier over the head, and steal thirty gallons.
What will actually happen when the government owns the car companies is that organized labor will wield renewed and enormous power. The very air in the factories will have to come from the atmosphere on a fully unionized planet. Executive pay will be curtailed until the car companies are driven insane looking for managerial talent. That kid with the head set at Burger King. He seems focused and decisive. “Three Whopper Meals to go!” Engineers and designers will be hired because they’re related to the governor of Illinois. Styling will be done by the same commission and committee process that produces public monuments such as the Vietnam Memorial. Your new Impala will be a simple slab with the names of everyone ever killed in a traffic accident engraved on it.
The Fun Suckers believe that a motor vehicle created by politics will be a cross between a biofuel golf cart and the thing the Baby Einstein kids fly. A motor vehicle created by politics will be a Zil. And FYI, Al Gore, fuel economy in a Zil is five miles per gallon on the highway and 3¾ mpg off road.
To us beleaguered car nuts, though, Zils rolling off the assembly lines in Detroit is not bad news. This is a device we can deal with. It will be easy to trim its weight and not hard to bring that engine’s horsepower back to three hundred. We can even improve gas mileage if we want. Meanwhile we’ve got twin forty-six-gallon fuel tanks. And the Zil is not without sophistications of a kind. It has coolers for both engine oil and hydraulic fluid. And it has fully waterproof two-piece spark plugs. The plug design is ancient. I found a drawing for a similar type in a book called Self-Propelled Vehicles published in 1907. But the design works. Andre told me that, supplied with a snorkel, the Zil can operate completely underwater. There’s a centrifugal oil-bath air cleaner to filter out the worst dust in the world (which Afghanistan has). The Zil’s air compressor feeds a self-inflation system for the truck’s six tires. Tire pressure can be changed on the run by half an atmosphere—about 7½ psi. Tires can be deflated to negotiate sand or pumped up to roll over obstructions. And air can be kept in tires punctured by bullets.
The tires themselves are mounted on twenty-four-inch wheels. A wheel mount weighs 330 pounds and stands forty-seven inches high. The Russian tires looked okay with an aggressive tread pattern and the kind of soft composition that works well on ice. But Valerii told me they only last a year. A little American know-how and a visit to the tractor-trailer junkyard should get us better unsprung weight and tread life. The Zil’s sixteen-inch ground clearance is disappointing, no better than a Hummer’s. But the Zil can climb a forty-five-degree incline and can tilt, Andre assured me, an astonishing sixty degrees before it flops over.
“He is best driver,” Andre said of Valerii. A Kyrgyz native, Valerii had been driving Zils in central Asia for twenty-three years. He was an enlisted man in the Soviet army from 1979 to 1981, serving in a Vladivostok transport division that used Zils to move bombs.
“To learn to drive Zils I was in school six months before I was really good,” Valerii said. “I was lucky because I could feel it very quickly, center of gravity. I learned to drive local trucks at fourteen.” When we encountered a mile-wide landslide it was Valerii who drove each truck across the crumbling ground above an abyss while Andre walked along beside him shouting how much earth was giving way from beneath the downhill wheels.
And landslides may be an issue for us car nuts. With the Fun Suckers ruining everything, we’ll have to head for the hills. Yes, I know, we’ve spent years trying to head for the hills, in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Northern California. The Fun Suckers keep coming after us on their cross-country skis that suck the fun out of skiing. Keeping fit so she can torment us until she’s a hundred, Granny D telemarks into our rifle sights while we’re trying to shoot a moose. Other Fun Suckers litter our bird covers with granola crumbs as they “Hike for Peace” and block our four-wheeler routes by holding 5K fun runs to raise public awareness about the dangers posed by lack of broadband Internet service to rural minorities and the poor. They get “centered” and “positive” and “spiritually attuned” by taking raft trips though the middle of our best trout pools. They build spas for holistic healing next door to where we were trying to get off the grid and then they complain about the noise our electric generators and snowmobiles make. Now that Volvo has built a credible all-terrain machine in the form of the XC90 (with scads of air bags to protect the passengers in case they drive into my goose-hunting pit blind and squash me), there seems to be no way to escape the Fun Suckers.
Yet nature geeks, outdoorsy bores, and advocates of protecting the endangered rabid raccoons in our garbage cans will never be able to go where our Zils can take us. The Zils took the Russians to Kandahar (and, better yet, got them out again). Maybe Afghanistan wouldn’t be our first choice as hills to head for. But there is no DOT there, no NHTSA, no CAFE, no emission controls, no annual vehicle inspections, no seat belt laws, speed limits, crash standards, or random roadblock checks for DWI (although there’s not much Afghan I to DW with). The Zils can take us plenty of other places as well. And here’s one more piece of good news from Obama’s Russian commie role models: Zils are still being made at a factory outside Moscow. They cost only about $30,000 new. You can get a good used one for six or seven thousand. And you can see the dealership from Sarah Palin’s house.