Muscle cars

Continued from previous post.
"Or at least you understand one of the reasons people love them. There's a lot more to the appeal of a muscle car than the act of driving one. A convertible Hemi 'Cuda didn't fetch $7.5 million in the spring of 2003 simply because the buyer wanted a fast car to run through the quarter-mile. A muscle car's appeal has as much to do with what it symbolizes as with what if actually is. Symbols are powerful things--people die for them every day--and a muscle car symbolizes freedom. More precisely it symbolized an era of freedom.
It was freedom of that brought the muscle car into existence--the freedom of cheep gas and open roads, the freedom offered by the postwar American dream, the freedom to go just about anywhere and do just about anything. And it was the perceived loss of freedom that brought the classic muscle car era to an end. In the sour aftermath of the Vietnam war, the first war we clearly did nit win, our sense of national omnipotence began to wither. With the loss of faith in our elected officials following the Watergate break-in, we suddenly found ourselves adrift without fixed stars to lead us into the future. After the shocking realization that oil was a finite resource, one that depended on forces beyond our control, we confronted the fact that the tap on our economy's lifeblood could be shut off at any time. The freedom symbolized by the muscle car suddenly seemed fragile and transitory in the face of this terrifying trifecta."
Continued in the next post.