If you felt a pang when you heard that Craig Breedlove died, I can probably guess your age and gender. He was the fastest man on earth, an inventor who built rocket cars and screamed over the otherworldly expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Four hundred mph! Five! Six! When I was a kid, guys like that were exceptional — but not odd. Special, yes, but that’s what America did. We made guys who looked at the speed of the Autobahn and snorted: Hold my bier, Fritz.
His car was called the “Spirit of America” — a sign it was from a culture that thought the name meant “1776” instead of “1619.” Breedlove’s invention would be derided today by some, for all the predictable reasons: It was part of a culture that glorified that satanic contraption, the internal-combustion engine. It made middle-aged men sitting at the traffic light rev their engine and think they might have a little Breedlove in them, belching lead and carbon monoxide into the fragile atmosphere. The craft was frankly phallic, all shiny and long and silvery, and the act of the machine piercing the placid atmosphere of the Salt Flats, engine screaming with rage and aggression, was literally violence! The embodiment of male entitlement. It’s a wonder Breedlove didn’t run the thing into a giant Georgia O’Keeffe painting of flowers just to underscore the point.
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