For GorT the Elder:

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

P.J. O’Rourke writes an elegy for American automotive power.

Attention, WSJ copy editors: it’s Bucephalus with a “u” (or Bucephalos if you’re feeling Hellenic).

Picture: 1963 Chevrolet Stingray, via carstyling.ru.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.