Americans and cars: Love runs out of gas
FOR MOST OF THE 20TH CENTURY, a generous portion of what was best about America and Americans was inextricably entangled in our special relationship with the automobile. The innocence and ebullience of that relationship made us seem more human, its ubiquity made us seem more democratic, and its purity made us seem more civilized. No more. When no less an authority than William Clay Ford Jr., chief executive of the Ford Motor Co. and great-grandson of the man himself, announces that the romance between Americans and their cars has gone stale, the bloom may be said to be officially off the rose.
The word is out. Americans used to love their cars and now they don’t, or at least not the way they did. The fate of the republic, of course, can hardly be said to hang on the outcome of this souring romance, but the tone and temper of the republic almost certainly do. A seismic shift of affection has taken place, and there is no consensus on its causes and consequences.
The French cultural psychologist Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, who had a hand in designing Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, thinks the fault lies in our cars. Like the designing French shrink he is, Rapaille believes that the possibility of romance springs eternal, that we might love again if American carmakers would just design a car or two that we might fall for. I don’t think so. My own suspicion is that the fault lies not in our cars but in ourselves -- that, simply put, Americans are no longer a loving people.
Many years ago, Mary McCarthy proposed another option. In an essay called “The Humanist in the Bathtub,” McCarthy argues that Americans, afflicted by their Puritan heritage and alienated from the pagan roots of European civilization, have never had any live, sensual affection for objects. We surround ourselves with objects, to be sure, but in McCarthy’s view, we don’t care about their object-hood. We care about what these objects mean, to ourselves and to others.
So, maybe we never loved cars at all. Maybe we only loved what cars meant, and we no longer do. Or maybe cars mean something different these days -- and love has nothing to do with it. The facts support this supposition. Car sales are burgeoning, yet we know the thrill is gone. All over America, every weekend, thousands of automotive extravaganzas open to the public: antique car shows, hot rod shows, custom car shows, grand prix races, NASCAR races, drag races, Indy races, motocross rallies, monster truck challenges, tractor pulls and demolition derbies.
Still, it’s not the same. What used to be a wide-screen romance is now just a sitcom dalliance. The vehicles that once brought us together in a colloquy of enthusiasm and aspiration now set us apart from one another. They isolate us behind steel doors and tinted windows; they re-tribalize us in the pursuit of regional enthusiasms; they reassert class distinctions and wedge us into niche markets that exploit our fear and prejudice.
Museum as showroom
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN Art’s inaugural exhibition in Queens provided a case in point. For that occasion, the museum presented the six automobiles in its permanent collection spotlighted on white pedestals in a kind of celestial showroom. Since MoMA’s new Queens location resembles nothing so much as an idealized car dealership, the effect was uncannily appropriate, lacking only symbolic sales personnel, cruising like sharks.
In lieu of these, the walls of MoMA’s showroom were adorned with period advertising graphics. One of these encouraged us to “Watch the Fords Go By,” although one would have had to step outside to do this since nothing so mundane as a Ford adorned the showroom floor.
This space was elegantly populated by the usual suspects of late 20th century European automotive design: a 1946-48 Pininfarina Cisitalia “202,” a 1959 Volkswagen Beetle, a 1963 Jaguar E-type roadster, a 1990 Ferrari Formula One racing car and a 2002 Smart Car manufactured by Micro Compact Car in Germany and France.
This, evidently, is the Museum of Modern Art’s automotive universe: two extravagant vehicles for the European aristocracy, two modest vehicles for the international proletariat and two functional vehicles, one for racing and one for fighting wars. This last category was represented by the single American car in the exhibition, a 1954 Willys-Overland jeep, which was acquired, one presumes, to honor the jeep’s role in liberating Europe during World War II, thus enabling the masters of European design to proceed at their leisure.
Missing from the Modern’s showroom were any of the cars we loved as one loves works of art or any vehicle at all that might have been paid out on time by a member of the American middle class and parked in the driveway of a mortgaged home.
One can’t really complain about this, however. Without its penchant for European solutions and class distinctions, without its obsessive concern with distinguishing “art” from “design,” the museum just wouldn’t be the Modern.
Even so, one has a right to wonder why a major American cultural institution would devote an enormous room, in its new building, in its inaugural exhibition, to a selection of automobiles that, with the exception of the race car, might be found on any given afternoon parked outside a Starbucks in Palm Springs.
The cynical suggestion that the Modern has embarked upon a flirtation with democracy by pandering to the automotive enthusiasms of its new off-island neighbors doesn’t wash. One doesn’t pander with Cisitalias and E-type roadsters, and the connoisseurs perusing these exquisite machines had not just come from a monster truck rally. They were on their way to Palm Springs, where they wanted to feel safe and knowledgeable in their summer-weight jackets and chat about “design.”
Symbols of freedom
CONFRONTED WITH THIS tasting menu of class-conscious automotive cuisine, however, it’s easy to forget that for most of the previous century, automobiles were the primary icons of egalitarian freedom in this, the Land of the Free.
Automobiles meant freedom then, and if they did not actually set us free, they endowed us with mobility, which at the time was considered to be the closest thing to it. Automobiles made America smaller, its distances shorter, and they made it one nation perhaps for the first time. As the nation’s first standardized, absolutely ubiquitous, sea-to-shining-sea, mass-produced product, the Ford Motor Car inaugurated what Andy Warhol used to call “the democracy of objects” -- a society in which all the people can be different because all the objects are the same.
In his book “The Americans,” Daniel Boorstin offers a parable of creation for such a democracy. He asks us to imagine the population of a new town on the American plains in the early days of the last century. No one living on that bald ridge of prairie was born there; they have all come from everywhere for every reason and are bound for God knows where. They share no cultural heritage, no ethnic bonds, no regional or religious traditions; they are bound by no shared past or imagined future. So, Boorstin asks, what do they talk about?
His answer: They talk about their Fords, and in these conversations, those uniformly black, mass-produced originals function simultaneously as objects of possession, indispensable appliances, icons of community and emblems of the promise of the republic. Citizens who share nothing else may stand side by side in the middle of nowhere looking at a Ford and negotiate issues of virtue and value, art and design, maintenance and survival, practicality and aspiration -- then move a thousand miles away and do it again.
Before the end of World War II, the richness and complexity of this conversation were rarely, if ever, reflected in the automobiles, however. Makes and models proliferated throughout the period, but mass-produced cars continued to present themselves as Henry Ford intended them to, as practical tools to facilitate and enhance the conduct of commercial society. The jeep in the Modern’s collection is the ultimate expression of this sensibility: an armored, hopped-up, virtually indestructible Model A.
In the festival of commerce that followed World War II, American cars finally embraced the destiny of their iconic social status. Under the aegis of design maestros such as Harley Earl and Raymond Loewy, cars became what they stood for. The highways filled with rainbow-hued, chrome-and-steel objects of desire -- as beautiful and foolish as love itself, as powerful and dangerous as their drivers were presumed to be brave, as theatrical and impractical as human aspiration, as wasteful as talent and as improbable as optimism.
It goes without saying, of course, that by the standards of the Museum of Modern Art these cars were not well designed. Their form did not follow elegantly from their practical function, but neither does the form of a painting by Picasso or Roy Lichtenstein follow elegantly, and these cars, like those paintings, were designed less to do something than to be something -- to embody their social function.
So the Thunderbird and the Rocket 88 looked fast even when they were standing still because their drivers’ destination was no place on a map. It was a visible, aesthetic condition of absolute, democratic social mobility, of unconditional promise, and when these monsters roamed the Earth, literally thousands of soon-to-be artists, designers, writers, filmmakers and musicians looked at these cars, drove them, dreamed about them and learned from them something about what it means to be an artist in a democracy.
End of an era
THEN, AS SUDDENLY AS THEY came, the wonderful cars were gone. The whole idea of wonderful cars was suddenly absurd and, around 1972, American automotive design passed directly from adolescence into senescence, with no intervening summer of maturity. Almost overnight, American cars became safe, economical, ugly and virtually identical, and, of these four horsemen, only the steeds bearing safety and economy were explicable.
There were reasons: The carnage in Vietnam and carnage on the highways, the degradation of the environment and the oil crises in the Middle East all conspired to transform the simple virtues of safety and economy into cardinal ones. Foreign competition made them necessary, and technology made them possible, so safe and economical we got.
Ugly and identical are harder to parse, however, since safety and economy do not require beige. Only the desire to be visibly and theatrically cautious, economical and anonymous explains this flight into automotive purdah. And this desire for timorous, self-effacing penance, I think, can only be attributed to a massive recrudescence of Puritan guilt and wincing embarrassment over the infamy of Vietnam, the obliquity of Richard Nixon and all the fun we had in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
As improbable as it might seem, however, there is a cultural logic to this paradigm shift. A society in quest of an “Eldorado” is transformed in the blink of an eye into a society in search of a domestic “Accord,” but it’s still the same society and the same old theater of democratic public life, only now with a brand-new, incredibly boring, Victorian play.
Viewed as theater, then, the third act of this drama qualifies as theater of the absurd. The age of extravagant adventure is supplanted in the ‘70s by an age of nervous consolidation, and supplanted in the ‘90s by an age of imperial paranoia. With the ascendancy of the suburban utility vehicle and the off-road raider we finally achieve the absolute worst of both worlds: a virtually infinite selection of dangerous, uneconomical, ugly, identical vehicles -- of feral jeeps and walled-communities-on-wheels.
On the highway, we confront senile dread, sequestered and smoothly cruising along. Off road we breathe the dust and stinking fumes of petulant adolescence raging against the planet without joy or optimism. Given these circumstances, William Clay Ford Jr. has a right to his lament that we used to write songs about cars, about T-Birds and GTOs, and now we write regulations.
Well, quelle surprise, I say. We write songs about things we love. We regulate things we fear, and today we are afraid of just about everything. We are afraid of what our cars might do to us and of what people might do to our cars. We are afraid of what our cars might do to the world, and mostly we are afraid of the world -- of that actual, non-virtual domain into which the automobile propels us so effortlessly and propelled us once with much panache.
Today, the acrid scent of apocalypse hovers around our car-buying habits. Why else would we require tanks to take the kids to soccer practice? Why would we purchase off-road vehicles with no intention of leaving the road if some covert agency of our reptilian subcortex were not planning against the day when the 405 falls into ultimate, irremediable disrepair? Who knows?
All I know is that the spectacle of cringing privilege is not a pretty one, so I’d like to think we are only buying what we are being sold, that the nation’s slide into mobile philistinism is simply the product of cost-effective marketing. Car manufacturers who once sold optimism and courage now sell pessimism and cowardice. This has to be cheaper, since pessimism and cowardice are supposed to be ugly.
Still, how long can the boy cry wolf? Ugly gets boring, and pessimism is no more predictive of the apocalypse than optimism is of utopia. And optimism, at least, has the virtue of being its own reward. It makes the day more livable. It transforms the ominous specter of tomorrow into the promise of adventure, and if the elegant rake of the candy-apple Vicky that once crouched out in the driveway said anything to the world, it said this: We are up for adventure.
