America and its Cars

...This is a big order and it would probably never have been filled—adequately or otherwise—had Keats employed conventional and objective methods of investigation...

...The book is a curious mixture of the sagacious and the naive...

...Detroit" will have to shape up, look around and "take another tack...

...Beginning with the assumption that American cars are overly expensive, overly large, overly powerful, impractical and dangerous—as well as aesthetically dreadful—he proceeds to account historically for these phenomena, to assess responsibility for their occurrence and, finally, to offer suggestions for getting rid of them...

...It is unfortunate that Keats, in his no doubt justified antipathy toward "Detroit," has seen fit to assume that motivation research is entirely inaccurate in its estimate of the American people as more than merely susceptible to the non-automotive attractions of automobiles...

...He also admits the existence of a certain amount of irrational oar buying, of the sort unearthed by a Popular Mechanics survey in 1956—"The average American changes cars for change's sake...

...Furthermore, since it is the manufacturer who does the laying on and since production techniques—among other things—demand the greatest possible uniformity of product, it is patent that there must be a "gewgaw" for everybody on every automobile...

...But in the end, all the public did was fall in love with its oar...

...People are not so "foolish" as to believe this sort of thing...

...As a consequence, the laying on of "gewgaws" is cumulative rather than selective...

...And this was simply because "like any primitive people confronted with an inexplicable phenomenon, Americans were quick to assign mystical characteristics to the automobile when it first appeared among them...

...Keats accepts some of this...

...He certainly knows, but has apparently forgotten in the heat of the crusade, that several million Americans are economically dependent on "dynamic obsolescence"—which is not to endorse it but to point to the naivete of the question...

...This intentional imperfection, or "dynamic obsolescence," as it is known to the brass at General Motors, also requires that the car that is made obsolete should not be made too obsolete—because if it is it will not command a respectable price as a used car...

...True, he never actually commits himself to an answer for the question "whether it is Detroit or the public that makes our automotive taste," and he recognizes that "a large part of the public does seem to want fripperies, as any dealer will tell you...

...It is equally unfortunate that he has, in the last analysis, ignored economics...

...His solution is finally a moral one (although it should be emphasized that throughout the book he exhibits a thorough understanding of specific economic problems...

...Detroit," did the rest...

...For another, they change annually (becoming better, it is understood) and therefore function as symbols of technological progress—a Good Thing...

...When Keats begins his book: "Once upon a time, the American met the automobile and fell in love," it is amusing and we think of it as a promising metaphor...

...What possible excuse is there," Keats asks with the innocence of a babe, "other than insensate greed, for dynamic obsolescence...

...Those mystical characteristics were apparently of a sufficiently tender and anthropomorphic nature to make easy "love objects" of their bearers and, as Keats explains, "when we view matters in this light, it is easy to see why Americans are as apt to lavish gewgaws on their automobiles as Hindus are to deck their idols out with gold and jewels...

...and in this case every-thing is equal, which is to say that most of us don't care what we are identified with, just so long as everybody else is identified with the same thing...

...So, not only are "gewgaws" laid on year after year in cumulative fashion: they are laid on in great multiplicity, until the automobile resembles the huge, crude, festive globules depicted in the eloquent illustrations of Robert Osborn which accompany the book...

...He recognizes that the automobile often functions as a status symbol and that it can be an emblem for its driver's personality...

...after all, it was only a car—and the monster...

...There have been exceptions to this welcoming...

...In The Insolent Chariots he uses a big rake, but wields it with something less than consummate skill...

...It was revealed to Keats that the condition of the American automobile as a "Baroque" monstrosity is the inevitable result of the fact that "automobiles were love objects from the start, venerated, called friends, lovingly polished and assigned the virtues of ponies, veterans and dogs...

...Dynamic obsolescence" is obviously a tricky business...

...More recently, as cars have gotten bigger and faster, the sniping has also increased...

...The American fell in love w ith his car—perhaps a little too deeply, for...

...It came to be, for various people, a status symbol, a personality reflector, an outlet for aggressions, a reassurance of masculinity and so forth...

...John Keats is a former reporter, author of two books—Schools Without Scholars and The Crack in the Picture Window—which locate him in the modem muckraking tradition...

...Detroit," Keats writes, "must combine creeping Charlie Wilsonism ['Basic research is when you don't know what you're doing.'] with the Barnum Law of economics, while allowing the customer to pay for everything...

...and thus as a trade-in, and its owner will be financially unable to unload it every two or three years in exchange for a new one...

...Everybody knows what Aldous Huxley had to say about Our Ford and many are familiar with William Faulkner's remarks, in Intruder in the Dust, about the automobile having become our national sex symbol...

...And if the Cadillac has "bosoms" on its bumpers, the Buick a ringed phallus on the hood and the Edsel captures the "vaginal look," it is all the fault of dirty-minded "Detroit," which has subscribed to the "preposterous presumptions" of the depth psychologists—including the presumption that Americans do not want to buy cars, but illusions as well...

...That pretty well wraps it up from Keats" standpoint...

...As a nation we have largely welcomed identification with our cars...

...If a Cadillac ad seeks to convey the impression that Cadillac owners are elegant and wealthy, it is a stupid and nasty piece of advertising...

...It is about time this statement were challenged...

...Even T. S. Eliot has had something to say on the subject—about the internal combustion engine having altered our perception of rhythms...

...There has been, in fact, a substantial amount of sniping along the path to progress...

...Detroit" is the real monster to Keats...

...The problem of "dynamic obsolescence"—undoubtedly the biggest problem facing any severe alteration of America's relations with the automobile—is so fundamentally an economic one as to require for its solution the same sort of revision of the economy that will be required when and if defense spending is drastically curtailed...

...The Cowboy and his Horse, a Boy and his Dog, Grandma in her Rocker—such images have become part of the past, to be replaced by the one, mighty, unifying symbol of the American and his Car...

...In the end, Keats seems to lose sight of the fact that his metaphor is a metaphor...

...Mainly, identification has been welcomed because, everything being equal, to welcome is more American than not to welcome...

...Reviewed by David Fitelson Contributor, ''Partisan Review'' The Insolent Chariots, a slightly angry survey of America's current relations with the automobile, reminds us that the automobile, even more than television, has become an appropriate symbol for what America is really like...

...That he did not employ them, and that we therefore have the book, is a result of his discovery that "no matter how objectively we view [the situation] a quality of slapstick tragedy is always apparent," and of his uncovering of an historical complex which represents the first and probably most important step in a solution to the whole business...

...Let's hope it will be in the direction of basic morality...

...None of this adornment ever succeeds in achieving a truly decorous effect because it is not intended to...

...If you start getting decorous, you begin to approach perfection, and if you ever become perfect, you will no longer be able to come up each year with a new model...

...For one, they do their jobs well and look good doing them...

...That is why we are beset with our present incredible automotive phenomena: Cars with more power than a sane man can use, cars that we cannot stop, cannot park, that become more and more difficult to enter—despite the annual increase in size—and so on...

...But beyond this he will not go...

...The American just plain fell in love with the automobile, while "Detroit" and its army of "arbitary" social scientists conspired to make him think he wanted a car that was overpriced, over-powered and idiotically over-decorated...

...As a metaphor it suggests that Americans came to value the automobile for other reasons than its basic function as a means of transportation...

...What with having been laid low by a recession and the influx of imported competition, some optimism is expressed that this will occur...