Those of us whose families depend on the auto companies for our livelihood have been feeling pretty glum lately, what with the Chrysler bankruptcy and the imminent GM bankruptcy. The perky, upbeat TV commercial featured in the video below seems to have come from a different universe. In reality, it harks back to a different era, the heady days when the automobile seemed like an unadulterated good that gave us freedom and unbounded mobility.
Back then there was no foreign competition, no worry about Peak Oil, no knowledge of environmental damage and climate change wrought by muscle cars and giant Cadillacs. I'm old enough to remember not the 1952 version of "See the USA in Your Chevrolet," but later versions performed by Dinah Shore. The 50s and 60s were an era of car worship, when the automobile culture was enthusiastically embraced, promoted, sung about, romanticized, made a symbol of both youthful exuberance (and sometimes rebellion) and middle-class arrival (a car in every garage--and later, two cars in every garage ... and then, even more).
The car was a symbol of freedom: get in your Chevy and see the USA! Go out West to the Rockies and experience the wonders of this great nation. Patriotism and personal freedom were one and the same. It was something of a master stroke to link car ownership with American patriotism--and individualism. No mass transit for us! For Americans, it was all about personal transportation.
Those days are coming to an end, and with it, the end of the American auto companies as we knew them. My husband, Jim, made his first good money as an auto mechanic and now works as a research scientist for GM. Back in the day, he was a gearhead through and through. Our first date was at the stock car races that were once held in Mt. Clemens, MI, where his friend was racing. From him I learned what drag racing was, and what those strange phrases meant in songs by the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean ("and one more thing, I got the pink slip, Daddy").
Well, the car culture wasn't necessarily a good thing--just ask Jim Kunstler. It robbed America of viable city life when freeways bisected neighorhoods and whole cities; it poisoned us with lead; it destroyed mass transit; it wreaked environmental havoc; and it helped create the cultural desert that is the American suburb.
But for all that, most of us who grew up during the golden era of the muscle car can't help but feel a certain nostalgia.
Here's Dinah Shore, invoking the freedom and expansiveness promised by America's car culture. May it rest in peace.
[via Automatic Earth]
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