Eccentric Flower:201009/False Nostalgia

Exhibit A: While I was in Louisiana, I did not drive the compact Toyota or Nissan that I had booked, because they didn't have any. The Enterprise outlet at the New Orleans airport had only American cars, as far as I could tell.

I should have expected this, because that's what happens when you book a car in the North among us godless America-haters and then try to pick it up in the Deep South, where the word has mostly not penetrated that American cars continue to be utter crap.

I personally would have no objection whatsoever to driving an American car if they were ever any good. I don't lean either for or against nationalist impulses in this situation; I'm completely blind at that angle. I'll drive a car from anywhere if it's actually good. The problem is that American cars are no longer any good may never have been any good.

The strikeout in the sentence above is deliberate and important. But we'll come back to that.

The car I got was an HHR (yes, that's its name) from Chevrolet. I had never seen nor heard of one of these cars before, and by the time I hit Baton Rouge I had seen dozens of them. I came back from Louisiana wondering if this was some aberration marketed only in the South. However, when I got back, my eyes now attuned, I did see one or two up here. So it's not that it isn't sold nationally, it's that we're less likely to drive crap American cars in this area. (Conversely, it has long since been a confirmed observation of ours that there are absolutely no Subarus in Louisiana.)

The HHR is not, let me say in advance before I get to the nasty bits, a wholly bad car. For an American car (strike one!) which had an automatic transmission (strike two!) it had a reasonable amount of oomph. I didn't have to worry too much when making a hurried, unprotected left turn whether I could get across the road from a dead stop before the oncoming traffic hit me (a concern which is never a problem with a manual transmission). It changed gears too slowly and too late, but that's a problem with all automatics. It was comfortable to sit in. It got reasonable mileage. The sound system had a jack for my MP3 player. The air conditioning worked very well againt the 90+ degree heat. It was not an unpleasant driving experience, on the whole (unlike some other American rentals I've driven in the last decade).

It is not a wholly bad car, but it is also not a good car. And unfortunately, most of the places where it is not a good car come as deliberate design choices. You see, the HHR is a retro-styled car. It is meant to invoke panel-truck and station-wagon designs of the late 1940's. In his zeal to invoke this bygone era, the designer (who was also responsible for that abomination the PT Cruiser, for Chrysler) has faithfully reproduced several of that era's faults.

The car has gauges and indicators that are arranged far from intuitively and are far less readable - poorly labelled, poorly lit - than modern displays. I understand that a digital readout is soulless and that there's a certain romance to a needle/dial gauge, but that doesn't mean you have to make them cryptic. If you unbend enough to hide a discreet LED matrix in that same instrument cluster for text readouts, then you've already given up any pretense to historical purity anyway (even were such a thing desirable).

The windows are tiny. The back window is so small that one-fourth of the view in the rear-view mirror is car interior. The front windshield is small enough that I didn't need to bother with sun visors for most of the trip; the roof line blocked the sun. I had to lean forward sometimes to see what I needed to see. This is a known problem with 1940's and 1950's cars, but again, why reproduce it? If it's a matter of fidelity, too late - your car has airbags and seat belts, so you've blown that.

And were we trying to reproduce the poor shocks and suspension of the average car from the leaf-spring era, or did this car just have lousy shocks? Any time I drive a car and I can feel the seams in the road surface, something is wrong.

Exhibit B: The fine cynics over at Scholars and Rogues have stumbled upon a Chevrolet poster which should never have been printed.

You read this (which you should go do now; I'll wait. It's short) and perhaps you think, "OK, but that's just some Chevy ad writer making very poor choices. The car is not inherently sexist, nor the nostalgia; it's just bad copy."

The middle clause of that sentence is incorrect.

Here's the thing: It appears that, increasingly, the Chevrolet brand is based on selling the past. Chevy is spending a lot of time and design and advertising money hoping that when you look at their cars you think of my grandfather's beautiful old early-1950's-era pickup truck, or American Graffiti. They want you to think of drinking malts at drugstore hamburger counters in saddle shoes. They want you to think of Ozzie and Harriet. They are betting a large portion of their sales on nostalgia rather than quality.

But in that cloudy haze they are trying to evoke, one might lose sight of the fact that the 1950's were a low point in the history of American racism, classism, and sexism; that they weren't exactly happy times for American labor relations or, really, anyone but straight-arrow white men middle-class and above, and that in places which had the American Graffiti culture of kids "cruising" around town, they did so because in their rigid, opportunity-free small towns, there was nothing else to do. (Baton Rouge had a "cruising" culture, and my mother - who was born in 1948 - has a number of sharp, accurate things to say about it.)

Even more importantly, in that cloudy haze, one might lose track of the embarrassingly low amount of progress we've made on those matters since then - one might be encouraged to forget just how much racism and classism and sexism there still is in this country. To reassure one's self with a delusion of How the Past Wasn't is also to enable one's self to conveniently forget How The Present Is. The two go hand-in-hand. Make no mistake.

The sexism is built into that Chevrolet ad, bad copy notwithstanding. It was foolish of the copywriter to bring it out into the open like that, but his instincts were sound; a small, aware part of his brain realized that as soon as you drag in the 1950's imagery, the sexism comes as part of the package. And he will likely get raked over the coals for the sin of pointing out the truth.

I'm not arguing against remembering and preserving the best parts of the past; I'm wholly in favor of that. I'm arguing only against the fog known as "nostalgia." Nostalgia is a smokescreen. Nostalgia is escapism. Nostalgia is dangerous.

The Chevrolet HHR has air bags. It has a modern frame design. It has seat belts. Have you seen what happens in a collision of the average 1950's car and the average car made fifty or more years later? It's not a remotely fair competition. The person in the latter-day car may go to the hospital; the person in the 1950's car is extracted from the pile of metal spaghetti in small pieces.

Remember when I struck out a phrase up above? What nostalgia tells us - the lie it tells us in this particular case - is that cars of the '40's and '50's were glorious things. In fact, cars of the '40's and '50's sucked. And if you look closely at the historical record, with the sharp lens of accuracy rather than the Vaseline-coated one of nostalgia, you will find that American cars pretty much always sucked, right on down to the Model T whose main virtue was that it was easily repaired and its parts were cheap.

Sure, '40's and '50's cars look great. But my grandfather's truck - dating from a time when trucks could actually be beautiful - had the most horrific transmission you ever saw, could take your spine apart if you rode in it for more than five minutes at a time, and required a bystander on the ground to back up without hitting anything because of its tiny side mirrors and its postage-stamp sized rear window. Oh, yes, and its truck bed capacity was laughable.

We don't seem to be in a hurry to go back to reproducing the lack of safety in 1950's cars - and someone would likely get sued if we did. So why reproduce their other faults? Why reproduce their poor mileage, their slow pickup, their horrible visibility, their lousy and minimalist instrument panels, their bad ride? Just because we like the look of the cars? Can't we reproduce only the look and lose the rest of this?

You may think I'm quibbling, but think more broadly: One of the big reasons American cars still suck, despite all sorts of economic, consumer, and government pressures to make them better, is that we are still longing for the false value of cars from the 1940's and 1950's. In our hearts, many American car buyers still seem to want those cars, forgetting their faults; in their hearts, American car manufacturers would prefer to keep making those cars (because not only do they believe - probably correctly - that many Americans still want to buy them, but they'd prefer never to have to relearn or retool anything).

This is a situation caused by nostalgia - by a false, deliberate recollection of a good situation that never actually existed.

In short, American cars still suck because many of us evaluate them in terms of a fake past. American politics suck because many of us would like to return to a fake past. How many other aspects of American life suck because of this sort of behavior as well?