cars

Cars, I was a big fan once, back in the stifling days of the fifties when everybody thought alike, and we were all thrilled in the fall wondering what the new Chevys, and the new Mercurys, and the new DeSotos would look like.  I thrilled in the late fifties when our bold automakers went the way of fins and chrome and psychedelic tail lights, so that the roads of America were filled with spaceships gunning their engines at stoplights, counting down, ready to blast off to Mars.  I spent much of my teen years standing on the corner of 55th and Kedzie watching all the cars go by and I knew every year and make and I knew most of the models too.

Not that I didn't love Studebakers, have to admit that I was not a big fan of Nash though, Rambler indeed, how dorky.  But mainly there were the Big Three, and you know they each had five brands from cheapest to most expensive.  I think there was some controversy as to whether the Continental was separate from Lincoln, and the Imperial was separate from Chrysler, but I'll let that be.  And I lied when I said they each had five brands because Ford only had four.  In the middle you found the DeSoto and the Oldsmobile, but between the Mercury and the Lincoln there was nothing.  The universe was not properly formed.

But then Life and Look Magazines whispered excitedly that somewhere, in the sands of the desert, a new car had been spotted, some kind of Ford, could it be the one in the middle?  There were grainy photos, like the ones of UFOs which were also popular at that time, and then one day the Edsel took America by storm.  Well it took me by storm, I loved it's lemon-sucking grill, but mostly i loved the fact that it filled that disturbing hole in the middle of Ford.  The universe was properly formed, surely an aeon of peace and prosperity would ensue.

But it was not to be, the American people did not love the Edsel.  It crashed and burned.  Kennedy was shot.  The unpopular war was begun, to quote the poet, it transpired that:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

Myself, previously a good solid American whose heart beat faster at the sweep of fins, the glow of chrome, and the twinkle of tail lights became a pot-loving, car-hating, commie-symping hippie. And remain so.  Fuck cars, noisy, dirty, street-clogging little monstrosities taking nowhere people to nowhere.  Sweep them off the streets in a rebirth of Public Trans.  Scrap that bloated snake of an interstate highway system for the gleaming rails of bullet trains, those soulless expressways for the shining tracks of light rail.  No more road rage, just plain folks sitting in their spacious seats traveling together chatting the issues of the day, and hey, if they should decide at certain points in their journey to join hands and sing kumbaya, that would sound so much better than seeing the USA in some stoopid Chevrolet.



When I was speaking of terrorist activity thwarted by civilians, I was saying so in light of those ubiquitous warnings.  In the case of that plane the activity was already underway, and i think it was the flight attendants who thwarted the shoe bomber, but having said that, i reckon if I had seen the guy in the next row setting fire to his shoe I might have been moved to go to the candy counter to get some raisinettes, and by the way there's this guy trying to set his shoe on fire.


What I was trying to talk about was this fear of terrorists.  Are any of the Beaglesonians actually afraid of terrorists.  I mean nobody likes these guys but who thinks there is much of a probability of them actually hurting them?