12 responses to “If anyone cares…”

1. 

   Dorothy said on January 14, 2006 at 2:53 pm

   I thought the pictures were great! Thanks for sharing them.

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2. 

   basset said on January 14, 2006 at 5:24 pm

   I know incompetent photographers. I’ve worked with incompetent photographers. You’re not an incompetent photographer.

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3. 

   Nance said on January 14, 2006 at 5:42 pm

   Actually, seeing them on Flickr, they don’t look too bad. I got my first impression when they popped up on the Freep website, where they seemed to be fairly low-rez. All I remember thinking was, “ech, another muddy one.”

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4. 

   Kirk said on January 14, 2006 at 6:22 pm

   I tend to get fairly exercised about this topic in general, but I gotta say that an event like the North American International Car Show is an enormous symptom of some of this country’s hugest problems.

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5. 

   brian stouder said on January 14, 2006 at 6:31 pm

   “an event like the North American International Car Show is an enormous symptom of some of this country’s hugest problems.”

   Well, if you believe that America should be an agrarian society with an essentially Amish disdain for anything that isn’t strictly utilitarian, then I guess I can see why you would say that.

   But if you believe it is a good thing for tens of millions of Americans earn non-farm wages, then you pretty much have to accept that mass consumerism (and the mass-marketing effort that must accompany it) is the route to it.

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6. 

   Nance said on January 14, 2006 at 10:07 pm

   It’s also possible to be somewhat encouraged by the technological advances being made. It was really Hybrid City this year, even if the whole thing is dressed up in my sequins and neon than Vegas.

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7. 

   basset said on January 14, 2006 at 11:22 pm

   hey, they sent you out there in the middle of a mob scene with a point & shoot. you did fine. at least they didn’t hand you a mini-DV handycam and tell you to produce tv news stories, which seems to be the latest fad in that business.

   I don’t know about the show being an “enormous symptom” of our society’s problems, but that Camaro thing just might be. loud, ugly and overpowered, what else can you say…

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8. 

   mary said on January 15, 2006 at 4:40 pm

   It’s wonderful that Chrysler is recycling the Aspen brand. Remember Dodge Aspens? They were smallish and crappy. Vintage 67ish, I think.

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9. 

   alex said on January 15, 2006 at 4:57 pm

   Brian, one doesn’t have to be Amish to have disdain for wretched excess. Even the poorest of our poor outstrip much of the rest of the world in terms of living standards. A great item in the Economist recently profiled a welfare hillbilly in a trailer in Kentucky and an M.D. in Africa. Guess who has the better home, lots of toys and plenty of time to play with them?

   Know who I’d trade places with? The one who has a life of the mind.

   I understand where you’re coming from. But I think our nation’s relative affluence is likely to be a mere blip in the whole scheme of things. Marketing is nothing more than misapplied psychology. Those brand-conscious people with deep-seated inferiority complexes who vote Republican the way they buy Cadillac and Gucci are in for a rude awkening when the global beast they’ve been feeding develops an insatiable appetite for Indian and Chinese labor. We may be a hardscrabble agrarian nation again and sooner than you think.

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10. 

    alex said on January 15, 2006 at 5:11 pm

    Oh, and Mary, the Dodge Aspen was a ’70s econobox, its twin the Volare by Plymouth. Aspen sounds so ski resort. And yet they’re recycling the name despite the fact it was a cheap and not very well made car at the time. Of course, Ford tried to resurrect the Thunderbird as a premium brand and it didn’t catch on, perhaps due to the fact that it let the brand slide from an exotic sports car in the ’50s to a Ford Fairmont-based piece of junk with “opera windows” and fake “cabriolet” tops in the ’80s.

    Concours, oddly, was a high-line Chevy brand in the ’50s and early ’60s that eventually became the el cheapo. Cadillac used it for a spell during the ’70s. These days it’s showing up again on high-style GM prototypes at auto shows.

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11. 

    brian stouder said on January 15, 2006 at 6:11 pm

    “Marketing is nothing more than misapplied psychology.”

    Well, the prefix on the word “misapplied” is certainly arguable – but I see your point.

    “Those brand-conscious people with deep-seated inferiority complexes who vote Republican the way they buy Cadillac and Gucci are in for a rude awkening when the global beast they’ve been feeding develops an insatiable appetite for Indian and Chinese labor.”

    ‘Course, brand concious people who buy a Honda Element and put a GreenPeace bumber sticker on it (next to their Kerry/Edwards sticker, which might come back into use, but in reverse order) are just the same.

    Still, I see your point.

    One last remark about the Henry Ford book (just finished it) – and then I will quit flogging it to death. After his astronomical success (but before the exceedingly anti-Semitic/natavist crusade started really pumping bilge in his Dearborn mouthpiece newspaper), he became a sort of populist oracle – everything he said was given lots of credence because, by God, it was Henry Ford talking.

    But as the 1920’s unfolded, the shine came off, until in 1926 Rexford Tugwell, in a review of Henry’s book Today and Tomorrow, wrote (what struck me as) the very best line about him (and one of the best lines in the book), when he said Ford displayed “a mind alert and effective within its range, unusually suspicious and frightened outside it, a mind which conceives things simply – or not at all.”

    Anyway – glitz and glamour is all part of it. “Wretched excess” is essentially meaningless with respect to a trade show, since of course the whole IDEA is to exceed your competitors’ best presentation of her wares!

    Go to an F1 race if you REALLY want to see “wretched excess” in motion!! (The Ferrari team expends in excess of $300 million in their 17-race season! Toyota spends a like amount, as does McLaren-Mercedes. AT least the stuf at the Detroit show might actually be for sale someday, and earn money back for the companies!)

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12. 

    alex said on January 16, 2006 at 1:20 am

    Brian, I really did mean to give equal play to the bourgeois bohemians who “buy” Democrat–Whole Foods, Starbucks, Honda Element, and for makeup that particularly painful thing they do which I call Shiseido-masochism.

    But it’s all crap, no matter who’s buying it, and at the rate things are going Americans won’t be making it. Get ready to see your children emigrate to Delhi and Beijing to be nannies for the nouveau. (I’d say butt-wipers too except the folks in Delhi use their own hand customarily, and this before entangling fingers and palms with Americans. Vindaloo poo–and you don’t even have to take a whiff of your hand like you dunked it in teen-aged pussy next time you shake hands with a Hindi ‘cuz it’ll smell like a closed-up taxi cab on a hundred-degree day.)

    America’s day in the sun has been overcast for the last decade and it’s about to go dark as night. Single-payer health care would fix it all if you’ve paid any attention to the scholars and industrialists blowing steam about it on Charlie Rose. But it ain’t gonna happen ‘cuz the fix is in, and not just from Mister Abramoff but thousands just like him.

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