Cars: A Romantic Manifesto

Cars

A Romantic Manifesto

Kent Gramm

cars

A Romantic Manifesto

Copyright © 2021 Kent Gramm. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-0334-4

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-0335-1

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-0336-8

July 12, 2021

Table of Contents

Title Page

Prologue on Earth

Chevy: Where it All Begins

First Philosophical Interlude: Goethe

Volkswagen-Audi: Blood and Iron

Second Philosophical Interlude: God and Nature

Interlude: The Web

Interlude: Personal Information & Some Contradictory Theses

Vanna: Another Interlude

Interlude: Chrysler— Drive Equals Love

Final Interlude: Willie Volvo and the Princess

Eighth Interlude: Love and Work13

The Frankfurt Auto Show

Actual Final Interlude: Faust Part Two, A Fragment

One Good Car

Epilogue

Second Epilogue: I Go Find April/Peggy

Appendix

Goethe’s Automotive Conversations

An Automotive/Theological Glossary

Note of Appreciation

for

Eileen Johannsen

Anyone separated from someone he loves understands what I say;

Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.

—Rumi

¹

1

. Quoted in Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (New York: HarperCollins,

1958

),

259

.

Note to the Reader

This Manifesto is about the Meaning of Life and How to Save the World. Those interested in car repair, car buying, and related subjects can consult my Systematic Theology. Those interested in a handbook for your everyday, down-to-earth romance can consult my History of Modern Ergonomics. Those interested in love, happiness, and personal fulfillment, read on.

Prologue on Earth

Spontaneous, fun-loving German Lutheran seeks lost love.

I Am Fired

For twenty years I was a sprocket engineer for Clark Bicycle Manufactury, UnLtd, a business founded by God in the 19 th century. It is a totalitarian company that doesn’t permit anything, so I was fired for wearing a beret. I did so in solidarity with the French, who, I stated in a press conference, are fellow human beings, who worship the same God as we do. This God happens to be the automobile, but the reporter at the press conference, who was a new hire at the West Fargo Evening Gazette , did not report my entire statement, which led to an ironic result because Clark produces an alternative to the automobile that might help to save the planet. I stand by my statement.

Clark’s rules on how to talk, think, and act are written in an inerrant book. But since only the Board of Directors knows how to interpret that book, I had turned to other books, primarily those of the great German, Goethe, whose works comprise an excellent guide on How to Live, and are not inerrant.

Still, I was confused by my firing because of a vision I had received twenty-one years earlier one blazing afternoon while walking the streets of Las Vegas looking for work.

I See Elvis

I had just consumed the remnants of a veggie burger smothered in mushrooms behind a restaurant; and though you, Reader, might attribute my vision to the day-old shrooms, I do not. As I wandered dejectedly along the sidewalk in front of the Golden Nugget, I noticed that a car was slowly accompanying me. The street was strangely quiet, a soft glow outlining all the parked and passing automobiles. I knew I was having a vision: this was an avenue in heaven. The vehicle slowly rolling beside me was a pink Cadillac.

There he was: the sequined white shirt-jacket with the high collar, an arm resting on the door’s ridge—Elvis himself.

Hey man, he said. Been lookin’ for you.

Sir? Me?

What d’you want to do with your life, boy?

"Translate Goethe, Sir. Compose the definitive English version of Faust, Goethe’s masterpiece."

I know it, man. Why ain’t you doin’ that right now?

I need to support myself, Sir. Translating doesn’t pay money.

What do you need money for, man?

Well, to be honest, Sir, I want to get a car like this one. It will remind me of you.

Go get it, man. But remember.

Remember what, Sir?

Keep the faith.

I’ll try, Sir.

Go after that job at Clark’s. It’s meant to be, baby.

But am I qualified?

Moses gave me the same story, man. Tell ‘em you’ve seen the King. Then I saw the famous Elvis sneer. That’ll fetch ‘em every time, boy. But remember that one thing.

At first speechless with gratitude, I finally stammered, Th-thank you, Sir!

He was about to pull away when he spotted my shoes. Hey one more thing, man. Take care of them blue suede shoes. The sneer transformed into the great Elvis smile, a dimple on his cheek. Never know when you might need ‘em.

Therefore the firing confused me, because in addition to the beret, I had been fired for wearing those particular shoes. When Management called me in I had them on, and the High Officials of the Company rent their garments. I had thought that keeping the faith meant keeping my job, but it struck me in a flash of insight that I was to keep the faith in spite of my job, and then "step out in faith" into a new life after Clark. Then I saw it all: my blue suedes were the same style and color as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s favorites, his so-called lucky shoes (Tvönkelspitzen). The message was clear: I was to translate Goethe’s works on Automotive Theory and walk back civilization’s destruction of the environment.

Chevy: Where it All Begins

Everything has a beginning. A French monk bored with God tinkers with some metal and invents the automobile. Good, or bad?

An innocent cluster of Satanists in colonial Pennsylvania distills the first drops of gasoline. Bad.

Two centuries later, I was taught to drive by a man named Art, a son of Norwegian immigrants, a farmer and a fisherman all his life. Art is good.

Good and evil: two words, one world.

1.

It’s a nice little car, Art said as we leaned against it, he at the front fender and I at the rear. It was the summer of ‘63, the year of John F. Kennedy and the Beatles. He was about seventy then, and I was a kid, tall enough to be resting my posterior against the fender of the ‘62 Chevy Bel Air that Art had just bought one year used.

You might remember that those Chevys had circular tail lights: one for the Biscayne, two for the Bel Air, three for the Impala. Art’s dark turquoise Bel Air had the six cylinder engine and a manual transmission. The shift stick was on the steering column: three speeds and reverse in the old H pattern. It was easy to shift into Reverse by mistake: no fancy European requirement of having to push downward to get Reverse, just straight back from Third. The shifter and clutch were pretty rough by today’s standards. It was kind of a bolt action arrangement, and I remember it well because I learned to drive in that car.

We stood in my Grandpa Martin’s driveway, which was only two tracks in the gravel and grass, looking at his white house about five feet away. Grandpa had owned a ’48 Chevy and had sold it when he stopped driving, at about the same time Art’s wife Sonja moved in to take care of him. Martin was going blind and deaf. She had taken care of me before that, as I had been an infant and it would have been counter-productive for me to see to my own affairs. But the good old days ended. Sonja moved out of our house and I was forced to grow up and learn literature, philosophy, law, and regrettably also theology.¹ And cars. Legend has it that at age four I could name any car I saw. So it began early. Neither my mother nor my father drove; we were the only people I knew who didn’t own a car. When Sonja was laid off at our house and went back to my grandpa’s small town, she bought herself a car. I think she spent her life savings on it.

So my first love was Sonja’s 1956 Chevrolet. That was one good car. Buffs know this baby as a classic. Hers was green, two-toned: dark green on the lower half with a very pale green upper half and roof. The upholstery was green and I can still smell it, warm and comforting. She had bought the Sport Coupe version with the booming 265 cubic inch V-8 that put out 245 horses and could be jacked up to 270. Manual transmission. Whenever Sonja went out, she dressed up, which is what decent people did back in the 1950’s. She emerged from my grandpa’s tiny white house in her floral print dress, shiny two-toned shoes, hair set (by herself), purse gripped by the strap. Whoa, Nellie! From the moment she let up the clutch, the car flew—except, of course, when she remembered her boy was in the car. Those were the days of no safety engineering and 50,000 fatalities per year in a comparatively low population of cars.

At the conclusion of our family’s visits, Sonja would drive us sedately from that western Wisconsin town back to Union Station in the heart of St. Paul, thirty miles away. As the train pulled out, she would be on the platform waving goodbye. We were on the old 400 that did the 400 miles from St. Paul to Chicago in 400 minutes, supposedly, stopping at many towns along the way, including good old Milwaukee, our home. So this bullet train pulled out of Union Station, gathered steam (it was a steam engine until the mid-50’s), and then shot toward Wisconsin. It passed through our old home town, but no longer stopped at the station. Sonja would be waiting on the platform in the floral print dress, purse in hand, waving to us—her hot Chevy steaming behind her in the parking lot. She had negotiated city traffic in St. Paul, falling miles behind the train—and then slammed that baby to the floor all the way home. She must have done over 100 mph.

The car had two straight bench seats, which Sonja bought covers for. She was proud of that car—it was all she had. She and Art married in their fifties, didn’t live together until their sixties, and never showed affection. Though display of affection is considered to be aberrant among Norwegians, this was an arctic, perhaps polar, marriage. The two were placed together in order to hammer each other into Lutherans.

So Sonja, who was full of sentimentality and hugs and love, had nothing but her car; and Art had fishing and his pipe. I was lucky. I had both of them. Some of my earliest memories are of waking up on summer visits to the sound of Art’s Chevy truck. He’d come into town on his morning break when we visited. He’d look into the bedroom where I was, smile a broad, tanned smile, and wiggle his fingers at me. His huge, rough, farmer hands would enclose my little hand. With thumb and forefinger, he would neatly pinch my whole upper arm, telling me to make a muscle. I grimaced suitably, and he would laugh and slap his knee. And Sonja would cook white and wonderful Norwegian things for me and pay attention to what I said and hug me; so love and Chevrolet are associated in my soul, and Chevrolet stands for everything good. It is the car of my heart.

The odds were very good that Sonja, a Norwegian immigrant, would have bought a Chevrolet. It was the most American car. The 1956 model sold a phenomenal 1,600,000 units that year. I use the word phenomenal only because in groping for an adequately colossal word I have failed and given up. You have to consider that figure of 1,600,000 in today’s context to appreciate it fully. Today the population of the United States is twice what it was in 1956. Not only that. Families have two and three cars today. People commute much farther today. Still, the largest-selling sedans today, the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, sell only about 265,000 and 330,000 units apiece. Even the best-selling vehicle, the Ford F-150 pickup, sells only about 900,000—being bought not only by farmers and businesses, but by consumers who need them to haul their golf balls and groceries and make them feel safe and powerful. So, that sales figure of the 1956 Chevy is astonishing. Of course, Chevrolet did not make as many different models then—and so on and so forth—but you would be quite correct in feeling astonished. Not until the world cars came along—the Volkswagen Beetle, for example—did such sales figures receive anything like a challenge.

And then you had Dinah Shore, the most American woman on television—wholesome, blonde, sound of mind and body—singing,

See the USA

in your Chevrolet,

America is asking you to call.

See the USA

in your Chevrolet,

America’s the greatest land of all.

Years later, when Chevy made the shameful rubbish of the 70’s and 80’s, their ad campaigns drew on the old account by talking about America, apple pie, and Chevrolet. And later still, Chevrolet was the heartbeat of America. No other manufacturer has been able to take away Chevy’s identification with America—even though a lot of General Motors vehicles are made in Canada now, and Camrys and Accords are manufactured in the USA.

The 1956 Chevy was the bridge between the tall, rounded cars of the late 40’s and the long, low, finned bodies of the late 50’s and early 60’s. The next year, Chevy lengthened the car a little, lowered it, enlarged what was a small fin—but except for a hotter engine (a 283 ci with Rochester fuel injection, developing one horsepower per cubic inch!) it was essentially the same car. Back then cars were restyled every year, planned obsolescence being one of the drivers of booming postwar American industry. But all those late-50’s Chevys were heartwarming gas-guzzlers.

Aerodynamics? Only apparent, not real. The cars plowed through the air by dint of sheer force. The neatest exercise in aerodynamics put on by Sonja’s 1956 Chevy occurred one afternoon when she drove my grandfather and me out fishing. Actually, not me. They fished, but I was too young. It was a hot summer day, and of course only the swank cars like Cadillac had air conditioning. So we had rolled the windows down. Grandpa was meditating in front, gently working the snuss—snuff—pocketed in his cheek, and I sat behind him with the wind adorning my good-natured face. Aerodynamics played their part when Grandpa decided that his oyster of salivated tobacco was worn out. So he ejected what ordinarily would have been an artistically pure, horizontal, ten-foot long, heavy squirt of brown juice. Our forward motion and the slipstream created by those humped fenders and that enormous grille caused the outbound load of hydrated snuss to peel back in a perfectly defined arch, delivering the entire quantity perfectly onto the middle of my cherubic face. The wash lasted several seconds, it seemed, splattering in all directions. We heard a high-pitched reprimand then. Followed by rumblings and aftershocks dating back to the Viking period.

But Grandpa took the reprimand in stride—of course not apologizing, mild and genial though he was, because there are no expressions for please or I’m sorry in Norwegian, and hence not in his English. He knew he did everything wrong and accepted the fact. He had my nutritionist father to remind him, for example, that he shouldn’t smoke strong cigars, chew snuff, drink coffee in bulk, eat butter and cheese in more bulk, use heavy cream in that coffee, and sugar on everything conceivable and inconceivable; he knew all that would kill him and it did, at age ninety-five.

The 1950’s was the decade when the unhealthy American love of cars came into full flower also. The cars were massive floats of horsepower and chrome, and for the first time they were really used. That is, previously the American love of cars was adolescent, Platonic: we had the hardware, but our software was not yet in place. But during the Fifties we learned to think like automotive people. We built the superhighway system, and we built suburbs. In the Fifties, teenagers started cruising on weekends and going to drive-ins. Cars were less overtly functional and were made to have more aesthetic and sex appeal. The ‘57 Chevy, for example, was called Sweet, Smooth, and Sassy by its ad men. Now the software was in place, and on a mass scale—no longer only among the Duesenberg and Stutz Bearcat crowd: cars meant sex. Regrettably, during the Fifties of Marilyn Monroe and the Sixties of the sexual revolution, sex was assumed to mean love. So in the Fifties you had the motives: bleak prosperity, culturally arid exuberance, boredom, and Hollywood romanticism; and you had opportunity: cars. True love was as rare and problematical as ever, but if you had romance and you had cars, you could entertain yourself. Roll over, Beethoven.

But now Art owned not the ‘56 Chevy but a 1962 Bel Air. Not much chrome. No big grille. Six-cylinder engine. It was long and low, symmetrical and straight instead of looking like a wedding cake. It had four doors, which was handy. It certainly was an up-to-date, plain car. Sonja never drove it. When Art traded for the ’62 and the ‘56 was gone, Sonja never drove again.

But Art liked the new car. He took care good of it. There was no garage, but whenever a rainfall quit, he went out and wiped the car off. He would keep that car 21 years. He never drove much farther than downtown (one mile) or a few miles out fishing. Maybe three two-hundred mile trips back to Minnesota to visit his old family farm. So after 21 years, the car had about 24,000 miles on it. What Art liked about Chevys is that they always started. For twenty-one winters the temperature out where the car stood plunged below minus ten regularly, sometimes for a week or two together. But no matter how cold, the car started. Near the end, the body and interior were pretty far gone. The seat covering was fraying and unraveling, the front right fender was banged up from the time Art and another driver had a small misunderstanding at an intersection a few blocks away, and you could see the street through the floor behind the driver; but the car always ran, faithful as the proverbial old man’s clock. After twenty-one years, Art lay in the local hospice dying of cancer. Nearly every day before going up to visit him I would start the car, sometimes drive it, to make sure it stayed healthy. It never failed. The day Art died, I went to start the car and it was dead. There might be some stretchers in this book, but that is not one of them. It took more than a new battery to start the car, too. A service station sent a guy out to start it and he failed. The next month somebody bought it for the engine and had to tow it to a garage and work on the engine to start it. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and cars are more than we think.

This was the car Art and I stood leaning against that warm day. So warm, Art had said, even the rabbit, he walks. There was a drought, too. The St. Croix River was low, and water for lawns had become, to Art’s way of thinking, more expensive than beer. I had been standing there, either thinking a boy’s long thoughts or remembering the ‘56 Chevy, for a good twenty minutes. Another ten or so passed. I stopped thinking about cars. I thought about my girlfriend. Well, she wasn’t exactly my girlfriend. I was nothing in particular to her, but I liked her the way a young adolescent does—religiously; that is to say, purely, almost nostalgically. No boom-boom ever entered my mind. This is when boys and girls are supposed to marry. At thirteen, you are at your wisest and best. After this, you marry for sex or nannying, and nine times out of ten you get nasty surprises. You marry for sex because you are disappointed beyond repair, ideal love never having materialized. Most men go through their entire lives without learning that you can’t pull yourself up by your own whistle. In the strange and basically illogical human mind, sex becomes a stand-in for immortality. The sex drive is connected to the fear of death. Once you find that sex won’t do it, or that you can’t get sex, whichever, you go for cars. It has been that way since pre-historic times. (Don’t kid yourself that cave men didn’t have cars. They did, and they still do.)

So I stood there against the ‘62 Bel Air lost in reveries about Nancy Hueple, or whatever her name was. Probably some song lyrics went through my mind, but I did not understand them:

I got a girl, she’s my steady date:

When she’s good she’s good;

When she’s bad she’s great.

That was sung by Rick Nelson around 1960, and truer words as to male fantasy would be hard to find. But this knowledge was in the mercifully opaque future; I did not know what further heartbreak and painful knowledge awaited me, as I stood looking at the old white clapboard of Grandpa’s house.

Grandpa was my ideal. His wife died back in 1919. He had never wanted anyone else. His was the truest love I could ever imagine, and I admired and respected him for it without limit. That’s the way love is supposed to be. When people asked him why he never married again, especially with two daughters to take care of, he said he never would find anyone like her—never find a lady like her, as he phrased it. A lady has a knight. This one smokes old cigars, drinks coffee, grows big around the middle, gets tipsy now and then down at the Oslo tavern, sits all day thinking, and once—once on an early summer morning—sings an old Norwegian love song in a deep, rich baritone I had never heard before—and have never heard since.

Art shifted. A-yuh, he said, it’s a nice little car.

2.

A couple of years went by and I passed my second shot at the written driver’s test, and because my parents had no car I began learning in Art’s car. Learning to drive is a man’s whole education compressed; it is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship rolled into a few months, without the tedium. The ‘62 Bel Air had no power steering, no power brakes, and it was heavy. I had started lifting weights by then and it was a good thing.

The weights and the years had changed the boy who had leaned against that car back in the summer of ‘63. Now he had grown to six feet, he had arms and shoulders and a chest, he shaved, and he knew everything. Knowing everything when you are fifteen and sixteen is definitely a good thing because in all other respects you are an ass. Whoever thought up the idea of putting a volatile keg of hormones, ignorant and feeling invulnerable, behind a 250 horsepower engine in a mobile 3,000-pound machine deserves some kind of population control medal. Anyone who doubts that like Faust, we modern people have made a deal with the devil, should ponder the concept of teen-age driving. Not that adults are much better.

The changes one undergoes while getting to be 16 prompt me to expand on my theory about 13 years being the ideal marrying age. If your wife marries you at 13, she is marrying a boy. If she marries you at age 16 or later she marries a man. Men are always worse than boys. Boys are more honest than men, more idealistic. They are nobler and wiser. Take for example my idea, at age 13, of floating down the Mississippi River like Huckleberry Finn. I have never had as good an idea since. Not one that approaches it in sublimity or purity.

My second best idea of that year was probably to marry Charlotte or Gwen or Paige, or whatever her name was. It’s true that I was not physically attracted to her and never even smooched her, but she made me feel my best self. The best self is a fiction we should make ourselves into. Whenever I was anywhere near that kid, I felt like a king and I had no other needs. That is what thirteen-year-old love does for you. Adult love usually turns out like this: you marry someone who proves to be shrewder than you, smarter than you, morally superior to you, thinks of affection as just another one of your problems, and shows you continually and audibly your worst self. It is hard to be noble as a married man with a job, health insurance, a retirement plan, and a mortgage. It is hard to be idealistic. It is hard to buy as many cars as you want.

I am not being cynical. I am simply a Romantic without a new car. Some will point out that having children redeems all the dull reality of post-adolescence, and I agree. But if we married at thirteen, we would still have children, plenty of them; and we would never become the Faustian adults we almost inevitably become. Why not? Because the girl has married a boy and the boy has married a girl. This business of adults marrying adults leads only to cars.

Proof? The ancient Hebrews married at puberty, and they had absolutely no cars. When Solomon used the phrase the wife of thy youth, he meant what he said. She married the youth in you. She sees that youth when she looks at you. She remembers it for you when you forget it, and you can read that youth in her eyes. When you look at her and you see those old days, it keeps you honest. Try lying to someone who has known you since you were 13. Of course, there were unhappy marriages back then too. All I claim is that early nuptials would increase the chances of happy marriage from 3% to 10%. That is a whopping increase.

There are other favorable results. How to end war? Get people taking care of several of their own children by age 16, and who has the hormonal oomph left over to enlist? The Western World, in its bad aspects, not its good, is based on two things: cars and postponement of marriage. Could we have had industry, wars, or theology if everyone married when they were biologically ready? I know what you are thinking: So we would be better off without the Industrial Revolution? Are you a Rousseauian Romantic? Are you a neo-Neanderthal? You wish