Swan Dreams-4 (Porsche 'Ugly Duckling' syndrome)

Very recently, the observation was made by a SPECTATOR magazine journalist (the conservative American edition of the UK SPECTATOR, which is the oldest continually published journal in the English language) that America doesn’t have a race problem. Rather, America suffers from a class problem. At first, upon reading this, I mentally nodded my head in agreement but quickly passed on to further opinions offered by the same writer.

At that particular moment, I was seated on my Iron Throne (remember GofT Targaryen Kings?) in my castle keep (the garage, not the throne associated with micturition and bodily solids waste management) which is situated near Jezibel, my long-suffering 914 that occupies the stall of honor in our collective family automotive stable. Jez is coincidentally reposed, in the time-honored Manière Royale, to my right, as I read the magazine. At some point, I must have been mumbling some of this column’s remarks aloud, for suddenly a series of staccato relay clicks seemed to be emitting from Jez’s front-end trunk (it’s called a ‘Frunk’ on a 914, since the car has both front and rear trunks, and yes, the latter is called a ‘Runk’) as my ruminations continued.

Given that Madame Chairman’s endless ‘honey-do’ list looms over my head with all the appeal of a late, blood-encrusted 1700s French guillotine blade (ever beckoning to distract me from my…dare I say it?...more ‘important’ activities, such as working on Jez and writing timeless prose, etc.) whenever I’m more comfortably relaxed in our home’s library, sharing Jez’s garage space often becomes a necessity bail-out option to avail. After all, a man’s garage is his castle, right?

It doesn’t take much imagination to fancy that Jez’s stream of wildly clicking relays was its way of affirming my head-nod, which made me pause in my reading and reconsider the passing mental note I’d just made about America’s apparent ‘race vs. class’ dilemma.

The more I reflected on it, the more I realised that said columnist with this remark had struck the erstwhile virtual iceberg in our garage freezer (most likely a long-forgotten half-side of solidly frozen beef) on its bovine starboard beam with at least as much force as did RMS Titanic’s hull on that fateful day back in 1914.

Despite the much-ballyhooed assertion that America is a ‘classless’ society, just consider, if you will, all the evidence that belies that Pollyanna’ish belief. Allow me to spool out a few QED examples here for you to illustrate.

Agism in the United States, another concurrent contentious social issue, is alive and well in America, as any observant person may quickly deduce with even the most cursory sampling of current affairs in these ‘Disunited States.’ There is, to be sure, indisputably inherent age-based discrimination present among all age groups in our culture, but Corporate America’s relentless Battle Royale to dredge the most profit from hapless consumers has focused itself more acutely on younger individuals, not us older and savvier folks who can more readily differentiate between wants and needs (theoretically, at any rate). This hard-edged dollars-and-cents pursuit of the youthfully gullible literally goes unquestioned by most consumer proles, excluding a small handful of deep-thinkers, intellectual outliers in our culture (and a few 2nd-rate, pseudo-Luddites-in-training, like me).

Since those who are theoretically ‘older and wiser’ SHOULD indeed be able to make wiser economic assessments and decisions about how to spend our rasbuckniks (NOTE: The national currency of the People’s Republik of Grosser Rasnia), corporate business naturally goes after the younger individuals among us, not unlike a pack of starving African Hyenas singling out a lame Gazelle as a main course for its family picnic, instead of devoting most of their dollar-Hoovering suctioning to the pockets of those over age 30.

While this is not an absolutely unchanging, inflexible hypothesis (some of my cohorts assure me it actually is), if one were able to make a truly objective canvass of consumer habits and tendencies, this nuance would undoubtedly be quickly ascertained as a factual reality. Think that’s highly contentious? Read on.

Consider that youthfulness is categorically concurrent with peak physical health and fitness (although not necessarily with intelligence). It also affects the gender whose behavior is most dominated by hormonal instincts (us garage cavemen). And since men are traditionally the physically stronger and more dominant of the two genders (yes, only two…not the 32+ different genders we are encouraged to believe exist by certain…ahem…puerile members of society) us guys tend to regard life as an exciting, mysterious, yet ever-fascinating adventure to plunge into with full-on exuberance. Most of these adventures involve manifestations of extreme speed, excessive-power, risky daring-do and upper/outer edge envelope-pushing behavior (as we used to say in the US Air Farce) of the most compelling sort.

Roughly translated into simpler terms, it’s permissible to translate the foregoing into irresponsible risk-taking, accompanied by diminished consideration for others who may be in our way.

OK, having established those paradigmatic parameters, let’s plunge back into a slightly tighter-focused (no promises!) colloquy that is a bit more Porsche-related and less so, on questionable (even highly arguable) philosophic hypotheses.

I submit to you that simple people of any age tend to think that excessive noise is not necessarily a deleterious aspect or byproduct of our science-&-technology-ridden activities. More cultivated, cultured and refined individuals tend to regard excessive noise as both an objectionable irritant and perhaps even a personal assault upon their senses. Professional engineers, by comparison, typically go far beyond a vague irritation with needless noise, arguing that noise is actually a gross indicator of unjustifiable, mechanical wastefulness and a by-product of poor design, deficit engineering and unacceptable mechanical inefficiency.

Younger people, in contrast to the above groups, think (if one can use that term here) differently, regard high-volume ‘music’ as merely another exciting requisite of modern audio entertainment. Of course, an argument can be made that what passes for music among under 30-somethings is generally quite inferior to that of previous generations, but regardless, the youthful norm seems to be ‘louder is better.’ No subtlety there.

Further, older people who by age 60 generally suffer from some form of progressive hearing impairment (much of which is undoubtedly related to their own former fondness for excessively loud music as youths) quickly protest that ‘loud anything’ is an overt annoyance (even youthful ‘Valley Girl’ soprano, ‘up-talk’ voices, such as seem to be epidemic among broadcast media and news anchors these days), leaf-blowers, Hardly-Goodson motorcycles (i.e. “Loud pipes save lives”) and what have you.

Now, pause briefly here to consider my next submission for your consideration: We ‘old male relics’ have been so conditioned to regard ourselves as socially useless and deficit by corporate marketing dogma, that contrary to the best dictates of our hard-acquired common sense and knowledge, we still often hanker after many of the same puerile desires that dominated our earlier (younger) lives. Enter the stereotypical ‘mid-life sportscar’ urge that so many older men suffer from once they’ve earned enough economic wherewithal to indulge such expensive whims. The message is hard to misinterpret: “I may be an old gray-hair but I drive an expensive Porsche…(neener-neener-neener!)”.

The hard reality is, unless you’re a drug-lord, gangster, rapper, Hollywood celebrity, etc., etc., by the time you’ve reached your 6th decade of life, you are usually saddled with far more sober and demanding realities (home-ownership, college funds, supporting jobless off-spring, etc.) to weigh you down than agonizing about whether or not to buy an expensive 6-figure Porsche rocket-ship-on-wheels as a personal recreational plaything. Think of this as virility-virtue-signaling, if it helps! Expensive Porsches may be viewed as, after all, a sort of 4-wheeled Viagra for many less emotionally secure but wealthy oldsters.

On the other hand, if you’re a top-of-food-chain apex-attorney, a successful plastic boob-job surgeon, referral orthodontist or some other top-tier white-collar professional of substance, whether young OR old, an expensive, high-status personal vehicle is part and parcel of proclaiming your ‘I made it!’ (the logical implication being "You didn't!") exalted social standing.

OK, mindful that all the foregoing assertions and assumptions are admittedly equivocal and open to question, youthful individuals generally seem to purposely make as much loud noise as they can, since it’s part of their sublimated, unconscious mating drive (also a reflection of their insecurity). It’s also the ‘Hey! Look at me! Here I am, in the midst of the faceless herd!’ urge to stand out, to gain social Brownie points, and possibly even attract a high-status female for a hook-up! Picture in your mind a strutting male Meleagris gallopavo (Wild Turkey), with feathers spread to attract females and display dominance. [Another good collateral justification, perhaps, for Ben Franklin’s advocacy of the indigenous American Wild Turkey as our ubiquitous national symbol in 1872, rather than the scavenging, offal-eating Haliaeetus leucocephalus (Bald eagle).] Turkeys, remember, may be spectacular looking but their brains are about the size of a pecan. Draw any inference you wish along those lines… Personally, I love Pecans but I don’t let them do any thinking for me.

Thus, whereas a younger person might want an extremely loud exhaust (think: weaponised noise) system to his Porsche’s flat-6 on steroids, an old geezer like me would much prefer as quiet a system as is possible, that still favors near-maximal power output without inciting a riot by inmates in the nearby Happy Acres Convalescent Home.

Ironically, my own Jez had the opposite of a ‘quiet’ exhaust when I acquired it, which is a possible indication of one of three things: 1) that Jez was owned by a slightly younger person who desired a good, hard-to-ignore auto-crosser in his paddock, rather than a more docile, socially acceptable street machine (with no concerns about excessive exhaust noise), 2) that Jez’s former owner was a much younger person with a typical adrenal motivation to draw attention to himself as loudly as possible at stoplights, or 3) that Jez's former owner was a very OLD guy with a bad case of Erectile Dysfunction. [I am reminded here of a possible exception: Actor (and auto racer) Paul Newman’s lovely little 300 HP Volkswagen convertible Bug, which to all external appearances was just a normal 40 BHP Beetle, thanks to Jerry Eisert’s clever manipulations. Newman’s Bug sounded like a kitten purring after a saucer of milk when quietly idling (and also looked like one)…but turned into a 200 dB Saber-Toothed Tiger with but a slight tap on its go-pedal.]

Think here of, say, those absolutely execrable commercials that the Consumer Cellular Company saturates the TV airwaves with (you can add Shriners, Wounded Warriors Project, AARP, Oak Street Physicians, etc. to that list). You know, the ones that unhesitatingly insult your intelligence and simultaneously irritate the hell out of you (“…just 19 dollars shows you care!” Does that mean that a measily $18 shows you DON'T care?) It’s a proven axiom of marketing and advertising commercials that anything that gets a rise out of a viewer, whether positive or negative, has effectively served its purpose, since even if the commercial ‘message’ egregiously insults your intelligence greatly, the advertiser has already successfully captured your attention. Purpose served, QED!

Pause further to think about this: Allowing youths to make a nasty, horrific racket with their hopped-up cars wouldn’t be so bad if they only drove them on a track specifically built to allow them to make all the noise they wish, such as tracks for auto racing, where simple spectators get-off on the excessive loudness of red-lined car engines as much as viewing the race competition. Unfortunately, youthful drivers routinely run their objectionably loud machines on quiet urban streets without a qualm (strictly in violation of numerous city ordinances) and with most law enforcement agencies today ham-strung by the Woke crowd mentality, teen offenders (and ‘arrested adolescent’ adults) run amok, at will. We can largely thank Hollywood and its ‘Fast & Furious’ films for that!

Back in the early post-war (WW2) days, Americans returning home from ‘Old Blighty’ were infatuated with the sort of classic 2-seat roadster that was a fixture in England (and an established tenet of sportscar design engineering in most of Europe). Cars were generally light in weight, engines typically about 1 or 1.5 liters in displacement, and yet they were very fast, highly maneuverable, and a radical departure from the heavy ‘Detroit Steel’ American cars were noted for. Our revered Demi-God, Herr Doktor Ing. Ferdinand Porsche, was one of those who engineered and designed within those smaller-is-better parameters and for that we have his immortal early racecar designs (the 550, 904, 718 RSK, etc.) to thank.

When awareness spread of these ‘Leichtbau-Rennwagen’, America soon underwent a kind of auto-enthusiast mitosis, with the more refined, ‘eddicated’ (sic) and cultivated individuals focused more on the European road-racing concept of refined, high-performance (SCCA) smaller machines and those motorheads with slightly less discernment gravitating to (affordable) competitive auto stock-car racing efforts (NASCAR, NHRA, et al). Those two main groups continued to grow separately but in-parallel, in subsequent years. I submit to you here that this status quo was a reasonable indicator of inherent class differences. Good ole boys from the south preferred NASCAR, while educated, upper-class ‘players’ fell in love with Porsche and English makes. It’s not hard to see my old buddy E.F. Schumacher’s philosophy of ‘Small is Beautiful’ lurking in the pit lanes, here, I feel.

I think back on my own SCCA days (80s) at Sears and Laguna at times like this, while communing quietly with Jez in the peacefulness of the garage, and reflect on how deliriously primal all those high-performance engines down at the Laguna hairpin sounded, racing around the course, back in my more youthful days. At such moments I reluctantly realise that speed, noise and being unacceptably reckless on occasion are all a necessary part of being young. It’s a rite of male passage in America to be such, but as life advances, all those extremes that comprise the ‘fast-living’ paradigm of youthful fecklessness are more appropriately consigned to one’s vividly lived past that I and others of my age managed somehow to survive, despite our best efforts to emulate James Dean at Salinas.

But to return briefly to my opening assertion, why exactly is our greatest problem in America matter of class rather than race? Simply because class as an absolutely vital and imperative quality-of-life component is predicated upon possession of crucially corelated considerations such as education, learning, knowledge, responsibility, honesty, broader awarenesses…all qualities that seemingly anathema to the bulk of the vast, unwashed demographic underbelly that comprise the American masses.

Therefore, it shouldn’t cause much unmanageable outrage to say that people from poorer social and economic backgrounds tend to be in the lower and low-middle classes, while people from the uppermost classes tend to possess more of the above qualities (that are indicators of what we colloquially term ‘class’). I’m open to rebuttal here, if anyone prefers to be categorised as ‘low-class.’

The old complaint that “Ya ain’t got no class” so often heard in classic Noire cinema dialogues is as apropos now as it was back in the Bronx of the 1930s.The chaotic Heinz-57, lowest-common-denominator personae of our ‘woke’ diversity today definitely qualifies for that (no class) appellation, in my considered opinion! Much of this unhappy status quo may be attributable to the deliberate intent of our corporate masters to reduce our collective reflectivity to its lowest common possible level, since the simpler, less thoughtful the masses are, the easier it is to economically enslave them as human barnyard dairy stock to milk. [P.T. Barnum is rolling over in his grave as affirmation of this as I utter the sad fact, I’m sure of it!]

Looking back on the many earlier decades of my own life, on this unusually hot late July day, there seems little else for someone like me to acquisitively obsess over since in terms of extremes, I’ve probably been there already. I’ve been to speeds in excess of Mach 2.01 (that’s twice the speed of sound to the uninitiated), altitudes of 60K feet above the Earth's surface, and worshipped Dr. Porsche’s race-versions of our beloved Stuttgart sports cars on the racetrack, surrounded by those outrageously loud (but sweet) sounds of auto engines on the verge of escape velocity. Who needs to pay US$200,000 to take a periodic short, 20-minute suborbital spaceflight in the latest mega-Porsche, say I? Not me! I’m happy with a slightly up-tuned Porsche 914 flat-4 (although I do wish I had a stock 914-6 exhaust system on Jez!).

Yep, I’ve sewed most all my requisite wild oats and by now I should be able to separate my ‘needs’ from my ‘wants’ fairly efficiently. But I’ve also learned another lesson well, too: that it’s far more important to stop along the otherwise frantically-paced racetrack we live our daily lives on to smell the Nasturtiums and Rhododendrons (and maybe also a rose or two, to boot) as the virtual PCA road tour that is the human life experience nears its completion.

If that means parking Jez somewhere in an idyllic rural mountain setting to serenely watch the sunset and savor the marvelous silence of a transient Alpine evening zephyr, you’re more than free to join Jez and I! We’re both out there in the North 40, peacefully grazing amidst the wildflowers with Ferdinand the Bull (not Ferdy the Porsche genius). Drop in any time!