The American Dream-Part II

So, Part II is here.  I left you with the lies we all tell, our half-white-truths that get us a couple grand closer to the richness each one of us deserves.  This second post will cover a couple topics: the used car salesman, his comparative glory days during the recession, his death via Arthur Miller, etc; my own covering of the two cars that define America is today (hint, only one is American...); finally, the definition of the American Dream and how and why it currently resides in a small bunker 10 feet under the desert of Arizona.

A brief sidenote.  The Toyota Matrix (the black beast of beauty I recently acquired) neither defines the American Dream nor stands out in any specific way, other than to incite this post.  It is doing well.  It now reps cat paws along the hood and a dust heart in the back window.  I can also drive it through the ocean like a navy vehicle.  Brief sidenote concludeth...

So, the used car salesman.  Boy is he peachy.  I'm sure now that some character at some point in something I write (yes, vagueness is the mother of some sort of invention...) will have this job title.  My childhood memories of the used car salesman only point in one direction: The Simpsons.  Our dear Gil Gunderson, the yellow (not asian) man with graying hair and a perpetually "fucked by fate" look on his face, is the image that comes to my mind.  I think many of you know him.  Maybe not consciously, maybe not even after this post, but you know him, deep in your core.  As all Simpsons characters, he exemplifies his profession with simplicity and pain.  Thus all mention of such a man, for me, have included those characteristics.  Then I read Death of a Salesman (the previous A. Miller joke was not a one-off) and realized the writers of The Simpsons are geniuses!  They got the point with a cartoon man that rubs his three-pencil-line brow as he whines...which is essentially what that play entails.  I don't think Gil ever dies, but I could be wrong.

Now I said in the intro paragraph (notice that these are classic thesis based papers) that I would speak of the rise of the used car salesman during the recession.  This view is based on absolutely no facts.  I just would think, as logic obviously implies, that during a recession people are not buying cars, but, if they are, it would be a used car. So here is the salesman, real-life Gil, broke, per usual. Now even more so because his stock options in Pet Smart and American Airlines just plummeted.  He comes to work, gets dirty looks as he walks to his corner office, the one that is missing a chair and doesn't actually have any walls, and he sees a line.  These people, they can all only afford used cars.  They are young couples trying to grab while the going is good, they are men in expensive suits they can no longer afford. They have come for his expertise.  His passion for their hand-me-down needs.  Ronald Reagan at its best.  Gil's wife loses her job, which is a shame, but he can finally come home and say, honey, I sold some cars today.  They hi-five and sit down to American Idol.  This is my factless story about the rise of the used car salesman during our nation's biggest economic disaster since the Depression.  Hope it holds up to all our concepts of a trying time in America's quest for the conquering of a Dream.

Now, all that was fictional.  The distorted thoughts of my mind.  My own real encounter with the used-car salesman was pretty much boring.  One thoughtfully said as I drove a silver Matrix about 10 blocks, "If you buy the car I'll wash it for you." Thanks, man.  The guy I did end up buying the car from was nice, small, and pretty quiet.  He knew a lot about cars.  Go figure.

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And now, for the current car that defines America.  I have two.  This is, of course, in honor of Hunter S. and his willful way of defining a generation.  Car number 1: The Prius.  Yeah, I said it. Car numer 2: The Lincoln Navigator.  Now I'm going to do a bit of compare and contrast, a little this a little that, and show you why these two define American pretty completely.

The Prius is the hippest shit to his this country since the Beatles, which are,  much like the Prius, NOT American.  Toyota, Japan, made this car.  It is small and futuristic looking, it can hold more than your average four door sedan, and, mostly importantly, it doesn't sound like a car.  Oh it also is the gets pretty good gas mileage because of the innovative technology that introduced the "hybrid" as a popular and reasonable model of the new and future car.  You all know this.  What you don't realize, maybe, is that old people like Priui (plural Priuses), middle-aged people like Priui, college students like Priui, and kids like Priui.  Also, celebrities like Priui.  Everyone, in fact, digs this car and wants one. Every category I mentioned, most every person there, is a Democrat.  This is the first big point.  The liberal America likes and wants the Prius because of it's claim to energy efficiency, its apparent beneficial effects on the environment, and its snazzy technology dashboard thing.

But, BUT, this is definitive of an American that wishes for change, and does what someone else tells them to do to inact that change.  The hybrid battery that Toyota puts in the Prius causes almost as much emissions as the life of driving a normal car, and it can't be destroyed easily.  It is, yes, maybe more effecient than a normal car, but it's still a car.  The middle east is still be screwed by us, and therefore pissed at the world, and therefore bombing stuff.  The new Prius billboards read, in huge letters that dominate the land we live in, 50 MPG!!!!!  Why don't they say, "STOP DRIVING SO MUCH, you are killing your world"?  Just a thought.  Lastly, the Prius doesn't sound like a car.  The engine is quiet and appears dead when stopped.  The interface is like an Enterprise Starship.  There are no seats, just gravitron suspenders.  The liberal mindset of America would seem to imply that we don't even want to be driving a car, we want to be involved in some sort of foux-automobile revolution that is fully supported by Al Gore.  But remember, it is a car, it still takes a tank full of gas and implies that you need at least 50 miles of sturdy highway out there for you to enjoy it.

Now the Navigator.  This is a cheap shot, Republicans (or non-Republican Navigator owners).  Just a heads up.  As I mentioned, I drove a silver Matrix that the salesman offered to wash if I bought.  To get to this car, we took a Lincoln Navigator about ten blocks.  I inquired.  It gets 9 MPG, a truly revolutionary low number (low is good, right?) in today's world.  It starts at about $42,000.   They were selling it for $4000.  Leave it to America to build something nobody wants to use anymore(except for Facebook I guess).  But who bought it at that price, who shelled out almost 50 grand on a hulking 7 seater that will probably be used as a light military vehicle pretty soon if Obama doesn't figure out a way to ban them from this country?  It is you, the American man that WILL NOT OWN a Prius.  Damn foreign boxes of death.  The Navigator had complimentary beer cozies.  It had TV's in the back of seats because it turns out the wasteland beyond our windows (still the land of the free and brave) should really not be looked upon by innocents.  It had a step-in platform and transformed into Optimus Prime if you clicked the big red LAUNCH pad on the ceiling.  The hulking beast, a new nickname for the Republican party and it's mass of die-hard fans, is who buys this thing.  Who shells out years and years of savings.  Who gets another car, because they all have 5, in a couple years.

The Navigator is the simple American man.  He does not want change.  He wants to be big and slow.  I mean, lets be honest, head on collision of Prius and Navigator?  No contest.

And that's just it, America is a contest.  One side wants innovation to the umpth degree and moves a little bit while the other doesn't want it and usually moves backward just to make a point.  Our Dream is to be on one side of this equation, defined by arguably our greatest invention (internet has not quite proven itself to me yet).  We are at odds, people.  Our lives and cars and shows and attitudes illustrate it simply and eloquently.  A love story with two a-sexual partner's and a serious communication problem.

Hunter S. defined a Dream with pain and a bad-ass car, a could have been almost maybe moment that lived up to at least the fever of passion and emotion.  I don't see that here, in all of us.  I see Congress stalling.  I see an idea that has not been realized, has not connected to our bodily needs.  I see our country failing to live up to it's own Dream, but trying, nontheless.

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A final part and piece, maybe a good larger topic at some point, but just a bit now.  This turned a tad negative.  I have some spite in me.  I travelled around for a long time and saw that we are not all we claim to be, this big country with its greenbacks and commercials.  I have faith in the world, but faith in America is hard to come by these days.  I can't find our priests.


p.s. there is no bunker, there is no Arizonian conspiracy.  The Dream is out there, walking around.  Go find it.