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Requiem for a Middleweight

Hear those muffled drums and bow your head: the Oldsmobile is officially headed down the one-way street from which no car ever returns. I should have seen it coming, the way I should have seen the tech stock crash of 2000, the way I should have seen the white Honda that sideswiped me on a dark street in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, last week. But I didn't think it would happen -- not to the oldest brand name in American autodom, not to MY car. Yes, it's true: I am an Oldsmobile owner -- one of the few, apparently. But also one of the proud. Of all the cars I've driven and cared for over the past thirty years, my jaunty forest-green 1995 Oldsmobile Achieva coupe is my one true love. I even have a pet name for her, and don't laugh, because though I may be a Cynical Guy I'm still a Sensitive Guy: I call her Sabrina. She looks like a Sabrina, small and sleek and bewitching. I delight in her gentle curves, her lustrous green-black finish, the play of luminous blue, red and orange lights on her dashboard at night. The purr of her six-cylinder engine soothes me. She's accompanied me to Maine, Virginia, South Carolina and Pittsburgh; she's a spirited and reliable traveling companion who asks nothing more than to have her tank filled every so often. The long and nasty scratch she suffered in the mishap with the Honda has already been buffed out -- most of it, anyway. But the venerable family that gave birth to her is about to be extinguished. 

The Oldsmobile first rolled onto the American scene in 1897, a mere three years after inventor Charles Duryea launched the automobile in these States. They wrote songs about the Olds, you know: a lilting 1905 waltz that went 'Come along with me Lucille, in my merry Oldsmobile...' You can imagine them singing it, all those years ago, in that nasal turn-of-the-century twang with rolled R's and ancient musical accompaniment, the mustachioed young men in straw hats courting their gently blushing belles -- this was the Gibson Girl era, after all -- the girls with their white middy blouses and dark ankle-length skirts, long hair carefully tied back in a swelling mass under their sun-bonnets. The people who first sang that song about the Oldsmobile are gone, along with their ice-cream socials and open-air skating parties, their harvest moons and Junes and Sunday afternoons. The Oldsmobile was a relic of that innocent and idyllic time, one of the last living connections between the 'Gay Nineties' and the age of Suck.com. No wonder it had to die.

I suppose the name didn't help: Oldsmobile. It's a good name, and a solid name, but it's not a sexy name. Contemporary marketing is about sex and enhancing one's prospects for procuring it. Just look at the ads in any current magazine aimed at the under-30 set, and you get the picture. A brand name should support the brand image, and unfortunately the Oldsmobile name succeeded all too well in this department: it became a synonym for stodgy. How could an Olds be expected to survive in an age that worships the NEW? If the car's developer hadn't been one Ransom E. Olds, who knows how long his four-wheeled namesake might have prospered? It could have been worse, of course. A Goremobile probably wouldn't have lasted a decade. A Bushmobile might have chugged on a bit longer, at least in Texas. Names like Schultzmobile, Frickmobile and Fuddmobile would have died quick and merciful deaths. What kind of moniker might have conferred immortality on this solid and likable car? We'll never know, good reader, we'll never know.

Even with a sex-friendlier name, the Oldsmobile might have been predestined to sink into its fatal economic ditch. The Olds was a middleweight, middle-class car -- a sensible choice for people who wanted quality without ostentation. Yet everywhere you look today, the middle is being squeezed out, isn't it? Where are the middle-sized homes for middle-income families? It's either cramped quarters or one of those palatial tract-mansions that have been sprouting like crabgrass on abandoned farms across the continent. Where are the friendly middlebrow publications like Life and The Saturday Evening Post? Dead or moribund as we speak. It's People magazine or the sniffy haut-monde of The New Yorker, with precious little in between. Political magazines for moderates? Forget about it -- you won't have anything to read unless you're a confirmed righty or lefty. Contemporary movies tend to be juvenile amusement park rides or anorexic film-school exercises -- again, little in the way of sustenance for moviegoers who enjoy meaty tales well told. It's the same story in literature: you can choose between a Danielle Steel potboiler and Saul Bellow's latest treatise on academic life, because the great middlebrow tradition exemplified by Dickens is dead as old Marley. Even Jesus hated the lukewarm believer, and I'm as lukewarm as a leftover bowl of mushroom soup. 

I've always been a moderate by inclination; during the turmoil of the late '60s I shunned student radicals and right-wingers alike. It burns me that the world is stacked against the middle. After all, didn't the Greek philosophers counsel us to pursue moderation in all things? Didn't they believe that the middle course was the most rational, the most virtuous, the most beneficial to body and mind and humanity in general? Of course, where are they now? They're all DEAD. Nevertheless, I still believe in the middle, even as it's being stripped away before our eyes. I'm prepared to continue walking down the center of the road with traffic buzzing in both directions. At least I know I won't get hit by an Oldsmobile.

© 2000 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher. 

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online. 

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