The Bluesmobile
(4.6 Liter V8 P-71 Package)
I don’t know about you- I am going green and all that, even though I don’t think we have a choice in the matter. It is going to mean saying good-bye to a lot of things, just as we are going to say farewell to the poor battered old 2008.
My eyes bugged out when I heard that embattled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich named former state Attorney General Roland Burris to fill the Senate seat vacated by the President-elect. It was awesome, something that could only come out of Chicago, and right from Saturday Night Live.
In fact, it got stranger, since former SNL cast member Al Franken may actually have defeated incumbent Senator Norm Coleman in Minnesota by fifty votes out of almost three million cast. Senate Republicans are blustering that they will not permit either to be seated.
What a year. Jeeze. There was the long slide down to September 15th, everyone with the heebie-jeebies, and then the bottom fell out from there. The word this morning is that the holiday season was the worst shopping in forty years.
I saw an ad from Joe Banks, the men’s business clothing store, offering me two free suits if I bought one. I have never seen anything like that, even from them. They must have at least a hundred and fifty percent markup, since they normally suck us in with promises of 50% off and still do pretty well. A three-fer sale has something ominous about it, like they are trying to put a good face on making the January payday.
It makes me think they might be in the same boat as General Motors, and they are a whisker away from missing January altogether. A quick $5 billion from the Treasury yesterday is the only thing keeping the doors open.
I expect there might be a rude shock or two coming our way, but what the hell. I have decided to be optimistic about 2009. It can’t get any worse, right? Besides, Tina Fey makes a more plausible Sarah Palin than she original, or we could actually have a liberal Palin to run against the conservative one, if it comes to that. How we came to have SNL more real than reality is only what one would expect right before the Rapture.
I know the next administration is going to make us move in some direction, if we don’t spontaneously go straight up and wind up left behind to shift for ourselves. President Obama will doubtless pick a direction that we all know we should have been going for a long time. It will be in a smaller and more realistic fashion, of course, but at the moment there are some great deals on things lying around, if your credit score is decent.
Speaking of GM, I heard their finance company had been so strapped that they required a FICO score of over 700 to qualify for a car loan. That puts most of us out of the market for fine domestic automobiles, since a score that high is normally reserved for people who don’t owe any money, and could probably pay cash for what they want anyway.
The infusion of government cash is intended to get people who have spotty credit records back on the spending bandwagon, and God bless us, I hope it works, even if I am getting a little unclear on the concept here. Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme seems to have the same concept at the heart of it, but what do I know. SNL could not make this stuff up.
Anyhow, the comings and goings to Michigan have required a lot of time in large rental cars, with the going-in assumption that the ride was good, even if the new Detroit iron is a little gutless on response.
The last two Lincolns gave me a sense of Americanism that was positively intoxicating, almost like the whole economic structure was not collapsing around is. With fuel prices coming down the way they have, it wasn’t even a problem in filling the beasts up at the pump.
The ending of one age and the beginning of another is not as dramatic as one would think. The trappings of the Bubble Age are still all around us, the little mammals that are going to run things are scurrying around the feet of the dinosaurs, who do not know quite yet that their time has passed away.
I imagine it would be a lot like Joliet Jake Blues, walking out of prison and gazing at the world that had happened since he went to the slammer. He started as a character in SNL, but became way too big for the small screen. I love that movie, since it contains all the seeds of destruction and great music, too.
You will recall that John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd depicted the brothers on their mission from God. I think it was about an orphanage, or something like that, but the story had nuns and lots of cop cars and plenty chase scenes. At one time the film held the record for the largest number of police vehicles crashed, at approximately 76; although probably surpassed, it is near certain that if one further refines the accomplishment to the “largest number of 1974 Dodge Monaco Police Package” vehicles, it will surely stand as long as the Republic.
Belushi’s on-screen performance mimicked that of his personal downfall, which would be equally accurate for the time in which he lived. I am surprised that Mr. Ackroyd lived, all things considered, and he even made another Blues Brothers film in 2000.
Cop Cars had changed by then. The Gold Standard had become the Ford Motor Company’s Crown Victoria, which with the P-71 option package of the 4.6 liter V8, heavy-duty cooling system, performance tires and beefed up suspension, became the Police Interceptor model.
The Crown Vic is also the baseline for the Mercury Grand Marquis and the Lincoln line of livery and luxury vehicles that were the backbone of fleet vehicle sales for a generation.
It is sort of sad, in a way, watching that particular dinosaur go away. But it occurred to me that in the time of the great transition, they must be giving those things away like men’s suits. One must adapt to one’s time, and it occurrs to me that I may have grown beyond the simple elegance of the Hubrismobile.
Oh, I loved that motor-car, with its fine leather, precise handling and spare elegant lines. It was also a car that I hated driving across the District, since it seemed that on the other side of the Potomac and
Anacostia rivers there was only broken concrete and gravel rattling against the fine thick paint, denting the well-crafted German steel.
If the preservation of the vehicle you drive becomes an obsessive-compulsive disorder, what good is it? Driving in the District or Maryland is not much different than actually being in a Blues Brothers movie. It is not a question of “if” the crash comes, but “when.”
Would it not be more logical to drive something more intimidating, rather than a magnet for unwanted attention? Something with imposing inertia, yet crisp handing? Reliable?
A winter car that you can leave outside. Faster than shit, and actually bullet-proof? You could feel with certainty you were on a mission from God.
The Blues Brothers were on to something. Art doesn’t imitate life. It is the other way around.
More about that tomorrow.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com