The Classic American Car Show is Terrible. Here’s How We Can Fix It
Old Men conspire while I perspire
I stood at my sink drinking a glass of water, vowing to never return to another car show. I felt much like I used to in my drinking days, when I would emerge unsteady from a fevered twelve-hour bout of nausea into the cool evening, vowing to never drink again, holding hope my newfound spirit of temperance would last beyond that fragile night. It didn’t; that spirit lost out to Spirits, in particular the honey and heather brilliance of Jameson Irish, and off I would go again to do John Barleycorn’s bidding.
Thankfully I don’t drink anymore, but my behavior with car shows roughly follows the same remorse/forgetting/remorse cycle as my drinking did back in the bad old days. I’m referring to the ubiquitous American iron car show, in which most cars are domestic automobiles from 1955-1974. You know the scene: Take one lawn, add iron, throw in a PA, lawn chairs, portable shade, a variety of food tents, and cover the place with old guys. You also know the type: Tommy Bahama or Goodguys Nationals shirts, one half prepping for the annual Hemingway lookalike contest in Key West, the other half looking like singed leather and hard tack.
How many more 68 Camaros, Tri-Five Chevys, and C2 ‘Vettes do we need to see? Do we need to hear one more bar of Chubby Checker and Little Richard? Pause for a moment. Little Richard, the flamboyant, Jesus-loving proto-transvestite (or “gender fluid” in current parlance) singer had his greatest success sixty years ago. Sixty long years—before we put a man on the moon, before the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Haight-Ashbury, and the Arab fuel embargo. The show I attended also touted a “special guest appearance” by a cast member of American Graffiti, a film released in 1973 about some kids in 1962. Did you get that part? A movie made 44 years ago that presented a wistful take on kids coming of age 55 years ago. Local police directed traffic and hordes of spectators thronged at the crosswalks; by noon I had to carefully thread through a maze of foot traffic augmented by mobility devices, the air laced with cigar smoke and few wisps of petrocarbons let loose by a good ol’ boy blipping the throttle for an admirer. Nothing unique here; I’m sure each one of you have been to a dozen or more of these kinds of shows lined up and down the Main Street of some picaresque hamlet.
By one o’clock a line had formed at the autograph booth. Will I end up like these guys? When I’m 75, my blood saturated with optimally therapeutic levels of Propecia, anti-hypertensives, and enough Cialis to keep my benign prostatic hyperplasia in check, will I be waiting in line for an autograph from a bit player in the Fast and Furious franchise? I’m just the guy to fall for this line of nonsense, as I’m a muscle car fanatic, long live Detroit and the whole bit. As I child I stared for hours at pictures of Roadrunners, Mach One’s, GT 500’s, and 4-4-2’s; I soaked in the lore of the 429 Super Cobra Jet, the 426 Hemi, the Chevy Rat motor, and Snake vs. Mongoose. I couldn’t drive for another eight years and I wouldn’t pick up a wrench for nearly twenty, yet I wanted to be there, breathing raw nitro as the lights tripped down the Christmas tree at Lions Dragway.
As an adult I’m armored up, braced for disappointment, perpetually suspicious, and these shows peg my bullshit meter. The cars are spectacular, but the scene is a drag, man. So: BRO. I mean that “bro” in the conspiratorial/chummy way it’s used by Persians and Armenians in Los Angeles-similar to the white man’s “dude” but with an added sheen of cultural solidarity and prickly independence. We can’t keep on like this.
The problem is the classic American iron car show’s forced narrative of main street drag racing, sock hop belles, and dime a gallon gas; The visions of an idyllic America, pre-civil rights, before globalization, before Nixon, before Mexican immigration, Columbine, 9/11, Snowden, and high schoolers on heroin, before whatever calamity you feel is different in kind rather than degree from past calamities. The problem is nostalgia.
Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term in a 1688 medical dissertation. Nostalgia comes from the Greek word Nostos, “to return home” and algia, “pain”. Nostalgia, as originally conceived, was homesickness, a bittersweet pining to return to familiarity, to return somewhere safe, known, and comfortable. But make no mistake boys and girls! Nostalgia, the shadow script of golden times past, can easily gain a few neutrons and irradiate all in its path. Nostalgia began as a disease to be treated, but today it is an industry, a feelings empire, the foundation of Disney, a perpetual motion machine that devours critical thought and produces the desire to consume more. Nostalgia is a drug, a soothing golden narcotic blanket that tells you you are all right, you know what’s real and good.
At Disney, children too young to feel homesickness are taught to feel nostalgia through the identification with the Magic Kingdom. Nostalgia is the 110-octane propellant of the Star Wars franchise. Nostalgia is the desire to return to a time that was never real; by positing a dimly remembered past that never existed, we can safely lament the decline of modern civilization without having to take any responsibility for its precipitous plunge. It may begin as a pining for youth; their youth--at these shows tuner cars, most imports, just the sort of cars that young people can afford, are nowhere to be seen—but nostalgia becomes a poisonous whisper that posits a substitute past whose fall we can all lament and hold someone else responsible for its loss.
What to do? We could do nothing. We can wait fifteen to twenty years for the old guys to die. But that will never work, as the next cadre of geezers will just take their lawn chairs. First suggestion-Hang the DJ. Let’s move the playlist up, include contemporary music, or at the very least knock it off with the Grease soundtrack and The Big Bopper. Second suggestion-The Kids are Alright. Reach out on social media to local car clubs and invite them to bring their rides. I propose a fee waiver for young guys and gals who want to show off their work in progress, whatever it may be. Rope off a section for the wrenchers, the laptop tuners, the greasy busted-knuckle dirt bags, the paycheck-to-paycheck spare time builders. Third suggestion: Look East. “American” can include all makes and models without leading to panic in the streets. The Statue of Liberty won’t fall into the Bay if we eliminate the restrictive vehicle entry requirements and get the Bimmer crews, the Vape Kids, and the Stancebros through the gates. What say you reader? How can we make the classic American car show better?