I have become a more attentive driver than heretofore. I used to be dreamy, listening to classical music, hoping that some phrase or formulation pertinent to whatever it was I was writing at the moment would pop into my mind. Over the past decade, I have been driving BMWs, and they give a nice feeling of protected enclosure, a perfect atmosphere for such digressive dreaminess.
In this state, the mind floats, recalling odd bits, old anecdotes, scraps of information from the past. Driving along, I not long ago recalled the story I heard about a lecture that C. Wright Mills, the radical sociologist, once gave at Columbia. During the question and answer session after the lecture, a student is supposed to have asked: “Professor Mills, in your lecture you attacked the West and the East, you attacked communism and capitalism, you attacked the family, the church, and organized religion generally, you attacked the past and held out no hope for the future. Professor Mills, is there anything at all you believe in?” Mills replied, ” Yes, one thing.” The student rejoined, “And what is that?” Mills, pausing briefly, leaned into the microphone and whispered, “German motors.”
I, too, believe in German motors and have indeed required them to keep me out of accidents both in my dreamy driving stage and in my new, more attentive phase. I pay no more attention to the road than before, but I have become very alert to license plates and bumper stickers. As I drive along Chicago streets, and especially on the city’s beautiful Outer Drive, my mind is nowadays usually engaged in reading the license plates — the vanity plates — of passing cars. Wit, pretension, unfathomable obscurity is to be found there in profusion. Yesterday I came upon a license plate that read LP FAITH. What can it mean? Does the man still have faith in his old long-play records? Or is Faith his family name, Lawrence and Peter his first and second names? Another car, heading toward me on Sheridan Road, had a license plate that read RR TIES. RR, I assume, stands for railroad. Does this guy have railroad stock? Mystery again, as mysterious as the out-of-state plate — from Pennsylvania — that read MYSTIC 1.
As for pretension, there is a van in this city carrying the license plate GOETHE and a Cadillac with L OPERA. For years I have noted an older, yellow Rolls Royce bearing a plate reading SNOB. Snob, as I learned a year or so ago when I finally saw the cat’s owner get into it in a downtown parking lot, is a small, older Jewish woman who might be your Aunt Sylvia.
In Illinois, vanity plates cost $ 75 above the normal charge and an additional $ 10 above the regular fee every year thereafter. People are apparently willing to pay for their little jokes, which reminds me that a woman who parks in the same garage I do has a plate that reads MISHUGA. Someone in the license plate division of the Illinois Secretary of State’s office must have to serve as censor, for no profanity on license plates is allowed. Censors exist, of course, to be eluded, and so, occasionally, is our man in the license plate division. The other day a Mercedes passed me on the right whose plate read BATESOME, which is an old Chicago high school slang word, perhaps no longer in use, for the male sexual reproductive unit.
License plates are the big-print version of car literature. Bumper stickers present more of a problem of the kind suggested by the sticker that reads, ” If you can read this you are too close.” Many have philosophical pretensions: “Question Authority” is by now, I suppose, a golden oldie. “Change the Paradigm” is rather more recondite. One day, in my own neighborhood, I found myself following an ancient Volvo station wagon, driven by an aging hippie, a fuzzy, perfectly Korenesque character, on whose sticker-crowded bumper I noted “Prevent Circumcision.” Some sort of deeper vegetarian reasoning, perhaps.
Among bumper stickeristas, dialogue of a sort goes on. Or at least some people seem to feel the need to reply, bumperistically, to earlier stickers. The long-established “Visualize World Peace,” the other day I saw answered by a produce firm with “Visualize World Peas.” The mawkish “Have You Hugged Your Child Today?” has been met with “Have You Hugged Your Motorcycle Today?” On the subject of religious debate, conducted on a lower level than Cardinal Newman and T. H. Huxley might have done, perhaps the oldest of bumper stickers, “If You Love Jesus, Honk,” has been riposted, a friend in Colorado reports, with “If You Are Jesus, Honk.”
What does it all mean, this strange need to express oneself through the vehicle, so to say, of one’s vehicle? “The truth is out there,” written in small white letters on the black T-shirt of a young man who passed me near my apartment only last evening, may be the slogan of the age, but, in this instance, the truth is less likely to set you free than get you in a car wreck.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
