What Makes A Subaru?

“Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” That’s the Japanese automaker’s current motto. “The ultimate driving machine” has long been BMW’s perennial slogan, but a few years back the Bavarian giant was going with “BMW: it doesn’t just satisfy your need for motion, it satisfies your need for emotion.”

There’s a VW ad in which a couple, maybe with their kid in the backseat, drive their new VW whatever into a picture-perfect suburban neighborhood, almost Twilight Zone-ish in its calm serenity. They are apparently lost. (The man driving asks, “Where are we?” The woman in the passenger’s seat might be looking at a map, and maybe the kid in the back, if there is a kid, is anxiously looking from side to side out the windows of the surprisingly roomy VW’s rear interior). The couple is driving past a small park amid the well-kept houses and yards. There are pedestrians walking dogs or pushing strollers in the park, all with beatific smiles on their faces, and they’re waving idyllically at each other and at the drivers of the many cars that are driving slowly past them up and down the streets that surround the park. The drivers wave back pleasantly, but the weird thing is that all of the cars (except for the VW that the couple is driving) are cardboard boxes. They all look the same, the cars: generic, automobile-sized cardboard boxes on wheels.

Our driving couple and the kid in the back, if there is a kid in the back, drop their jaws and crane their necks as they drive along so as to better stare at all the slowly passing cardboard-box cars. But their confusion and disbelief quickly turn into bemusement that people would be willing to actually drive around in cardboard boxes, that an entire little community could fail to realize how bizarre and ridiculous it was to drive these nonsensical cars, so odd and yet simultaneously so dull. They (the couple, that is) shake their heads to dispell their wonder, shrugging their shoulders condescendingly to show their live-and-let-live sense of tolerance for those who drive tasteless cars; then they hit their accelerator and speed away down the block. Meanwhile, all the pedestrians and cardboard-box drivers have stopped in their tracks, and they watch the VW as it drives off. They’re taken aback by how great and stylish the VW looked, and their happy smiles all dissolve, replaced by horrified expressions of crushing disappointment with their own boring car choices, tragic dissatisfaction with the bland automobiles for which they’ve allowed themselves to settle. Their peaceful complacency has been utterly shattered. The commercial’s narrator comes on and says something to the effect of “why drive a generic box when you could drive the distinctive new VW whatever?”

(I suppose it’s important to note that in the commercial there’s nothing functionally wrong with the cardboard-box cars. They operate perfectly fine, they don’t fall apart. There’s no suggestion that they break down or get bad mileage or spew pollution or can’t go fast enough or anything like that. Also, the cardboard cars are all very clean and new looking. Their only defect is their supposed aesthetic shortcoming – namely, that they all look like plain cardboard boxes.)

This VW commercial is supposed to be funny, I guess, but I find it extremely disturbing. The ad presents the neighborhood’s residents as very happy, physically healthy, sociable people. They are clearly comfortable, affluent even, and they are obviously enjoying a very high standard of living. They are well fed, they have leisure time, and they live in nice homes on beautiful, sunny green streets. Their lives are peachy-keen, and they know it. Or, rather, they thought that they knew it, thought so until they realized that the cars they were driving were all pieces of shit. (By the way, the whole premise is a bit confusing to me because, personally, I’d love to drive around in a cardboard-box car -- or, for that matter, any car of great novelty.) Anyway, I find the commercial disgusting not so much in how it openly encourages us to keep on keeping up with the Joneses as in the way that it insidiously tells us to not assume that we’re successfully keeping up simply because we feel satisfied with our lot and good about ourselves. It’s a sick and twisted ad that teaches us to distrust our own happiness.

Roberto M. Unger, a social theorist and law professor at Harvard (where, incidentally, during the 1980s he once served as Barack Obama’s teacher), places the objects of all human desires into two categories, that of “comfort” and that of “glory”. Comfort comprises both needs (e.g., food, blankets) and wants (e.g., stereos, yachts), and glory includes our natural tendency to seek respect and admiration, to be loved as individual personalities. Modern consumer culture, of course and without doubt, is a terrible thing in the way that it exploits those that toil on its periphery (the sweatshop workers, the coffee bean pickers, etc.), but it is also a terrible thing in the way that it warps the values of those who dwell at its center and enjoy its fruits. For so many Americans (and other “westerners”, I presume) the longing for comfort and the longing for glory have been entirely conflated. We so often seek honor from our peers based on the products we purchase and on the reputations of those products’ brand names. The esteem in which we are held by both strangers and acquaintances can be so heavily influenced by the choices we make as consumers, the merits of our choices frequently judged in direct relation to the status attached to the things we’ve bought. We are encouraged to identify so strongly with our material possessions; we are measured (and we measure ourselves) in terms of the quality and quantity of the stuff we can afford and do afford. Our ambitions become our Christmas lists and vise versa. Identity and possessions have merged to the point where many people seemingly express themselves and perceive each other largely through the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the trappings and luxuries they have acquired.

I’ve never fully subscribed to Unger’s clean distinction between comfort and glory, never really believed that the one category could be completely divorced from the other. I think that, irrespective of whatever socio-economic or cultural models that society might adopt, the quantity and quality of the stuff to which one has access and the level of respect at which one is held by oneself and others will always be, to some extent, interrelated. Moreover, I am as apt to glorify comfort as many. A Timex keeps near perfect time, but, were I to win big at lotto tomorrow, I would likely be sporting an extremely expensive wristwatch the day after tomorrow. If given vast resources, I would almost certainly eventually get around to investing my capital in some sort of project to further the general welfare or to promote social justice, to somehow make the world a better place for humanity, but certainly not until after I’d fully tired of showing off my shiny new watch. And I’d probably also buy a motorcycle or two before I ever got around to sending out any philanthropic checks. Indeed, I find that my excitement and lust for material niceties have compromised my integrity in the past and continue to do so on a fairly regular basis. However, I have fortunately not yet reached the sorry point at which I derive my spiritual and emotional wellness primarily from the nice things that I have or could afford to have. Once comfort and glory have become entirely indistinguishable, then we've lost our souls to bourgeois commercialism and brain rot, the gospel of the mundane. When the dichotomy between comfort and glory is totally abolished, that is when we become our Subarus.