ManicDDaily

Back Seat of Chevy Impala

When I was a child, my parents bought a new white Chevy Impala with a sea green brocaded interior—by brocaded, I mean, covered with a roughly embossed pattern meant to repel or disguise the spills, crumbs, and other tidbits that attach like limpets to the insides of family vehicles.

The morning after the purchase, we set out on our annual summer trek from home in suburban Maryland to grandmothers in Iowa/Minnesota, a two-day drive.  Later, that same day, we sat by the side of the hot whizzing Ohio interstate someplace near Elyria, waiting for a tow truck.

This was a huge upset to my mom.  First, we were only in Ohio—Eastern Ohio!—when we needed to make it at least to Indiana to do the journey in the requisite two days.

Second, how much was it going to cost?!!  What if we were stuck?  Would the warranty cover anything?

More importantly, she fumed (in an increasingly accusative and hot-from-sitting-in-a-stalled-car way), the breakdown proved that the car was a lemon–a lemon!–which would need years and years of nonstop repairs and still never be right.

This brought up its own cycle of despair.  Why, she moaned (through a litany of  family machines) did these things always happen to us?

My father (increasingly defensive and hot from bending over a stalled motor) tried to explain to her that things just sometimes don’t work.

I knew my mom was being extreme.  Still, as the sea green seat covers imprinted their pseudo paisleys on the backs of my sweating thighs, so my mother’s sense of familial despair imprinted itself on my consciousness, enough so that any contemplation of a future major purchase in my own life has been clouded by a sense of doom.

In the last few years, however, I’ve slowly come to realize that my dad was right.  It’s not just my stuff that breaks down; everyone’s stuff breaks down.  The material/man-made world simply doesn’t work on demand.

There are many reasons for this problem–shoddy workmanship, cheap materials, careless delivery practices, “planned obsolescence,” questionable Chinese (but also global) cost-cutting and manufacturing measures, and (my increasingly curmudgeonly brain is certain) modern carelessness.   But even when products are presumably built with care—as in the containment cap of BP or the NASA space shuttle—the unexpected will have its day, Murphy’s Law endlessly waiting to enforce its mandates.

This brings up all kinds of age-old wisdom: don’t put all your eggs in one basket, small is beautiful, look before you leap, but also, today, two new thoughts: (i) Bobby Jindal is idiotic; and (ii) so is the idea of genetically modified salmon.

I bring up Jindal (amazingly still Governor of Louisiana) because of his whining complaints about the federal bureaucracy not jumping aboard his spill-containment plans, which appear to be flawed ab initio.   Jindal’s plans involve massive building projects which (i) will take too long to do any good (even under best case scenarios), and (ii) have serious risks of funneling the flow of oil in a manner that will make environmental damage more rather than less pervasive.   People complain about Obama’s caution; I personally am glad that he has not decided simply to nuke the well.    (To be fair, nuking is not Jindal’s proposal.)

I bring up the salmon because—geez—do you want to eat genetically bloated salmon?  How can fish farmers actually determine, in their short-term studies, that salmon engineered to have non-stop growth hormones will be safe for human consumption?  (Isn’t everyone already complaining about bovine growth hormones?) Also, how can the industry truly keep these salmon from the infecting the general population of salmon, much less, the non-genetically-modified marketplace?

Whenever I think of the possibilities of genetically modified livestock, all I can do is feel lucky that I genuinely like beans.

(As a final note—the white Impala was fixed by the next day; it did not break down more than usual in its lifetime; and for years afterwards, whenever we went by the exit for Elyria, Ohio, my father waxed nostalgic.)