Any man my age can, at the drop of an oil pan, go into a reverie about the crappy cars we owned in our youth. For instance, I had a ’68 Chevy that we called the Hemophilacmobile, because it needed a transfusion of two pints of oil every 40 miles. And the ‘78 Volkswagen rabbit whose engine exploded on I-96.
Now that I am a middle-aged Michigander, however, what I am socially expected to do is collect expensive vintage cars, to be driven in the Dream Cruise or Concours d’elegance, depending on how vintage.
Alas, I forgot to acquire the vintage income. But I’ll tell you what I would do if I had big bucks and no sense of social responsibility.
I would collect . . . Eastern European cars of the Communist era, some of which I actually got to ride in during my reporting days. To give you an idea, in a world where the Yugo was a Rolls-Royce, the cars I’m talking about would be Chevys.
The East Germans had the most lovable one, a car called the Trabant. The Trabi was made of cheap plastic, had a two-cycle lawnmower engine, and belched blue smoke. Its unofficial slogan was “From 0 to 60 in 15 minutes.” Sixty kilometers, that is, about 37 miles an hour.
And then there was Romania. Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship produced a plastic car called a Dacia, which was what Romania was called during the Roman Empire. I was once taken to a showroom. The dictator’s face scowled down from every wall. The cars looked roughly like a Ford Pinto designed by a seventh-grade shop class.
Being a native Detroiter kind of guy, I kicked the tires. Then I opened the front door and slammed it.
It came off. Well, one of the hinges did, anyway. For a moment, I thought I might be on the verge of Cold War martyrdom. If looks would kill, I would have been on the cover of National Review.
But with pure disgust, they let me go.
Next time I meet Thomas Friedman, I intend to ask, now that the world is flat, what do former Dacia salesmen do?
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