Friday, October 7, 2011

Wishful Retrodiction

retrodiction

PRONUNCIATION:
(ret-roh-DIK-shuhn) http://wordsmith.org/words/images/sound-icon.png

MEANING:
noun: Using present information to make an assertion about the past; an instance of such an assertion.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin retro- (back) + dicere (to say). Ultimately from the Indo-European root deik- (to show, to pronounce solemnly), which is also the source of judge, verdict, vendetta, revenge, indicate, dictate, and paradigm. Earliest documented use: 1895.

USAGE:
"Dan Gardner, for all his concern about prediction, has no qualms about retrodiction, even of the distant, unknowable past."
Kathryn Schulz; What Lies Ahead?; The New York Times; Mar 27, 2011.

Thanks to Anu Garg at Word-a-day for this little gem.

As a lover of ‘supercars’* of the sixties and seventies, I have spent nearly twenty years thumbing through old magazines, working my way through microfiche (remember that? Hint: it’s at the library…remember those?) and tracking down every scan of a supercar road test some charitable soul has posted on the web. I don’t have a PhD in historiography, but one can’t help absorbing, just by osmosis, the zeitgeist of the late sixties and seventies era, and also to make some conclusions about the more vexing and specious tropes employed to describe the past.  Before I get into my problems with current ‘retrodiction’ of this era, let me list some general pet peeves.

“Ahhh, the past – it was a more innocent era.”

Really? I suppose this is an instance of a person projecting onto history the learning curve of his own personal development. It’s as if to say “I was just a small boy in 1972, and that year happened to reflect my innocence at the time.” This is particularly laughable when speaking about the late 1960’s, which by any measure were exceedingly tumultuous. Yet I think there is an even greater gulf between reality and perception with respect to the 1950’s. Gary Powers is the perfect example of the moral ambiguity, perhaps even amorality of the era. He was flying a CIA U-2 spy plane over the USSR and got shot down in 1960 by a Soviet missile expressly designed to target the high flying (70,000 ft) U-2. The US had denied it was even flying over Soviet airspace because it was essentially an act of war, so the U-2 pilots were given cyanide pills and told to take them if they were ever in danger of imminent capture. Powers not only failed to set the U-2’s self destruct sequence, allowing the ‘weather plane’ (as the Eisenhower administration cover story had it) to fall into enemy hands in relatively complete form, but Powers also failed to take the cyanide, which resulted in a drawn out show trial and allowed Soviet officials to humiliate Eisenhower for having lied about the plane and its purpose. What about this story sounds ‘innocent’ to you? Oh, and one more thing: Joseph McCarthy.

“People were, like, totally clueless in the past.”

The innocence becomes a kind of credulousness. Whenever we say that past eras were innocent or stupid, you can pretty much rack that up to projection. Anyone who has ever read Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persauders” (emblematic of the generalized hostility and paranoia to ‘big business’ in the 1950’s) would only have to conclude that it’s actually OUR age that is clueless, credulous and naïve about corporate power.  (Apple computers are sooooo cooool!) And the irony of ironies is that we have much more to be worried about, particularly post ‘Citizens United’ than our cynical and suspicious grandparents did fifty years ago.

“We discovered a lot of secrets that people in the past were too ‘uptight’ and repressed to know about.”  

This applies to boomers and Gen Xers in particular. Since I’ve delved more deeply into pre-WWII music, it just grates on my nerves. It applies to music and sex, namely that baby boomers somehow discovered the existence of both. Authors like Greil Marcus have helped propagate this myth of a ‘crossroads’ with Robert Johnson selling his soul to The Devil in return for the mythical R&B. The only problem was that the crossroads was crossed by Scott Joplin in the 1890’s. To those who believe ‘parking’ or riding in cars with boys was a boomer phenomenon, well, here’s a little ditty from 1905, called “Merry Oldsmobile.”

They love to "spark" in the dark old park As they go flying along She says she knows why the motor goes The "sparker" is awfully strong…  
You get the idea.

And to boomers who think they discovered black people and their sexy, sexy music, there’s this…


Ragtime might have been percolating throughout the black ghettos since the mid-1890s, but the style's first million-seller was achieved by Irving Berlin, with his 1911 hit 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.' It took a white man to really sell black music, as previously subterranean styles hit the mainstream as exploitable crazes. That was the deal: the new method of exchange.

"Ragtime's crossover success excited unfavorable comment, not the least because of its appeal to youth. The Musical American thought that ragtime was like an addictive drug. In 1913, the Musical Courier stated that America was 'falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro through the influence of what is popularly known as 'rag time' music.' This was nothing less than 'a national disaster,' as ragtime was 'symbolic of the primitive morality and perceptible moral limitations of the Negro type. With the latter sexual restraint is almost unknown, and the wildest latitude of moral uncertainty is conceded.'
"But it was too late as, in defiance of the reformers and the legislators, thousands of American youths continued to throng the dance halls every night of the week."

Author: Jon Savage   
Title: Teenage
Publisher: Viking
Date: Copyright 2007 by Jon Savage

Now let’s begin to unpack the “retrodiction” trope.

This goes by another name, I’ll call “Journalism Shorthand.” This one is harder to criticize as a vice. After all it’s a news brief. Not every story about the Gaza Strip can start out “In the late 19th century, a nationalist segment of European Jewry became enthralled to a movement called ‘Zionism.’”But clichés are currency when you only get 800 words and, to be fair, people think in clichés that are really canards (“The sun rises” is ultimately false – it’s the earth that turns). Specious automotive clichés abound in the press, partly because cars are complicated subject with endless arcane details.

A favorite, which has reached the ‘urban myth’ level, is the story of the Chevrolet “Nova” failing in Latin America because “No va” means “No go.” First of all, the car in question was actually simply called “Chevy” (as the American version first offered in 1962 was originally called “Chevy II”) - Nova was, at first, just a trim package – and besides it was a sales success, not a failure. The analogy in English could be a dinette set called “Notables” failing to sell since after all, it could mean “No tables.”  

But a more insidious journalism cliché and example of retrodiction in the automotive arena goes something like this…

“In the 1970’s, domestic car makers failed to meet the demand for smaller cars in response to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. As a result, Japanese cars started becoming more and more popular and American cars lost market share.”


  

This is a popular theory - really an article of faith - among left leaning, green oriented writers and publications because the underlying ‘natural’ forces prove larger points about the US car buying populace: these virtuous Yankees were demanding small cheap and thrifty cars and foolish, US carmakers with their feet of clay kept foisting decadent luxury barges on basically good people. The second case of wishful thinking is that government Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, established in 1975, actually helped the hapless Detroit three by forcing them to "make the cars people actually wanted."

Many people, not just the left leaning, have come to accept this as a cornerstone of the US auto story, but literally all of the elements of the story are false. Firstly, the US makers began offering ‘compact’ cars in the early sixties and these were overtly in response to the German made Volkswagen Beetle. The first and most radical attempt, the 1960 Chevrolet Corvair, was blatantly modeled on the Volkswagen, even down to the air cooled rear mounted engine. Of course this was the car attacked by Ralph Nader in “Unsafe at Any Speed.” But then the aforementioned Chevy II, a more conventional design, arrived soon after. Besides, the Corvair actually was popular and sold quite well. Ironically sales fell off after 1965, when Chevrolet fixed the rear axle camber issue. All of the big three got in on the ‘compact’ car act. Ford had its popular Falcon and Plymouth had its Valiant. In fact, these compact cars became very popular and later sporting models, the Plymouth Barracuda and Ford Mustang were simply more stylish, coupe versions of the Valiant and Falcon.

By 1971 new “subcompact” models were offered in response to Japanese cars, namely the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega. These models sold quite well, despite their ignominious reputations today. Chrysler’s bailout notwithstanding, the big three Detroit makers actually held on to market share in the '70s. By 1980 GM still had a whopping 46% of market share – nearly one out of every two cars sold was a GM – basically the same share GM enjoyed from the post war years hitherto. In fact, GM had to restrain its own sales to maintain a market share just below 50% all through the 1960s, fearing that the Justice Department would slice top selling Chevrolet away from GM as a result of anti-trust action.

NHTSA’s CAFE didn’t really have teeth until 1978, when it started handing out fines to car makers who didn’t make the average. So it was actually in the 1980's, as CAFE standards forced large Detroit cars to get smaller, that Detroit’s share of the market gradually dwindled. Ironically, in this same period Japanese cars became gradually larger and more powerful as they gained market share. So much so that by 1990, Toyota and Nissan offered their new luxury brands Lexus and Infiniti, both of which featured new ‘flagship’ - wait for it…V8 engine luxury cars.

So the real story about Detroit’s downfall in market share is precisely the opposite of the ‘virtuous consumer’ story favored by the likes of Tom Friedman and the New York Times. As Detroit cars got smaller and thriftier, they lost market share, and that market share was taken by Japanese cars which were getting larger and larger – so much so that the one-time ‘compact’ Honda Accord grew literally into today's ‘full size car’ according to the US EPA passenger volume index.

Yet looking back from the 21st Century in the spirit of retrodiction, liberals see a contemporary US auto industry that’s not doing very well, and a Japanese auto industry that seems to have thrived, and they picture a diminutive 1976 Toyota Corolla being embraced and a voluptuous Chevrolet Monte Carlo kicked to the curb by John Q. Virtuous Consumer. Add in a good natured NHSTA CAFE regime that really just wanted to help Detroit kick its bad habits, and you’ve got a perfectly specious, remarkably robust narrative of ‘redemption’ that does a lot of heavy lifting in a lot of newspaper articles.

I don’t mean to inveigh against government regulation, Japanese cars or Tom Friedman for that matter. All three have their virtues. I consider myself one of those ‘left of center’ writers in fact. The point is, to paraphrase Henry Ford, newspaper articles are mostly bunk. An interesting lie ("No Va… stupid GM! haha!") can race around the world in minutes while a boring truth (big, fuel guzzling cars are more profitable for Japan and Detroit alike) is still struggling out of the gate. 

This is simply a matter of intellectual hygiene for anyone in the ‘reality based community’ to which liberals believe they belong. If we are bound by the world as it is and not the world as we wish it to be, we are obliged to look at things in the harsh sunlight without donning rose colored sunglasses.

*For the next example of automobile history retrodiction, and the next blog entry, I will be addressing the story of how the word “Super Car” was coined to name what we now, I would argue pejoratively, call the ‘musclecar.’ The picture here is a taste of the evidence. 


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