Crazy 'Bout a Mercury

When we purchase an automobile, we are also acquiring an amorphous but very real image, that is, the statement which the automobile makes about its owner to the public. Such images are forged in popular culture, and Mercury is an automobile brand that had an auspicious post-WWII popular culture debut. In 1948, K.C. Douglas recorded “Mercury Boogie” on a 10-inch 78-RPM, with its memorable line in the chorus “I’m crazy ‘bout a Mercury.” Five years later in 1953, George and Sam Barris transformed a 1951 Mercury Club Coupe into the Hirohata Merc, creating a classic of customization that has been described as “the most famous custom of all time” (Taylor 2006: 56). Ford occasionally attempted to take advantage of these strong roots in popular culture formed in the make’s earliest days, but the company’s efforts were not notably successful. In spite of Mercury’s promising beginnings in media, it has had only a slight presence in music and film. Mercury’s image never influenced the automobile market beyond the first few years, and it was unable to prevent the brand’s 2011 demise.

Endings

It’s spring in the academic village, with blossoming fruit trees all over campus, the ground smelling of fresh mud, and once again my thoughts turn to summer. I think of those long, delicious months when, without the telephone ringing and student papers sitting on my desk ungraded, without faculty meetings and office hours, without classes to prepare, I’m free again to work exclusively on my own writing. My e-mails will dwindle to communications with a few good friends. Some mornings, I might even sleep in. But spring also brings with it a small feeling of dread. “April is the crudest month,” wrote T. S. Eliot—a memorable line. I think of it again as lawn mowers drone outside the open windows of my classroom, a sweet wind blows papers off my desk, and I begin to anticipate the end of another school year, with the many losses that inevitably attend that moment, marked so vividly by the graduation ceremony, when half a dozen kids I had really come to like, even love, wave to me from the platform as they proceed into their adult life, diplomas in hand. I’m aware that one or two from each class will remain friends forever, but I know as well that there will be many— the majority of those whom I genuinely considered friends—who won’t. It’s not their fault, I tell myself. They will get busy. Soon spouses and children will lay claim to their attention. I’m just a passing figure in their lives; they know this, and I know it. It’s not as bad as it sounds, given the demands I feel myself toward spouse and family, toward a circle of friends that has widened decade by decade. There is only so much attention to go around. I begin to feel this little dread coming on in late March, when the spring snows in Vermont begin to thaw. Huge piles of the stuff grow wet at the edges, melting slowly, so that by the middle of April there are puddles everywhere, and I have for the first time to wear my waders to school.

Rounding up the Usual Suspects

There is a memorable line at the end of the film classic, Casablanca. It is spoken by the Prefect of Police, Captain Renaud, to his men just after Rick (Humphrey Bogart) has shot Colonel Strasser. He says: “Colonel Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.” That rule or principle of action—of rounding up the usual suspects—writ large, captures the essence of the South African security system. The system may fairly be described as an elaborate mechanism designed to empower the security authorities to round up, or otherwise dispose of or deal with, suspects of their choice. The technique of empowerment is the conferment of statutory discretion upon some official or body to limit, suspend or terminate the basic liberties of any citizen or group of citizens. This discretion is usually couched in subjective terms.

Dante's Hell, Aquinas's Moral Theory, and the Love of God

‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ is, as we all recognize, the inscription over the gate of Dante's hell; but we perhaps forget what precedes that memorable line. Hell, the inscription says, was built by divine power, by the highest wisdom, and by primordial love. Those of us who remember Dante's vivid picture of Farinata in the perpetually burning tombs or Ulysses in the unending and yet unconsuming flames may be able to credit Dante's idea that Hell was constructed by divine power; and if we understand ‘wisdom’ in this context as denoting an intellectual virtue only (and not as connoting a mixed moral and intellectual one), then we might agree that only divine wisdom is capable of making something like Dante's hell.