Of subwoofers, subculture and substance
This is the first in what I hope will be a succession of columns, which might entertain and provoke the reader with unusual and sometimes offbeat scientific and philosophical ruminations.
I will be intermingling the subjects of science, medicine, philosophy, art, music and film. Whenever possible, I will endeavor to connect any number of these subjects even in the context of a singe article.
Readers are encouraged to send requests; nothing is too over the edge for consideration.
Now, on to “Of Subwoofers, subculture and substance.”
One of my fondest memories from childhood was having an intense obsession with cars. This left such an impression with me that, comparable to people who can recall and regurgitate baseball scores, batting averages and who won the 1956 World Series, I can pontificate all kinds of persiflage about early Ford flathead V8s; Buick straight 8s; Plymouth flathead sixes; and De Soto fire dome V8s with fluid drive, a mechanical non sequitur of a drive train: an automatic with a clutch pedal.
In the ’60s I took great pleasure and experienced some pain overhauling carburetors and, not infrequently, coming up with leftover parts or, during my training years, spending three days replacing a water pump. It was a given that I always changed my own oil and filters.
By trial and substantial error, I took great pride in being able to fix a car, not counting the time when I lived in Phoenix and my Mustang ran poorly before I fixed it, after which it would not run at all.
The point of all this is that a 1965 Mustang 289 is an understandable machine. One could teach oneself how to fix it, and, in turn, owning and working on such a car was an education. Everything under the hood of those cars was knowable. It was kind of like the known universe before Copernicus.
Today’s cars are, in contrast, very unfriendly under the hood. You might even notice that when you open the hood on most new cars, you will likely not even see an engine, as it has become fashionable to hide the engine under a piece of plastic reminiscent of Flash Gordon. It seems that the modern aesthetic dictates that an actual engine would be too messy looking in that location. It is almost impossible to get one’s hands dirty under a modern hood.
The computerized black boxes found in all of today’s cars are completely inaccessible and unfriendly to casual Sunday mechanics. The engine compartment is therefore off limits to anyone who sports a meager collection of hand tools… why bother?
So what is an adolescent to do? Because kids cannot actually work on today’s cars, they must settle for the silliness of what I think of as exercises in “pseudomechanics.” This ersatz experience typically involves adding onto the car silly, nonfunctional accessories. Such gimmicks have no useful effect on performance. These customizing devices either light up the pavement or make noise. For example, a good number of cars, driven by adolescents, travel on an iridescent cushion of neon light. Other young drivers, fueled by some variation of penis envy, attach noisemaking exhaust outlets to their vehicles. Here we are talking about faux exhaust add-ons suggesting the caliber of a semi but hanging off the back of a small Honda or Toyota.
Most of all, though, I am talking here about the ubiquitous subwoofer, fueled by hyperbolic lyrics off semi-musical, monotonously thumping rap. The Hip Hop lyrics would suggest that the drivers of these cars are more dour than evil in motivation.
Building-rocking subwoofers feign the suggestion of masculinity and power, yet if you look behind the curtain, there is no wizard nor wizardry. All of these accessories are user installable and give the installer a nice albeit brief feeling of pseudo-accomplishment. This kind of superficial mechanics is practiced by a generation of the scientifically disadvantaged. No wonder we are importing so many engineers these days.
While many of our children appear to be computer literate in utero, a good number have but a rudimentary understanding of how generators, radios, TVs or semiconductors actually work. Jargon about gigabytes, RAM and flash memory often hides an actual ignorance about how things actually work. We have fallen in love with jargon and acronyms. People no longer exclaim that they strained their knee, rather: “I think I tore my ACL.”
It used to be that, when your car wouldn’t start, the first thing you would do would have been to take a pair of pliers and short out the solenoid. Now it is difficult to find the solenoid, let alone have access to it. Even then, do our children use pliers?
The moral to this whole conundrum is that you should tell your children that they cannot have neighborhood-disruptive subwoofers or other noisemakers added to their cars. At age 12, they should be forced to take at least a beginning course in auto mechanics and be required to build a small kit amplifier. Then the child must submit to a music appreciation course.
I acknowledge that this all sounds excruciatingly painful, but such requirements of adolescence would lead to the saving of energy, the accumulation of useful skills, quieter cities … and, yes, less dependence upon the importation of engineers.
