How I Bought My Red Miata

A personal experience

James B. Twitchell from the August/September 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

What separates this ad from the usual automotive pitch is its claim on memory. The more usual claim for sports cars is sexual: Get this car, get that girl. So the sports car is usually photographed out in the rugged countryside, the sport himself is young and virile, and the chick by his side just can't stop looking at him. In advertising lingo this is called the aspirational sell: Use the product and everyone will see what a real man you are.

What is important about the Miata ad is that there is no one at the wheel and no dreamy chick flapping her lashes at him. This driver's seat is vacant. You've always wanted to sit there. Now you can. Here, as my cultural studies colleagues might say, is nostalgic onanism.

Although I had "new-car fever" (a common enough strain of affluenza), the object was difficult to consume. Here's why. I teach school. I wear khaki pants. I had a green book bag in graduate school. I am a company man. I buy my cars from Volvo or Saab. Not because I like those cars--I don't. They are built to be ugly and are no fun. But they are part of the uniform. They are from Sweden, for goodness' sake, the Valhalla of academic liberalism. If I bought the Miata I was not just going to lose my affiliation with my usual consumption group, I was going over to a different group, to a group I abhorred. If I bought this car I was going to become ...a yuppie!

At the time I was making my decision (in the early 1990s), yuppies were the group du jour of marketers and the group de resistance for all the rest of us. The original definition was a "young urban professional," but at some point this became corrupted to mean a "young upwardly mobile professional." From there the meaning spread to define an entire generation of affluent and selfish 20-somethings who were hot on the heels of us baby boomers. Demographically, yuppies were part of the 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964. Their number was small. Indeed, the only definitive estimate of the yuppie population, published in American Demographics in 1985, found just 4 million of them, representing a mere 5 percent of late baby boomers. But their impact on the rest of us was huge--reverse magnetism.

Yuppies were disgusting. What made them disgusting was their lack of reticence in the displaying of commercial badges. More interesting still was that no one ever would admit to being one of them. In fact, in retrospect, the real sign of being a yuppie was that you tried hard to disassociate from them while all along displaying their badges.

Yuppies were unique in that they were the first consumption community that I can think of known only by their badges. No one came forward like Marlon Brando, Abbie Hoffman, John Wayne, or Elton John to personify the group. Richard Gere laying out his clothes on the bed in the 1980 movie American Gigolo might have been the yuppie archetype, but he seemed a little too moody about his stuff. Still, rather like Eagle Scouts, yuppies had no distinct personality other than their merit (or demerit, it's up to you) badges worn almost Pancho Villa style around their vacuous lifestyles.

Here are just a few of the yuppie badges: yellow ties and red suspenders, Merlot, marinated salmon steaks, green-bottle beer, Club Med vacations, stuff with ducks on it, Gaggenau stoves, Sub-Zero refrigerators, latte, clothing from Ann Taylor or Ralph Lauren, designer water, Filofax binders, Cuisinarts, kiwi fruit, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, ventless Italian suits, pasta makers, bread makers, espresso-cappuccino makers, cell phones, home fax machines, air and water cleaners, laptop computers, exercise machines, massage tables, and remote controls for the television, the VCR, the CD player, the stereo receiver, the garage door, the child. More than anything, of course, the car--especially the BMW, the infamous beemer--was the yuppie badge nonpareil.

The yuppie and his German or Japanese car were academic anathema. If a colleague were to see me in such a car he would surely think I had gone over to the other side. My cousin with the pricy condo, the Jenn-Air gas grill, Biggest Bertha Ever golf club, and the Suburban could be a yuppie. But not me. I only bought just the things I absolutely needed...like a red Miata? And that, of course, was precisely my problem. When I bought this car, I became one of them.

I dilate on my Miata decision because it shows the dynamic of pressures in the commercial world. Two generations ago maybe choosing what denomination of the Congregational church to attend would have caused me such distress. Do I dare be seen with Unitarians? At the turn of this century what musical instrument you played would have been important. "They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play!" describes a Horatio Alger experience we have trouble understanding. Maybe status would have been derived from what I read. Could I be seen reading Walt Whitman? What about what I ate? Our grandparents read etiquette books detailing the shame you should feel if you ordered the same meal too often. "Again she orders--A chicken salad, please!" is the headline of an ad for such an etiquette book. It is presumably spoken by an exasperated young man about his date. What if I coughed? Would that be a social blunder?

Perhaps what I wore. Could I be seen wearing a gold stickpin in my tie? The way we live now, I worry that I might be mistaken for a yuppie.

While I certainly went through the modern version of the "agonies of the damned" buying a Japanese internal-combustion engine advertised through nostalgia and wrapped in red plastic, I never once was duped, misled, waylaid, or reified. In fact, I loved the process. They offered me my dream and I gladly bought it. I never liked that dreary Volvo to begin with. Now I'm wondering about a Jaguar, perhaps something from the early '80s, not too ostentatious but still flashy, if you know what I mean.