An Old Car

Pictured is the engine compartment of my car—a 1985 diesel Jetta. I bought this car almost in desperation, sick and tired of opening the hoods of newer vehicles to see a relatively uniform block of plastic and metal, virtually none of it identifiable.

In relative terms, this old Jetta has very few modern parts, in fact it has relatively few parts, period. I lift the Jetta’s hood, and there, by God, I see an exhaust manifold, and an alternator, and a valve cover, and look, there’s a fuel pump! How about that!

The Jetta gives me some relief from a world in which we can no longer fathom the inner workings of our most common tools. Calculators, cameras, telephones, radios, and pagers are all imminently common and incomprehensibly complex. Credit card swipers, entry door motion-sensors, monitors, detectors, and control devices are everywhere, and are entirely impenetrable. Who knows even how a modern furnace works, or a microwave oven, or a fluorescent light?

This trend is, in my view, not good. Complicated machinery at its minimum makes us slaves to expensive repairmen, who are often not really repairmen at all, but technicians plugging in pricey replacement modules according to automatic error codes. (And that’s when repair is even possible. So many of our machines are so cheaply made that fixes cost more than replacement, causing us to become desensitized to poor quality, and to the apparent necessity of throwing broken things away.) But there’s a bigger and more insidious problem lurking underneath all that. Complexity has stolen our self sufficiency. The tools of our daily lives, the machines that we use each and every day at home and at work, have disconnected us from the foundation of understanding that fosters independence. We now expect to be ignorant of what goes on around us, and have become habituated to a reliance on far-away technical and manufacturing to fill our needs. Worse, the ubiquity of unknowable machines has desensitized us to the overly complex in all things, muting what ought to be a natural suspicion of the labyrinthine operations that today characterize our massive and still growing government and business systems.

Give me a simple machine any day, or at very least, a simpler version of a complicated machine. Give me a one-on-one relationship, a plain and apprehendable device. Give me a system of human scale. Give me, for instance, a 1985 Jetta.