Love Will Win

Picture the favorite vehicle that you have ever owned. Did it look like this?

Or this?

Or this?

Mine looked something like this. (Not exactly, but close. Amazingly enough, I have no actual full pictures of the vehicle in question). On a very sad morning five years ago, the morning that my favorite vehicle ever was towed out of my driveway, I wrote the following reminiscence of how this candidate for the world’s ugliest station wagon played an important role in helping me learn to embrace my inner self.

I watched a piece of history disappear out of sight this morning, as it turned the corner at the end of my block—a piece of my history. It was perched on the back of a flatbed tow truck. As my car rounded the bend, donated to charity for a tax write-off and undoubtedly destined to be dismantled for parts, I began to wax nostalgic. Although I came of age during the turbulent sixties and early seventies, I was not your classic anti-establishment rebel. I grew up in rural northern New England, was raised in a conservative Protestant religious tradition—these are hardly contributing factors to being a 60s counter-culture flower child. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to make up for lost time during my 40s and 50s. As I get older, I continue to attribute a number of my defining features—my liberalism, the delight I take in enabling young people to think for themselves, my ponytail—to the atmosphere of the Sixties that seeped into my bones unbeknownst to me as I was growing up. The vehicle in question was a significant addition to this development.

The Chairmobile was a 1991 Honda Accord station wagon—it had about 190,000 miles on it when it dropped in my lap in the summer of 2004; as it left the homestead this morning, it had 250,000. It should have looked like this: It didn’t. The Chairmobile’s registration said it was blue, but no one who ever saw it called it blue. It looked red to me, but I’m partially color blind. It had a serious rust problem on both fenders; it was apparently in an accident before it came to me and has a gash on the driver side front door that is also rusting around the edges. It was also covered with graffiti-style yellow spray paint, making the question of its true color moot. The hood said, in large yellow letters, “Cuba Caravan 2004,” in honor of the (illegal) caravan of humanitarian aid to Cuba in which Jeanne participated in the summer of 2004. Along the two driver side doors the words “Love Will Win” are sprayed. The two doors on the other side read “Pastors For Peace,” although the fading letters are hard to read in places. The back window had some more propaganda painted on it.

Around all four sides of the roof were sprayed the names of various heartland cities, from Minneapolis, MN to Wichita Falls, TX, towns it visited as it was loaded with aid to be driven to the US/Mexican border. The car was intended to go on a barge with the rest of the aid from Mexico to Cuba, but the Cubans could only take diesel fueled vehicles that summer. Jeanne had just accepted a job at a university on Long Island that started in late summer and would be taking our sole vehicle with her. The beat up, graffiti-wearing, Cuba-rejected Honda was there for the taking, so I figured I’d drive it for a few months until it croaked.

That was five years ago. I christened it “The Chairmobile” because I had just started four years as chair of the philosophy department a month earlier. It came with a bumper sticker that said “Be a real revolutionary: Practice your faith.” I added a few more, such as “Don’t blame me, I voted for Bartlet,” “Dissent is Patriotic,” and the symbol for the ACLU, just in case there was any doubt about the political leanings of the Chairmobile’s owner. Every time I drove out of the driveway I was screaming to the world “I’m a fucking liberal! You want to make something of it?? What are you staring at?? You want a piece of me??” Not the best vehicle for an introvert who would just as soon be anonymous at times, but driving an extroverted car boosted my confidence level.

I have enough stories about reactions to the Chairmobile to fill dozens of essays. A local cop pulled me over in the grocery store parking lot within a week of the Chairmobile’s arrival for no reason other than that he simply could not believe such a horrible looking car could be current and legal in its insurance, registration, and inspection. More recently, as I was minding my own business loading groceries in the same parking lot, a twenty-something yelled “Hey buddy, Osama kills liberals too!” as he drove by in a BMW convertible. Another time somebody hollered “Love sucks!” at me as I turned the corner from a stop light—obviously his girlfriend had just dumped him. My friend Montana Bob, a veteran of the Cuba caravans, reports that a few years earlier, he was driving a similarly graffitied vehicle through Colorado Springs, gathering humanitarian aid on the way to the Mexican border. Someone at a stop light asked “If you love Cuba so much, why don’t you go live there, you Communist?”, to which my friend, in the true spirit of Christian charity, asked in return “why don’t you pull over into that parking lot so I can kick your ass?” Montana Bob is a committed advocate of muscular Christianity.

But in the years I drove the Chairmobile, I received far more smiles from strangers than frowns. A woman in the neighborhood told me (in the grocery store parking lot once again) “I love it when I see your car—it always makes me feel good, especially these days.” How different would the world be if everyone wore their inner selves on the outside, in the same way as exoskeletal lobsters and crabs do? For the few years that I drove the Chairmobile, I announced to the world in no uncertain terms some things about me that were both true and could no longer be hidden. Such as that what my car looks like is about 1037^th on my list of priorities. That at least in theory I care more about people in need than people’s opinions. That I believe being a person of faith has little to do with church attendance. That I’m a person of faith in the first place. And that I’m living out some repressed rebellious tendencies that had no outlet in my youth while rebellion was erupting all around me.

The money required to keep the Chairmobile inspected and running finally became prohibitive; its replacement is also used (1996), has high mileage (update: 145,000 then—225,000 now, four years later. Jeanne and I like cars with more mileage on them than we have), but has no rust, no dents, and no graffiti. That worries me—I’ve become used to my car making a statement, sort of like a sandwich board advertisement for the driver. So I’ll be headed for the hardware store to get some spray paint soon. I need some new messages, though, to reflect the new and revived me that emerged from my sabbatical months. “St. Benedict is the man.” “Monks rock.” “Big Bird is watching you.” “My dachshunds can beat up your honors student.” Stuff like that. And perhaps the opening lines from daily noon prayer: “God, come to my assistance; Lord, make haste to help me.” It never hurts to ask—all the time.