American Objects of Affection: (shared by Left and Right)

                                                                                 

Americans seem very convinced a cultural war between the left-wing and right wing ruins any chance for peace and civility in the public discourse. Balderdash! Bunk I say… for Americans from across the political spectrum share a fondness of many of the same things.

Top 3 things Americans love:

1)  Cars

2) Air-conditioning
3) Cellphones

The Top 3 may seem so obvious as to be not worth mentioning. People in many countries may also love cellphones (laptops, iPads etc/), cars and air conditioning. The less prosperous populations often do not have access to these luxuries.

The Top 3 are not considered luxuries by most Americans. The American populace, left or right wing, feel they must have these commodities. We take them for granted like the air we breathe. 

Cars and Trucks:

The rural American, identified as Donald Trump voters, likes the pickup truck the bigger and more expensive the better. 

Pickup Trucks (Trumpers like): 

1)    Ford F-150

2)  Chevy Silverado

3)  Dodge Ram pickup

Fortunately, American car manufacturers produce well-built pickup trucks. You can buy American, feel good about it and get a great truck. 

Pickup Trucks (Liberals like)

A guy who drives a Toyota Tacoma may just be a liberal. Even left-leaning, bleeding hearts, enjoy the macho feel of a big, steel pickup truck.

SUVs (Obama Liberals like)

1)   Subaru

2)  Lexus RX 350

3)  Honda CRV

Liberals profess a passion for the have-nots but often drive SUVs that prove they “have” plenty. The SUVs listed above tend to be expensive and Japanese-made. Maybe the international flavor of a Japanese-made vehicle appeals to liberals love of globalism? These wonderfully built vehicles cost a hell of a lot—but so do the fancy versions of the pickup trucks listed above.

Right wing Trumpers and left-wing Barack Obama lovers don’t fret about global warming when they turn the key to their ignition. 

Henry Ford turned us on to car ownership with the Model-T cars he mass-produced from 1908-1927. America has never been the same. Ford built the car at a price the average man could afford, even those working on the assembly line.

Ford revolutionized car production with his assembly line. His business genius allowed him to recognize the advantage to making a car affordable to the rising middle class. Henry Ford’s marketing genius got us hooked. The driving habit has been with us for a century. Doesn’t matter your political persuasion—everybody likes having a car/truck.

Air Conditioning

Air conditioning got invented by Willis Carrier in 1902. You might say that air conditioning brought the North and South together-- with the arrangement that Northerners could now more readily handle the worm temperatures of the South.

"The introduction of residential air conditioning in the 1920s helped enable the great migration to the Sun Belt in the United States." (Wikipedia)

Chilled air is so prevalent everywhere in the South and Western United States as to be invisible. You walk into a restaurant, movie theater, super market in Texas, where I live, and feel your just stepped into a produce cooler or a meat locker. Everybody demands central air conditioning, or AC/  We hardly get a winter down here, except indoors, where man has created his own climate. The entire spectrum of voters, from Trumper to Obama supporter, votes “yes” when it comes to air conditioning.

Cellphones

We get even more agreement on the cellphone. Most everybody wants an iPhone. Samsung phones are popular too.

Cellphones can be seen in every hand, from  alt-right believers to their Antifa adversaries. Apple owns the world because left, right and everybody else loves the iPhone. We all have computers in our hand, a luxury valued by all—right or left.

We may be more alike than we care to admit. 

McLuhan Predicts Cellphone (The New Yorker, May 5, 1965)

Marshall McLuhan’s prominence as the world’s foremost intellectual  cannot easily be conceived from the remove of the present day. A piece from “The Talk of the Town” column, at the front end of the The New Yorker magazine issue, May 5, 1965, entitled “The McLuhan Metaphor,” was  composed at the same time as the  the New York World’s Fair. The author mentions the Westinghouse company’s plan to place a Time Capsule for future generations at the World's Fair and suggests McLuhan himself could better serve as a time capsule. 

My family visited the World’s Fair that year. I recall lavish futuristic exhibits sponsored by Ford and General Motors,  two industrial companies representing a mechanical age. Their exhibits imagined an automotive future with Jetsons-style highways flying in every direction. But McLuhan envisioned something different, an information age—and a massive change in consciousness.

The New Yorker author describes McLuhan’s lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn and quotes several startling prophecies included in his remarks:

“(He) predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information” and

“Dr. McLuhan next suggested the possibility of a new technology that would extend consciousness itself into the environment. ‘A kind of computerized ESP,’ he called it, envisioning ‘consciousness as the corporate content of the environment—and eventually maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.’”

McLuhan’s accurate prediction of computers, cellphone-sized and smaller, merits no further explanation but the second insight--consciousness as the new environment-- cuts to the very essence of the digital era.  The hearing aid device anticipates the iPhone or other mobile device. Individuals study the phone and share experiences as a corporate entity creating a group consciousness and posts are exactly as McLuhan described-- personal, random thoughts offered in a dreamlike manner. McLuhan perceived the new electronic environment as consciousness— and no better, more succinct description of the modern social network has ever been offered.

McLuhan’s notion of new technology working as extensions of the human body achieves new levels of traction in the electronic era, for if clothing extended the skin, and the wheel extended the legs’ ability to achieve movement, “the computer achieved not merely an extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole nervous system.”  (New Yorker 1965)