Look Out The Window

According to Automobile Magazine, one of the crown jewels of the Honda Odyssey Touring Elite (A minivan, Touring Elite?) is the DVD player. A staffer and his family recently took the Honda on a 2,552 mile road trip from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Walt Disney World in Orlando. He reports: “DVDs played: 11 “The DVD system in the Honda is unsurpassed for ease of use. It’s totally intuitive and fully controllable from the front passenger seat…””

I‘m assuming the DVDs were movies played for those in the back seat and those in the back seat were children. At an average speed of 50 mph, one movie got played every 4.5 hours and if each movie with ads and trailers lasted 2 hours this means DVDs were playing for nearly half the time the vehicle was in motion. Let me say this about that: Ugh.

No place or time is apparently beyond seizing to feed our progeny the pablum Hollywood panders to us as “entertainment.” For what, to keep the little wankers occupied and out of the grownup’s hair? Undoubtedly there is some benefit in this for said grownups, but in the mean time the kids are being fed carefully designed messages such as the popular delusion that good consistently and by means of violence triumphs over evil. And so we go on and on bringing up and misguiding the new ranks to follow in our footsteps.

And let us not forget that to be consumers is the highest calling!

What did my sister and I do in the back seat without a movie? We daydreamed and sang songs and counted Volkswagens. The rare Karman Ghia bird was (and is) a special treat. We goofed around, teased and annoyed each other and learned how to compromise and make up. We drove our parents nuts and they reciprocated. We got to know each other, and learned to get along.

I would read until I threw up until I figured out reading in the car wasn’t such a hot idea. Looking out the window was much better, for miles I watched telephone and power lines gracefully sweep up and down, and the poles loom by.

My sister and I would bicker. After listening to this for just so long, our mother would turn around, glare at us and announce, “If I hear one more peep from either of you before we get home… we’re going to stop the car!” Far as I remember we never did stop the car but nonetheless, there was no telling what might happen if we did so it was the ultimate threat. We youngins would then be very very quiet until we would look at one another and snicker and couldn’t stand it any longer and one of us would barely utter the forbidden word, “peep.” And the slightest little grin would creep across our mother’s face, and we knew we had her and then we would erupt into a cacophony of “PEEP, PEEP, PEEP!” Good natured brattishness is so endearing.

We enjoyed the freedom of unstructured, unfocused time. We wondered and thought and debated about things, all the while watching the land and the people go by. We learned about our country. Big polluted northeastern cities. Sweeping, beautiful landscapes, lakes and oceans. Hardscrabble bare dirt poverty in the rural south. And it wasn’t white folks out front of those shacks. It all bore no resemblance to the paucity of experience doled out by the entertainment industry.

Gordon Bunker