Indie Auto gets all kinds of emails, but until today we have never received one from God. As you might imagine, this email has some exceptional qualities. For one thing, it is unusually long — more than 12,000 words!
In addition, God apparently doesn’t like paragraph breaks, so His prose looks suspiciously similar to the fine print of an insurance policy.
Since this is a car blog, I was hoping that God would weigh in on some of the great debates we have been having at Indie Auto of late. For example, was a commentator correct when he insisted that AMC was doomed?
God only addressed that debate indirectly by suggesting that He stays away from “empty discussions that get nowhere.”
I wanted to ask God a few follow-up questions, such as whether he drove a car when visiting Earth. However, the email address he used had the prefix “noneofyourbusiness.” That leads me to I assume that God is an introvert. Fair enough — I am too.
So I will take God’s above-mentioned advice to heart and hope that at some point He will pontificate on the finer points of automotive history. Of course, even God may not be able to change some people’s views, which are apparently so deeply held that they may as well be set in stone.
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I tl;dr manifestos like that. Punctuation has a purpose. I even indent paragraphs (sometimes). 12,000 words without a space? SMH. God still needs an editor apparently.
I don’t believe that was actually God, because if it were he, I’m sure he’d have told you he loved driving, particularly large personal luxury coupes from the 60’s and 70’s.
Cadillac or Lincoln?
He would, of course, be driving the car named after Himself, the Jupiter 8, as seen in Star Trek. https://www.startrek.com/news/take-a-ride-in-the-jupiter-8.
I have the feeling that God really was our new president. After all, he proclaims he was saved by the divine to be our dear leader again, Grover Cleveland style.
Given that the “AMC is doomed” quote is mine, and you patronized me with your response then, very much along the lines of “empty discussions go nowhere”, and given the post that followed shortly with my son’s ancient quote about commenters along with some other put downs and snarky comments, it’s painfully clear that you have become rather obsessed with me and my comment.
Steve, one thing I’ve learned over the 20-some years of blogging is to avoid making things personal. I learned that the hard way and undoubtedly lost a few readers along the way. Unless you’ve decided that initiating personal attacks is a strategy for growing your site, I recommend staying away from it, as it seems to have the opposite effect.
Your response to my comment (and others) and now this third personal attack via a post directly targeted at me makes me think perhaps you’re frustrated or unhappy in some way? Are you not generating the profound in-depth discussions in the comments you were hoping to get? Too much effort and too little intellectual reward?
I’m asking you to stop attacking me and quoting me in your blog, veiled, “satire” or otherwise. It’s not a good look. I’ve rarely come here, and the one time I did and left that utterly innocuous comment weeks ago, you just can’t let it go. This is the danger of the internet: personal attacks and comment wars are invariably more exciting and cortisol-generating than deep and profound analysis and discussion as to whether “AMC was doomed” or not.
Paul, an important part of Indie Auto has always been media analysis. Over the years I have frequently said supportive things about your work. I have also offered criticism, but I have hardly singled you out.
As a point of process, I would note that: 1) you came to my website and made a comment, and 2) I responded in a playful way that was so oblique that few readers would have noticed if you hadn’t started pounding the table.
My sense is that the automotive history field is in danger of dying — and that its greatest hope for survival is cultivating a greater diversity of journalistic approaches. That may inevitably lead to some dustups among media outlets. While this can result in uncomfortable moments, that’s what a free press looks like.
“Pounding the table” — also known as the Streisand effect. With Paul’s length and breadth of experience, I’d think he’d have realized this before posting.
That was my reaction too. I suspect that we all have found ourselves in situations where we overreacted, perhaps partly spurred by stresses that had little to do with the specific matter at hand. This is why giving people grace strikes me as the wisest course of action.