Convertible Crazy: Confessions of a bonafide out-of-control car fantatic

Next Saturday is Homecoming at William Carey University. As I have for several years, I will supply four convertibles for the campus parade. Since I own a total of 14 convertibles, I could actually provide the entire parade around the campus.

 

I’m not bragging; I’m really ashamed, and I know that I need an intervention. 

 

On the face of it, my compulsion to own every convertible I see is unexplainable – like what Winston Churchill said about Russia: “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” 

 

Perhaps it is an asymptote: what we know yet never will know. On the other hand, as a former chair of the Psychology department at William Carey, I know many of the clinical explanations: I wanted a convertible as a boy and couldn’t afford it; I drove convertibles overseas as a young man and this is just a nostalgia trip; I’m in my “second childhood,” etc. 

 

In reality, I’m just an example of runaway consumerism, of rampant materialism; just a cog in the grinding wheel of capitalism; a poster boy for the imposition of the “democratic socialism” that we hear so much about lately. 

 

But Margaret Thatcher was right: “socialism works until you run out of everyone else’s money.” 

 

As a matter of fact, Britain’s fling with socialism in the 1960s and 1970s is what killed my favorite automobile marques: MG, Triumph, and Austin Healy.