#rootio

When making a new technology, one has to explain to people what this thing that doesn’t yet exist will be by referring to things that do exist.  In my case, the radio technology I’ve been working on is designed to help produce a content ecosystem for rural listeners in the developing world, for whom there’s not a lot of content on the radio already.  There aren’t a lot of shows discussing crop diseases, or how to nurture sick goats, even on rural stations.  So at least once every week I’ve found myself talking to someone and pitching “Goat Talk.” So when I heard that Tom Magliozzi, cohost of Car Talk died, I had to write a thanks for the many hours I’ve spent listening.

If you haven’t heard this odd radio program, it is ostensibly a program about automobiles (more on that below) hosted by two Boston car mechanics, and was syndicated on NPR, which is normally considered high brow media in the US.  That two blue-collar guys with such a thickly regional accent; who come from an oft-demonized part of the country; and who are so old and white and goofy could get away with making so many bad mother-in-law jokes on NPR is something of a modern wonder.  Another radio host, Peter Sagal, wrote a nice piece about the Magliozzi brothers and why their work was so beloved.  His thesis: they weren’t assholes.  It’s a start.

I didn’t understand what Car Talk was about until a carhead friend of mine  explained it to me.  This was in grad school, and the friend John, a mechanical genius, came to my rescue many times when I was trying to keep my 1986 Jetta alive. I told him that I had heard a few episodes of car talk and wasn’t too interested, because I wasn’t that interested in cars.  He looked at me with the same sad, disbelieving look he often gave me, like when he realized I had worked on my breaks but didn’t realize I’d have to "bleed" the air out of them. 

"Car talk isn’t about cars.  It’s a family counseling program,"  John explained, no doubt before casually replacing the bolt I had left over after trying a repair but couldn't figure out where it had come from, and probably saving my life again.

It didn’t take me long to realize my mistake about Car Talk.  In the next program, Tom and Ray saved a couple’s marriage, defused an explosive father/daughter relationship, and prevented the breakup of a young couple.  I’d been hearing mufflers and fan belts when in fact it was personalities and relationships being diagnosed. Almost every family in the US has a car, and everyone who has a car has issues about their car; those issues though, are mixed in with all the others, from money to jobs, to love and sex, and mothers and mothers in law.

Unlike an “agony aunt” or a typical marriage counselor, the Magliozzis had no problem choosing sides. They were MIT graduates, and in a lot of cases the domestic disputes revolved around something they could adjudicate mercilessly: No, it doesn’t help a low-octane engine to put high-octane fuel in it. Yes, you should leave the car in gear at a red light. Your husband/wife/boss/neighbor is wrong, please put them on the phone so that we can humiliate them nationally.

Unlike so many engineers, though, they understood that the mechanical aspects of a car are only one aspect of its importance to people, and often not the chief one. The french critic Jean Baudrillard described this in semiotics and later applied it to technology (see Pour une Critique de l’Economie Politique du Signe): the fins of a ‘57 Chevy don’t help its aerodynamics, but they are nonetheless as essential to that car as the engine.

As a toddler my family had a massive blue station wagon with vinyl seats that my brother and I would slide across into each other as my dad weaved on the highway — no seatbelts! — giggling “G Force!” as we got older.  When the oil crisis came and it wasn’t worth fixing, I told my parents I would disown them if they got rid of it.  I had crawled around every inch of the back of that car, picked at every bit of vinyl piping, touched every bolt head and weld.  The car had come on every camping trip with us, had been almost everywhere I’d been; I couldn’t disambiguate it from a family member.  It sat on flats for years behind our walkup apartment, a rusting eyesore only a child could love.  I’m pretty sure that none of this was part of Plymouth’s engineering specification.

Understanding the many meanings of cars allowed the Magliozzis to practice a sort of mechanical casuistry, recognizing what was important in the situation.  They could, in good conscience, tell people to put electrical tape over their “check engine” light, or pull a fuse rather than fix the buzz in a vent.  To the caller who had a non-dangerous car problem and no money to fix it, or to the frustrated spouse being driven crazy by their loved one’s driving style, they said: “Pax.” Leave it be.  Close the windows so you don’t have to worry about that new engine noise.  You’ll get where you want to go, and you’ll be happy.   They were enablers in the best sense of the word.

Of course, they also gave advice on cars, sometimes good.  I know far more about cars from listening, and as a result I feel far more comfortable and confident when I am in one.  And the Magliozzis even evaluated their own advice, calling back listeners (randomly) who they had tried to help, often to find that their advice had been wrong. Would that radio or television news programs held their regular pundits — the Bill Kristols or David Brookses — to such standards.  The Magliozzis were like ideal scientists who cared more about the truth than their opinions or reputations, even when they didn't sweat the details.