such gestures would have been meaningless. It wouldn’t have 
paid off. Now, it pays to laugh at the mechanical and the 
merely standardized. John Keats could question the central 
glory of classless American society by saying, “If you’ve seen 
one part of America, you’ve seen it all,” and that the car gave 
the American the opportunity, not to travel and experience 
adventure, but “to make himself more and more common.” 
Since TV, it has become popular to regard the more and more 
uniform and repeatable products of industry with the same 
contempt that a Brahmin like Henry James might have felt for a 
chamber-pot dynasty in 1890. It is true that automation is 
about to produce the unique and custom-built at assembly-line 
speed and cheapness. Automation can manage the bespoke 
car or coat with less fuss than we ever produced the 
standardized ones. But the unique product cannot circulate in 
our market or distribution setups. As a result, we are moving