ports, and various other exotic features borrowed from the 
non-motorcar world. We were invited to associate it with 
Hawaiian surf riders, with gulls soaring like sixteen-inch shells, 
and with the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour. Could MAD  
magazine do any better? In the TV age, any of these tales from 
the Vienna woods, dreamed up by motivational researchers, 
could be relied upon to be an ideal comic script for MAD . The 
script was always there, in fact, but not till TV was the 
audience conditioned to enjoy it.

     To mistake the car for a status symbol, just because it is 
asked to be taken as anything but a car, is to mistake the 
whole meaning of this very late product of the mechanical age 
that is now yielding its form to electric technology. The car is a 
superb piece of uniform, standardized mechanism that is of a 
piece with the Gutenberg technology and literacy which created