I Finally Got A Top Of Something Quote... Kinda

I've long believed that working in the autojourno biz is much like growing up as one of many children in the house of extremely wealthy but often absent parents. We (really meaning they, I've done two press trips in all of 2014) are spoiled with first-rate accommodations and meals and travel and gifts all the time, but what we really want is approval from the manufacturers. We compete tooth-and-nail to obtain the approval of those parents for two reasons. The first is that the real perks, the Jonny-Lieberman-indoor-Dubai-ski-trip stuff, is reserved for the people who shamelessly service the manufacturers like Elizabeth Shue at the beginning of Leaving Las Vegas.

The second and possibly more important reason is that everybody hates their readers and loves their friends in PR. It's not worth getting the approval of the readers because you (meaning they again, I meet dozens of readers a year) never meet them in person. Better by far to get that pat on the back or the friendzone hug from that gorgeous PR girl.

The ultimate expression of manufacturer approval is to be quoted by the manufacturer in their marketing materials. Noted moron, pansy, and closet case Dan Neil is the past master of this particular art: his facile, reptilian tongue works the shaft of Porsche or Audi or Toyota with long, loving strokes and never lets the teeth of his genuine disapproval come into contact with the object of his desire.

“The IS has an overarching newness about it, a sense of something reformed and redeemed.”

"Now it becomes what it wants to be: a squat, low-slung, all-wheel-drive luxury race truck, an Audi with a love of knife fights and Toby Keith."

"THE PERSON WHO DRIVES this car is fun at parties, hot in the boudoirs, dangerous with firearms. No, not the chandelier!"

"To feather the clutch lightly up a hill, to rev impetuously and dump the clutch when the floodlights hit. Stop, thief! You've stolen our hearts."

If you want to know what's happened to the American man, just consider this: Saul Bellow didn't manage to win a Pulitzer Prize until 1976, a full twelve years after he wrote Herzog, but this perfumed punk managed to win one for writing this:

The TL is Botox for the brain box.

You might think that the TL -- based on the current-generation Honda Accord and built in Maryville, Ohio -- would be cause for celebration, what with its just-about- perfect-in-every-way engineering, embarrassment of standard features, handsome exterior and starship interior.

I can only assume that the attitude of the selection community was more or less that of my sophomore high-school class when we (meaning they, for the third time in the past five minutes) elected a mentally handicapped girl with a pronounced harelip to be our Homecoming Court Attendant. I could never figure out if the ringmasters of that particular achievement were trying to be exceptionally kind or preternaturally cruel.

Alright, enough about Dan, let's return to meeeeeee. The point here is that I've been given top billing on a website! No, it's not a manufacturer website; in fact, it appears to be some sort of website dedicated to the downfall of a particular manufacturer, in this case Mitsubishi. Let's roll the quote!

Every Mitsubishi built ... has been a complete piece of crap....Maybe every Mitsubishi ever built has been junk. - Jack Baruth

Oh boy. Did I really say that? That seems unnecessarily harsh and not very Pulitzer-worthy. More like on of those suspiciously Prince-sounding YouTube comments: "EveRY MISUSHITTY IS CRaP N' FUK UR MOM 2". I wonder if the context of those sentences, a review of the Eclipse Spyder in rental spec, will reduce the sting a bit.

[T]he Zero was a decent little plane.

Every Mitsubishi built since then, of every type, shape, variety, and description, has been a complete piece of crap.

Whew! Sorry about that! I was channeling our dear departed founder for a moment. I mean, not every Mitusbishi ever built has been junk. There was the Sapporo, which was, um, junk. And the Starion, but that was junk, too. The 3000GT? Impossible to fix and heavier empty than the aforementioned Mitsubishi Zero or a Corvette carrying the two fattest people from your local Wal-Mart. The DiamondStar cars? My friend Mark Mitias famously christened them “DSM-Disposable Speed Machines”. The Lancer Evolution? Nice to drive, satisfying to use on a racetrack, but made from tin and cardboard.

Maybe every Mitsubishi ever built has been junk. Still, I’m sympathetic towards them

I'd say the quote was fairly, if harshly, used. Oh well. The Eclipse Spyder was and is not a great car.

Still, cars don't have to be objectively great to be subjectively wonderful. I'll always remember that Spyder fondly because of the circumstances surrounding my drive. I was in Los Angeles for another media thing, staying at the Andaz in Hollywood. At the time, the Southwest slot in my dating rotation was occupied by a wonderful Tex-Mex girl who was engaged to some sort of local drug kingpin/thug/stickup kid. She was thirty-five and he was twenty-four. I think they're married now. Anyway, she flew in to meet me and somehow the rental agent talked her into that Eclipse at a truly outrageous rate, $103/day or something like that. I choked on my vodka when she told me the rate then I handed her five crisp hundred-dollar bills which disappeared into her fingers before they had left mine.

I truly adored this woman. She had the most agile and uninhibited mind possible. We ditched the media circus and its elephantine cargo of freaks to roam Los Angeles, dropping in on friends, visiting tattoo parlors, spinning the 80,000-mile-treadwear tires of the Eclipse with a shriek as we raced up the hill to the Hollywood sign, skidding around the tight corners between million-dollar homes, the road shiny from an unexpected rain shower. On a rocky lookout above those floodlit letters I took her shoulders and leaned her out over open space and she failed to shriek because she trusted me. We knew that we didn't have much time; her fiance was catching wise to all her unexpected travel and I had set my sights on the dark-haired dramatic tornado for whom I would eventually have to make my Tex-Mex friend the first of many blood sacrifices.

The next morning we took a breakneck run to Venice Beach to put our toes in the water and we lost track of time there, it was too much, too far, we were going to miss our flights. I ran the Spyder through Beverly Hills on the way back at ninety miles per hour, expecting any moment to see one of the familiar black-and-whites from what I always considered to be the Shannen Doherty Show. We left the car at the curb at the airport and ran for the shuttle together. Then she was gone and I was handing my credit card to the flight attendant, holding up two fingers, slamming both little Findlandias in a row without a chaser while a young mother actually put her hand over her daughter's eyes next to me. There was sand in the torn lining of my old Zegna sportcoat and I woke with a start when the plane touched down at Columbus, temporarily panicked and blind and alone.

What I'm saying is this: Please disregard that quote. I cannot bring myself to hate the Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder.