The Critics Respond, Part Twenty-Five
Well, dude, here's another quote for you, and Geddy Lee had nothing to do with it:
And I never wanted anything from you Except everything you had and what was left after that too
I've written at tedious length over the span of nearly a decade about how automotive journalists come to love their friends in PR. Got that covered to the point that even my friends complain about it to each other when I'm not around. On the other hand, I've almost certainly failed to fully address the story of how automotive journalists come to despise their readers. So let's discuss that for a moment. We'll use an analogy.
The analogy is two women and one man. Or, if you prefer, one woman and two men. Or two men and a third man. Or a poly trans otherkin pansexual and a gFur wolfkin and a thirty-inch bear plushie. Your choice. I've given up on trying to force my laser-like focus on pussy/victory/controversy/Metheny into your mind, dear reader.
The first woman tells the man: I want certain things from you and I'll be very clear about them and if you deliver them to me I'll do whatever perverted thing you can conjure up in your #PornEducated #FastFoodDiet mind and you can call me next Friday night if you're free. Oh, and I'll pay for dinner. The second woman tells the man: I need you to love me and do everything I desire but I'm not going to tell you what I want until you fail to provide it and then, my love, we are going to have problems. Oh, and I need to live with you and not work a real job and eat from your Sub-Zero at your expense and once in a while I'm going to leave you a hateful note just, you know, because.
If you don't know that most men will pick Girl 1 and let Girl 2 hit OKCupid on the way out the door, then you must be as blind as Anne Frank* because the truth is that we like sharply defined deliverables and tangible rewards and low commitment and low expense. I don't think that preference is limited to so-called hetero-normative cisgender white men six feet and above, but I can't speak for others because that would be racist.
The PR game isn't just the carrot of the benefits, the Ferrari Challenge race or the trip to Mallorca. It's the stick of the fact that you can totally screw over the PR people and write the honest truth about something and most of the readers simply won't understand what you're doing. And then next month you got no money, and you got no car, and you got no readers, and there you are**. After a while, nearly everybody understands this, and they start writing for an audience of twenty people instead of the readers as a whole. Only the most iconoclastic or stubborn of people would do anything else.
Well, I am that stubborn iconoclast. So I take a hammer to Porsche's ridiculous Turbo turbo Carreras, further ensuring that I'll never be invited to a Porsche press event, like, ever. And I even work a little quote from a Rush song in for my brethren among the true prog-rock nerds.
Then one of them has an Asperger's attack and gets angry with me for picking the wrong Rush quote in his Rushy opinion. He's also feeling stroppy because I didn't stop the article and write THIS IS A RUSH QUOTE BY GEDDY LEE FROM THE ALBUM "MOVING PICTURES" FIND IT AT YOUR LOCAL BUZZARD'S NEST RECORDS immediately before or after the quote, maybe both.
I give up.
Next week I'm going to write a new article. It will called, "The New 911 Carrera Is So Good. I Mean So Good, I Mean Amazing, You Have To Read What Happens Next." And if I want to hear anything else about Geddy Lee, I'll hear it from the Burmester sound system of a brand-new Panamera Turbo S loaner, you dig?
* yes, another unattributed quote ** and another, albeit modified