car is that, more than any horse, it is an extension of man that turns the rider into a superman. It is a hot, explosive medium of social communication. And TV, by cooling off the American public tastes and creating new needs for unique wrap-around space, which the European car promptly provided, practically unhorsed the American auto-cavalier. The small European cars reduce him to near-pedestrian status once more. Some people manage to drive them on the sidewalk. The car did its social leveling by horsepower alone. In turn, the car created highways and resorts that were not only very much alike in all parts of the land, but equally available to all. Since TV, there is naturally frequent complaint about this uniformity of vehicle and vacation scene. As John Keats put it in his attack on the car and the industry in The Insolent Chariots, where one automobile can go, all other automobiles do go, and wherever the automobile goes, the automobile version of civilization surely follows. Now this is a TV-oriented sentiment that is not only anti-car and anti-standardization, but anti-Gutenberg, and therefore anti-American as well. Of course, I know that John Keats doesn't mean this. He had never thought about media or the way in which Gutenberg created Henry Ford and the assembly line and standardized culture. All he knew was that it was popular to decry the uniform, the standardized, and the hot forms of communication, in general. For that reason, Vance Packard could make hay with The Hidden Persuaders. He hooted at the old salesmen and the hot media, just as MAD does. Before TV, 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