But now Audi flogs you its vehicles on the basis that it’s the most convenient way to submit to arbitrary state authority. Forty years ago, when they first began selling over here, it’s doubtful the company would have considered this either a helpful image for a German car manufacturer or a viable pitch to the American male.
But times change. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, all the men in the Audi ad are the usual befuddled effete new-male eunuchs that infest all the other commercials.
[Kathy adds: And the entire city of Toronto, not to mention a frightening number of Canadian “conservatives”!]
It was reported last week that as many as a dozen men have been killed in disputes arising from karaoke performances of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” Surely, bellowing out “I did it my way” to Frank’s backing track in a karaoke bar is the very definition of not doing it your way, but it’s marginally less pathetic than the song’s emergence in post-Christian Britain as a favorite funeral anthem: For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has not? Nothing sums up your iconoclastic individualism than someone else’s signature song, right?
***
Alas, this big time leftwing blog says the “My Way” story is a) made up and b) probably racist. (OK, I made that last part up for them. Wow, the left is losing its touch…)
That the New York Times just makes up stories should hardly be, well, news at this point.
The funereal uses of “My Way” in the UK, and elsewhere, are true, however.
And have more to tell us about “where we’re at”, should we care to listen:
Today’s nanny state, working class Englishman wants a song written by a Canadian, stolen from a Frenchman and sung by an Italian American sung at his funeral — one at which Health & Safety rules even dictate how his casket can be carried to his grave; “he” can only “sing” about having lived a free, individualistic, risk-taking life — after he’s safely dead.
And hasn’t.
