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Jeffrey Goldberg and Jack Shafer

the breakfast table
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from: Jack Shafer

Sentenced to Life With a Minivan

Posted Friday, Feb. 9, 2001, at 2:48 PM ET

Dearest Goldberg,

Do you remember when you and the very pregnant Miss Pamela and your two little Goldies came over to my house last summer for bagels and lox and you mewled about the plan to ditch the Explorer for the Odyssey? You, the Ultimate Manly Man, evicted from a tough-ass' SUV for a life sentence in a sissy-ass' minivan? (As I recall, we discussed this before news reports revealed the Explorer to be a death trap.) My view was that minivans are incredibly cool, but that if you got one you should slam it.

No, not drive it into a wall. "Slamming" means aggressively customizing your Honda (the way that West Coast kids do) until it's a high-performance rice-rocket: Trick out the engine; install a beastly exhaust system; replace the stock red tail lights with clear ones (and red bulbs!); lower the frame; cherry-out the paint job; install ground effects; skinnify the tires; and prettify the interior. In short, trade a rollover death trap for an automotive bullet that kills in much more interesting ways. I haven't seen a slammed Odyssey yet, but you could start a trend in your yuppie D.C. neighborhood and simultaneously preserve your manhood. I'm sure Pamela will approve, as slamming rarely costs more than $10,000 or $20,000.

I'm very happy to see that I wrote you into a gastrointestinal event this week. Taunting you from afar, though, wasn't as fun as provoking you in person, but it proved much more deadly. If you're still alive when you read this, please call or e-mail. We need to go out cruising in your new dream machine pronto.

Love,
Jack

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Jack Shafer

Sentenced to Life With a Minivan

Posted Friday, Feb. 9, 2001, at 2:48 PM ET
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Jack Shafer is deputy editor of Slate. Jeffrey Goldberg is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His book on the Middle East, Prisoners, will be published next year by Knopf.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: There was a spirit of friendly enquiry in the Fray: "Do you guys like each other?" asked Beth. "What is a CVS?" came from Dea--and do you need to be rich to find out? (Fletch tells us it's a drugstore.) And Mark wanted to know "What's wrong with a little Masada?"

Posters who weren't asking questions were trying to draw blood. "Breakfast Table" Fray regulars are a nest of trouble-makers. Neill Hamilton demonstrates this here and here, and so does Joseph Britt, whose comment below provoked a thread well worth reading, including a debate on whether basketball is prominent in American culture.]


In response to last week's "Breakfast Table", I and several other Fray posters made the suggestion that this feature would be more interesting if it involved writers who actually disagreed with each other about something.

By "something," I was referring to American politics or something especially prominent in American culture.

Disagreements about whom Israelis should vote for do not count. This is because Israel is a foreign country. Now, I wish Israel well; I like most of the Israelis I have met in my life; I even think how the American government should respond to whatever Israeli government emerges from this week's election is a topic worthy of exploration.

But who would I vote for? Stupid question

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)

(2/6)

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