What Makes A Classic?

 I had a random thought while driving home one day:  a lot of the ordinary cars of my childhood have pretty much gone extinct.  By that I mean you hardly ever see a Chevy Celebrity or Ford Probe or Buick Skylark in the wild anymore.  Most of those passenger cars, vans, and trucks from the 80s and 90s are now rusting away in junkyards or some hillbilly's yard.

It occurred to me that the reason those vehicles are extinct and others like muscle cars of the 60s and 70s or hot rods of the 40s or 50s are still around is that no one chose to preserve those vehicles.  I mean, most people don't want to restore a Ford Probe and drive it around.  Or put a big fancy engine in it and give it a bright paint job.  No one thinks a Celebrity is a "classic" car.

For that matter, most of the ordinary cars of pretty much ever have also wound up in junkyards as scrap because no one bothers to try to preserve them.  What remains are the sports cars, some trucks, and some sedans from olden times.  And that also goes for museums.  I mean, I doubt any museum is going to have a Chevy Cavalier unless it was used as a pace car or connected to some famous event.  Those things just aren't that interesting to people.

What remains are things that people think have style and power.  Or historical value.  Cars like Model Ts, Bel Airs, or Corvettes.  The regular cars that were just pretty plain and boring get junked and no one cars.  After a while, no one probably even remembers them.  In another 20 years or so, that will probably true of Ford Focuses and the like.

This Focus is already in the junkyard. [sob]

(Electric cars might be forced to be junked the same way people have to get rid of old iPhones--because there's no longer the support for them.  I mean if your Volt or Tesla recharge station goes bad and they don't make any compatible ones anymore, you'd probably have to get rid of the car, right?  Unless you want to pay to get one from eBay or something.)

Such is the way for everything when you think about it.  Most of the books from the last 400 years wind up being lost and forgotten.  What remains are the "classics" people decided to preserve for one reason or another.  Because back in the 1600s there couldn't have just been Shakespeare, the Bible, Don Quixote, King Arthur, and Canterbury Tales.  There were probably plenty of other plays and books that no one saved.  Or in the 1930s there was tons of stuff being printed for pulp magazines and dime store paperbacks; most of that stuff is probably lost.

And of the billions of books on Amazon now, how many will survive into the future?  1%?  Less?  I doubt any of mine would be preserved by other people, because why should they be?  I'm not famous or infamous.  I wasn't well-regarded by critics or audiences.  There's really no reason that anyone would bother preserving the complete works of Eric Filler for eternity.  The Harry Potter books, definitely.  The more popular works of Stephen King, sure.  Award winning books, probably.  The early works of John Grisham or James Patterson?  Oprah's Book Club picks?  There I think it starts getting kinda spongy.  

Depressing as it may seem, the same applies to people.  Most people wind up being forgotten by history.  A few leaders, scientists, authors, philosophers, prophets, or criminals are preserved in the public records.  The other millions (and now billions) are forgotten except maybe within their own families or cities.  Isn't that why pharaohs wanted those pyramids?  So no one could forget them?

Anyway, next time you're on the road, maybe take a longer look at those ordinary cars--because it might be your last.