“HEAD OUT ON THE HIGHWAY”

Like most creative endeavors, an idea for a civics lesson comes from many sources. There is an advertisement running in my local TV market – I'm sure it is running nationally – that I believe contains a strong civic message. The car manufacturer, Subaru, is the responsible party.

The ad starts with a fairly close-up shot of a young woman struggling with some physical chore. It turns out that she is changing a tire on a car (of course, a Subaru). As the ad progresses, she struggles with loosening the bolts (finally, resorting to some foot action – better leverage); she struggles with removing the tire; she struggles with picking up the replacement tire and then lining it up. The shooting splices the action into short segments of the chore. As she finally finishes, which one assumes took a very long time, this fairly tall man emerges from behind the car. You hear a male voice-over saying that he wanted her to know she could do it and the shot then shifts to another close up of the young lady's face, smiling and portraying a sense of pride. The next scene is of the tallish man putting his arm around the young lady's shoulder. From this perspective, it becomes clear the young lady is a very young teenager. This is the first time you see her standing up and you realize the tire height is almost half her height. Here, in a few scenes, is a good summation of what this blog has tried to establish – the federalist vision of equality.

No product represents our sense of individualism more than the automobile. While Steppenenwolf's classic rock song, Born to Be Wild, is probably about motorcycles, the song can serve as a natural rights anthem and, for most of us, the automobile promises the song's image of freedom. It, the car, allows one to be able to travel where one wants to go in order to do what one wants to do. Our folklore is full of images of the young and the not so young traveling around our open spaces capturing this image of independence. And yet, even here, there are duties to fulfill and necessities to satisfy. This young girl, as a personification of liberty, needs to have workable tires on that conveyer of freedom. She will not necessarily have, at all times, access to a service station or helpful person – a male – to fix a flat tire. Even if she belongs to AAA – how institutional – she might find herself in some remote place without her cell phone or in a place where she does not have a strong enough signal to use that cell. As the male voice in the ad tells us, he wants her to be as safe as possible; therefore, she needs to know how and be physically able to change a tire. Flats are common enough that the inability to fix one does offer a meaningful enough danger.

And yet who is it that is providing the instruction? It's someone who cares enough to provide it: Dad. So, even when the image is one of independence, of individualism, there is the appropriate institutional figure, the family member, who is providing the instruction for the young lady to be able to exercise her freedom in a reasonably safe manner. The ad doesn't show the interaction between father and daughter that led to this instructional session. I think we are led to believe that a bit of even coercion might have led to the two of them being out there so the daughter could accomplish this purely instructional task; the first tire didn't seem flat or seem it had a puncture. I'm not positive, but I am fairly sure the car was not presently hers to use and, therefore, changing the tire did not benefit her in any immediate way. If the young teen is symbolic of a typical teenager, then the lesson probably did not have the importance to her that it did her father. Yet she fulfilled her obligation to follow her father's directive.

I don't have a daughter. I have a lovely daughter-in-law. I have wondered about how good a dad I would have been to a daughter. I have often felt strongly that what I would have tried to accomplish would include instilling a strong sense of independence and self-reliance. Sports – even team sports – is a good teacher of such values. Perhaps naively, I would have highly encouraged her to participate in sports as I did my son. In any event, a scene like the one depicted in the ad would have definitely been part of my parenting strategy. Nothing promotes women's lib more, other than sane public policy, than to promote among young girls a strong sense of self-worth and self-confidence in order for them to aim high and to attain the skills necessary to succeed in our competitive economy.

To me, obviously, there is a lot in this ad – maybe more than its producers intended. But I believe the ad is a fine way to introduce a federalist conception of the balance between communal and individualistic interests. Symbolically, the ad presents a fine depiction of the relative legitimacy of both types of interests and how they both can function in a productive interaction. It suggests a model for such interactions that a civics class can formulate and then apply to many politically challenging situations.