Analyzing My Text's Cultural Setting

Francesco Crippa "DSC_6265.jpg" September 7, 2013 via Flickr
reuse with attribution

In this blog post, I am analyzing the cultural setting and background that impacts the Esquire/Road & Track article about "Remembering a Golden Age of Cheap Cars."

This article was published in Road & Track magazine on September 3, 2015. The author is writing about his experiences as a teenager in 1990 in regard to car culture. The setting is somewhere in the Rust Belt, likely Ohio.

1. The author's young age plays into this story because it strongly limits what he and his friends can afford. The other norms that strongly play into the anecdotes in this piece are that getting your driver's license and getting a car used to be the biggest priority that anyone around age 16 had. This level of universal car culture has decreased. Another strong value mentioned is the lack of affluence of the author. He was wealthy enough that his parents could afford to "silently help [him] stretch for new car payments by covering food and insurance..." but not so wealthy that his parents might buy him a Civic Si or even a BMW.
2. The text directly interacts with all of these cultural values. They set the stage for when the author got his first new car based on his work as a bag boy during high school at a local supermarket.
3. The text is genuinely supportive of the cultural values that it contains but it laments that many of them are no longer as present in culture as they once were. He laments the fact that nowadays, there is much less of a good economy for people without a college degree. He laments the lack of affordable cars that make lifetime customers. Finally, he laments when teenagers currently experience uch more entitlement.