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June 13, 2005
Looking at the US from outside
America for the Americans seems to be the cry in some quarters. After all, America is different and we can expect outsiders to understand -- for example, our love affair with the automobile.
Wrong, as the story of the new Mustang shows:
"This is the best Mustang ever produced," said Brad Barnett, who runs an enthusiasts' Web site called TheMustangSource.com. "It's all-American. Baseball, apple pie and Mustang are all-American."
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the new Mustang is largely the creation of a Vietnamese immigrant named Hau Thai-Tang.
. . .
it was another Asian American -- Larry Shinoda, held in internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II -- who designed the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, arguably the top rival to the Mustang as the quintessential American car.
The rest of the story can be read at last Sunday's Washington Post,
"Importing Ingenuity". As the story points out:
Sometimes it takes a distant vantage point to see America quite that way. After all, it was Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville who captured the spirit of American democracy in essays in the 1800s, and fellow countryman Frederic Auguste Bartholdi who created the great symbol of the Statue of Liberty. Think of the Eastern Europeans of the early 20th century who shaped American cinema -- Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer. Or French designer Raymond Loewy, who created the Greyhound Scenicruiser, the Shell and Exxon logos, the streamlined S-1 locomotive that was the pinnacle of 1930s railroading.
Keeping an open mind to ideas from others is always a good policy (as some in this country seem to have forgotten).
Posted by Ken Jarboe at June 13, 2005 1:58 PM
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