QUOTE : Maybe his thinking had been affected by the attitude of the age, in which a man tended to be less and less identified as an individual and more and more regarded based on the symbolic status of the car he drove. When a stranger rode down the street, one seldom thought of him as a person; one’s only immediate reaction was, “There goes a Ford — there goes a Pontiac — there goes one of those big goddam Imperials.” And men bragged about their cars instead of their characters.