Author: Kim du Toit

Last Sunday was the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, whereby car enthusiasts converge on the famed golf course and drool over the various examples of automotive gorgeousity strewn around like a rich man’s carelessly-scattered diamonds on green velvet.

Here are a couple other examples:

Iso Rivolta:

Ferrari Pininfarina:

And all was well in the land, until this little Wokist twerp got in on the act:

Let’s get two things cleared up before we continue. The first is that while the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is certainly far from the most momentous cultural event of the year, it is the most prestigious car show anywhere in the world. For a few days in late summer, the 18th fairway at the Pebble Beach golf course is the very highest point for any rich person who covets vintage cars, and the highest honor for any person working in the business of restoring classics.
The second is that Mercedes was not just a car company that was busy at work doing normal car stuff during the time in which Nazis were in power in Germany. Mercedes was an early and direct supporter of Adolf Hitler long before he took power, helping him out while he was still an outsider figure in Bavarian politics. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he got picked up in a Mercedes-Benz.

Ergo, says this girlyman, we should not have the 540K as the winner because it was driven by Nazis.  Here’s the car in question:

And then this:

This is exactly how this car is seen in this world of the mega-rich: an encapsulation of “the optimistic mood” of Germany in 1934. Let us ask: for whom was this an optimistic time, and who is the kind of person who looks back on that time now, remembering its icons for their … optimism? Rich people, that’s who.

Wow… wealth envy and oh-so laudable “anti-Nazi” sentiment all wrapped up in a neat little bundle.  Read the whole thing to get the RCOB that Longtime Reader Ken S. warned me I’d get, when he sent it to me yesterday.  And I did.

Even better is that the writer suffers from the usual hypocrisy of his ilk, in that he owns a… Volkswagen Beetle, surely the most Hitlerish of all German cars of the 1930s.

So just for the hell of it, feast your eyes on a couple other examples of this eeeevil car:

And to hell with this wokist revisionism.  Let’s just enjoy the automotive excellence.

Pity, though:  I used to enjoy reading Jalopnik.