Art Car

So I was taking pictures of this car when the car's owner showed up.

I'd heard about this car, especially back when I put the coffee mug on the roof of the original childsupportmobile.

The thing about having a mug on the roof, it was new to the people who noticed it, but after awhile, I was like, 'Uh, yeah, that. Glued on, thanks for your concern.' To the guys who jumped out at stoplights. To the highway patrol officers who pulled me over to rescue a mug they could have figured wouldn't hang on at 70 mph.

Earnie, the owner of this car, doesn't get pulled over by folks who think he mistakenly forgot he had a village on his roof.

He's also very modest about his vehicle, an 80s vintage Honda. "There's art cars everywhere," he said, as if you saw one of these for every shiny new Prius or F-150.

Ernie is from Staten Island, and he is also very religious. His faith is the main inspiration for the art on his car, and it's the part he's most eager to explain. He spent quit a bit of time on how he carved up a 'God Bless America' bumper sticker because he thought it was backwards: America has a duty, in Ernie's view, to bless God.

He's not shy, too, about his views on the economy. I take it Ernie got the short end of the big Economic Downturn and isn't entirely enjoying our high-budget sequel to the Great Depression.

And you can call it a great recession or a double-dip recession, but I think historians will call this America's second Great Depression. Or if we're in really bad luck, our second Long Recession. Not our second overall, because the one everyone thinks of as the big one wasn't our first by a long shot. See 1807, 1815, 1873...

And maybe Ernie is wise to focus much more on the divine, those market externalities that make the car you drive or the paycheck you earn seem trivial no matter how much you earn or how well you've expressed yourself artistically with your car.