Vehicular Armageddon

I first heard of the GM bankruptcy while sitting at an empty gate in the Minneapolis airport on Monday. A television was on, but no one was watching it. It was more like a radio as I watched takeoffs and landings in the distance.

It was impressive to hear the level of production that must have gone into the news segments on the bankruptcy. You'd have thought Bob Hope had just died again -- flashbacks to earlier eras, apple pies and Chevy trucks, lifelong Chevy men whose feelings of betrayal teared their eyes...it really was impressive, wasn't it?

I was moved, too. I sat there in the empty terminal with my own boyhood dreams of owning a '57 hardtop now forever crushed. It was the end. It was over. Vehicular Armageddon had arrived...


Interestingly, very little was broadcasted on the financial impacts of this filing, the details of restructuring, etc. No one really seems to give a shit about that sorta thing, do they...another ho-hum day in our cratering economy, just another failure in a succession of failed banks, investment firms, corporations, what have you. In any event, Britain's talent had stolen the limelight...

However, this one impacts the very essence of what it means to be an American. Car ownership. And multiple ownership at that. Somehow you'd think that all those Chevy cars and trucks are suddenly going to be taken off the road, that we all just lost a quarter of what we spend our working lives to own and maintain. That's the exact feeling the networks wanted to exude with their reporting. We've lost our way, our identity. Things will never be the same...

Ummmm...yes they will.

Now you'll just be owning two Chinese Cherys in your garage instead. The American worker --who wanted a pension, some scraps of a health insurance plan, and the dignity of work --all of that has been outsourced now, just like everything else. Two Chinese Cherys will be less expensive than one Detroit sled, so that means you can buy twice as much, and in a nation obsessed with material wealth, twice as much is four times gooder.