On Automakers and Americana

Tearing down the open road with the top down, windows wide-open, radio blaring good old rock n roll - what could be more American?

A whole lot of things: Coca-Cola, comic books and the underwear-clad superheroes who populate them, Dungeons & Dragons, the banjo - and those are just off the top of my head. Let's not blow smoke up our national skirt when we discuss the auto industry and its contributions to Americana. While I agree with President Obama that our country would be in worse shape were the auto industry allowed to die the death it deserves in the grave of its own digging, I stringently oppose the idea that victims of the industry's shoddy craftsmanship may get as little as ¹/₂¢ on the dollar for their claims!

All the fuzzy feelings over muscle cars and Route 66 belong to a generation or three past - a generation, I'll scholastically add, who has done more damage to this country (and world) than pretty much any other since the Industrial Age. A generation whose avarice and plotting led directly to the downfall of these very automakers they laud.

America is a country which doesn't just allow consumers to be victimized, it encourages it. Worst of all is the stigma attached to "getting played" - the kind of shame which keeps so many from reporting it. It is more of the Blame the Victim mentality I so frequently deride here, and this is the very reason I do so. I know this is a preachy post, but it's been... shit, like a year or more since I wrote one and the bankruptcy of the American automakers is definitely a matter of American history and Americana. And it still needs to be said; I will quit preaching the pitfalls of this terrible, Medieval, Blame the Victim ideology when it stops being so prominent!

"Buyer Beware" is literally a euphemism for "Don't hold large companies responsible for bad craftsmanship because they provide many Americans with jobs." Except they don't. Most of these products are manufactured overseas, where their "customer service" centers are now located (since the turn of the Millennium, anyway). The idea that "everybody gets what they deserve" is precisely as philosophically advanced as "that chick totally wanted it" and "you get what you pay for" is simply a play on that theme.

Accidents do happen and no matter how much we Americans want to find someone to blame, they are no one's fault and no one can truthfully be held responsible for them (even if someone is), but these lawsuits discount any chance of accident, and deserve to be heard and settled on their merits. Many are pushing for a quick resolution, even though they know there is no guarantee they will ever actually get whatever they may be awarded.

Why?

What I don't know about bankruptcy could fill the Web (it does, come to think of it) but I know that entering bankruptcy literally means one cannot pay one's debts, which must be forgiven to some degree (structured payment plans, et.al.). I agree with it as a legal maneuver, however last-ditch, but maiming, dismemberment, paralyzation, and death due to poor workmanship? Why are they getting off the hook for that?

This illustrates everything that is wrong with bailing-out these industries to start with: they fucked-up, so they should suffer the consequences! That's what a free-market society is. And if that sounds antithetical to my whole "anti-Blame the Victim" campaign, you have to consider the fact that these companies are the very ones who victimized consumers to the point that no one wanted to purchase their inferior product and deal with their inferior customer service in the first place! The automakers are no victims of ailing economies, or anything else, aside from their own greed and mismanagement.

Whatever you want to say about unions, corruption, and so on, the automakers cannot fault the benefits they provided union members, even though they absolutely over-extended themselves by offering such outrageous benefits. It was an optimistic attempt to maintain the "Company Man" way of American life some 50 years after it ceased to be viable - or relevant. Again, the same generations who extol the overreaching "Americana" of the automakers are the ones who mismanaged these megacorporations right into the ground, so who is really losing anything with their demise aside from these dummies?

Obviously, tens of thousands of minimally-skilled workers will be displaced. This once again brings up the issue of illegal immigration, as there are more than enough jobs for underskilled and physical laborers in America, they're just being done by illegal immigrants for half the wages federal law says must be paid their legal counterparts. And who says these people are necessarily unskilled? Whatever skills they learned as part and parcel of their auto-industry job(s) must surely be applicable in some related industry... oh, that's right - those industries are all located overseas now. It's cheaper that way, as the megacorporations pioneered and profited by.

These assholes did this to themselves - even in the face of everyone who was telling them not to do it! They made a point of flaunting the very fact that they were doing it, trying to convince us all that it was a perfectly viable exploitation of the law that we should expect them to... exploit - that it was somehow clever and efficient of them. It's this very concept which has resulted in the nationwide apathy for which my generation is so well-known.

Do we not all expect Big Business and The Government to produce sub-standard results at a bare minimum of efficiency for the largest profit margin possible? And, when they inevitably do, do we not all sigh, "Well, that's what They do..." and carry on? Are we so complacent that, when these bastions of all that is wrong with this Goddamned world finally get their comeuppance, we're going to show them mercy!?

Now, no one can accuse me of being some Right-winger, Conservative... whatever - in fact, I'm most often characterized as some hippy-dippy dummy who lets everyone get over on him (because it happens so often) - so please hear me when I say that even I am for letting the American automakers go bankrupt and die!

These insufferable power structures symbolize everything that is wrong with America, everything that has been wrong with this country for decades now, and this is what we wanted to happen to them! These are the despots of our nation, people! We should rejoice in their ruin and eagerly discuss how best to build a fair and mutually beneficial world on their bones, learning from their "mistakes," and righting them. Why do we keep giving them the benefit of the doubt when they have proven themselves corrupt beyond all redemption? These people have no concept of reality; they are literally doing and saying whatever they need to to cover one another's butts. And this "One hand washes the other" mentality is exactly what got us to this point to start with! Doing whatever you want and having others help cover it up in return for helping cover-up their corruption and misdeeds results in the few getting more than they deserve at the cost of the many.

They have the audacity to present their egregious misconduct as enterprising, daring, and creative - why, their success proves it! And they keep the customer from getting too ballsy and questioning their behavior with the Buyer Beware mantra: the consumer is always responsible. Eventually, consumers are exasperated by the process and and give up trying en masse.

This backhanded strategy did not work, though; it failed. Brazenly cheating will not work, no matter how many times you try it, no matter how much you really want it to, because it pisses people off. And these Good Ol' Boys are not going to change their ways, no matter how many chances they get. I am just barely willing to throw my hands up in despair at the entire thing on an average day - I sure as hell don't want to be party to this stuff!

So, at this point, we come full-circle: with the bail-out of industry after industry, company after company, and now the possibility of bailing-out entire states, our money is being used to pay the salaries and bonuses of people and firms who sold us out, and sold us short. And now we "own" a piece of their way of business.

We need to remember that great, American maxim: "Buyer Beware."

© C Harris Lynn, 2009