Nothing like a little town hall meeting to mark one hundred days in office.  A nice win one for the Gipper speech before a receptive audience to make everybody feel better in bad times.  Barack Obama is perhaps the best president since Ronald Reagan when it comes to being able to speak to the hearts of an audience.  And America needs it now.  Things are not good and everybody needs some reassurance that we can get through this crisis. 

Of course the problems of the American auto industry were front and center in his words today.  Bad decisions had led to the position we are in now and President Obama could not justify more bad decisions with taxpayer dollars.  He would demand of auto executives that they table workable plans for a sustainable recovery if they wished to dip into the pockets of ordinary American citizens.  He is absolutely correct.  Bad decisions did bring us to this point.  But much as I dislike corporate executives and believe me, they must shoulder a significant portion of the blame, they can’t be tagged for it all.  Those bad decisions were made in a social culture that demanded just the decisions that they made.  It is a social culture that still exists and was reinforced in the president’s speech. 

Obama spoke of a time when the American auto industry built the cars that people wanted but lost their market to foreign competitors due to poor corporate decisions.  There certainly was a period of complacency that resulted in poor quality design and manufacture processes.   The American auto industry was producing vehicles that were plagued by breakdowns and recalls.  They lost the trust of the North American consumer who sought out imports that sold themselves on quality and fuel efficiency.  The president is absolutely correct lazy and stupid are bad decisions.  But were they not still designing vehicles that people wanted?  The answer is yes they were.  A cursory look at Japanese automobiles (still the chief competitor) since they broke onto the North American market will show you that Detroit didn’t change, Tokyo did.  How do the 6 and 8 cylinder four door luxury sedans full of computerized crap that just means more to break down compare to the Toyota Corolla and Corona with their simple functional design and fuel efficiency.  Not too well.  It is not that GM, Ford and Chrysler were force feeding us larger vehicles, we demanded them.  Look at the highways today and you see them full of over-sized quasi-trucks.  Many of those with brand names like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai and Mitsubishi.  That is what the people want.  There lies the problem.  We cannot afford to give the

Photo by David Williams, Knoxville Tennesee. Retrieved from FUH2.com

people what they want.  Just like you shouldn’t let your kid go on that all sugar diet she wants, you can’t let the childish North American have his Hummer.  The Earth is mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore.  (I know that GM is currently in the process of dumping its Hummer line.  Actually it is hoping to sell off the brand.  Take my advice, sell the brand to an adult toy manufacturer and not to some idiot that will try to make another ugly-ass vehicle out of it causing carbon and visual pollution.)

But there is more.  I said that Obama was correct in saying that bad decisions led us to this point but more bad decisions are not going to bail us out.  Bailing out the current automobile industry is an error of Earth shattering proportions, pun intended.  Obama’s speech mentioned moving to fuel efficient, environmentally friendly, blah, blah, whatever cars.  Hybrids, green cars, bio-fuels are all pacifiers stuck into the mouths of whining little brats who can’t get it through their heads that the private automobile must go.  If the money used to bail out these dinosaurs of our adolescence was put toward creating a comprehensive public  transit system (which would be both faster and cheaper) and into technologies such as carbon recovery, passive housing, etc.  it would create more jobs, make the economy more sustainable and guarantee our children and their children a future. 

Oh but wait that would make sense.  Can’t do that then.  And we won’t.  We will poor good money into this bygone contraption and when the inevitable comes we can only hope their is enough money and time left to save the planet.  And hope is all we have given the short-sightedness we continually confront and the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Eco-Catastrophe, breathing hard on our necks.  For now though we will all skip merrily over the cliff because no politician or community leader has the courage to just speak the truth.  But like the Earth I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.  So to paraphrase Shakespeare I say ‘First let’s kill all the people who own Hummers and see where we get from there.’