The American auto industry lies in shambles. The arrogance and power and prosperity of “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” now feels like a threat. The industry that revolutionized transportation, industrial innovation (everything from the Model T to the Batmobile–and, oops, the Volare and Edsel, too), mass production, and profoundly altered where we live and where we work, is standing in a government soup line.

I was born in Detroit, a good place to be from (ba-dump-BUMP).  My father was a lifer at Chrysler. Every kid I knew had a dad who was a lifer somewhere in the car biz.  In grade school, we didn’t go on field trips to museums, we went to the River Rouge plant and Jefferson Assembly.  Our civic heroes weren’t writers or actors or statesmen, they were mythical lions like Ford and Olds, and “car guys” like Iacocca, Shelby and DeLorean (pre-coke bust). The annual international auto show was the event; for a week it put my grubby rust belt city on front pages worldwide. We lived not too far from the steak house where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen; it was not some far off mob story, it was right there on Telegraph Road, on the way to the mall that, like all good Detroiters (and Americans), we drove to.  And now Detroit may be the first industrial American city to die.

As such, people keep asking me about the “bailout,” thinking that the 10W40 in my blood might make for some insight that doesn’t redact this Gordian knot of a problem into the easily digestible either/or proposition that we seem to be comfortable with in this era of Jerry Springer chair-throwing-styled debates. It is a dynamic that largely ignores the swirling vortex of factors and players; it’s like the end of Reservoir Dogs–everyone’s got a gun pointed at everyone else, and we get to watch with a mixture of revulsion, disbelief and schadenfreude.  Unions, executives, politicians, economic Darwinists and ideological blowhards of all persuasions have dogs in this fight.  All have their interests, biases, valid points and hysterical overreactions.  Some intersect, most diverge.

A popular bogie man (especially among the Wall Street Journal and Fox News crowd) is the UAW.  They grew fat and powerful and lazy.  They are grossly overpaid (especially compared to those in workers’ paradises such as China and India) and saddle the industry with untenable “legacy costs.”   Any bailout has to include provisions to “control” them, or rein in their influence.  Many Republican commentaries on the bailout sound like nothing more than a naked, union-busting power grab, as if a good union salary is somehow more “un-American” than an eight-figure CEO salary.  However, one need not look further than the jobs bank (where workers are paid even if there is no need for their job at that time) to see that there is some merit to this viewpoint.  On the other hand, they also provide tens of thousands of skilled manufacturing jobs.  If those jobs are lost, we are told, the ripple effect would be devastating.  After all, no car industry is worse than a failing or broken one.

Maybe the government is to blame.  Maybe there needs to be more intervention from Washington; legislate higher fuel economy standards, dictate what kind of cars can be made, require innovation.  Ignore Congress’ decades long predilection for being the industry’s lapdog, or the convoluted CAFÉ standards that allow for political cover but accomplish little, or that government-run auto companies give us winners like the Yugo.

Then there are the companies themselves, with their business models leading straight for the concrete abutment of oblivion or irrelevancy.  Sure, they gorged themselves at the hog troughs of SUV profits. Didn’t hear many complaints then about how unfair unions or government meddling were then, did we?   They have been painfully reluctant to accept change and display a pattern of resistance and outright hostility to science (Who Killed the Electric Car?) and safety (it took untold lawsuits and some [rare] useful action from the government to force carmakers to implement safety glass, seat belts, airbags and emissions reductions).  To paraphrase Hearst’s muckraking: Remember the Pinto!

To top it all off, we have the perfect perp walk, via scapegoats that sit sweatily in the white glare of the hearing room lights: the out of touch, tone-deaf CEOS!  Didn’t we all enjoy the theater of them being castigated for their Robber Baron salaries and smug sense of entitlement?  Didn’t the righteous indignation over the corporate jets make us feel better?  The promises of a pay cut to $1 may have exacted our pound of flesh but solved nothing of import.  Sure, these guys should be publicly flogged, but these are cosmetic changes and the lawmakers are all too eager to comply now that the political winds have shifted, especially if it deflects any culpability on their part.

And, yes, they deserve to be punished; a business that does not thrive should not be propped up by the government.  Should the government should have kept Underwood in business making typewriters in the face of the nascent computer industry?  It goes against all the precepts of free market capitalism (just ignore that that is exactly what they recently did for the banks…).  More damning, though, is that they chose not to lead, to look forward, to innovate, or to use America’s dynamism and technological prowess to improve their products.  But, really, can you blame the CEOs for running their companies into the ground by making bigger and more obnoxious cars?   It’s merely a reflection of our crack-mentality approach to capitalism, in all its eight-cylinder glory.

With all these villains to go around, the dirty little unacknowledged or unrealized truth is that we too are one of them, perhaps the main one, but nobody likes to hear that they are part of the problem.  Our short sighted, selfish interests as consumers add a substantial piece to this little morality play.  While it is cathartic to point our fingers at unions or government agencies or craven CEOs, it ignores the basic tenet of supply and demand.  We demanded it, they supplied it.  Now we are playing the hapless victims, like we were forced to buy a shitty, gas-guzzling car.  Hell, they were just giving us what we wanted.

Americans have a remarkable capacity to delude convenience into necessity.   Instead of demanding fuel efficiency or development of alternative fuels and power trains, we asked for more cup holders, three rows of seats, an entertainment system and a high riding profile.   We wanted a car that could tackle the Sahara desert or the drive through raging rivers or scale Everest, even if we were only driving to the Chuck E. Cheese’s in Schaumberg.  Fuel economy?  Let the other guy worry about that. After all, we needed the Escalades and Tahoes.  It was the OTHER guy who was the jerk for having one.

We bought the SUVs (and when I say “we” I mean “not me”) when there were already ample reasons not to.  We were sending money to our enemies–despotic, unstable, unFREE regimes. A journalist recently summed it up by noting “we are borrowing money from China to send it to Saudi Arabia”. We were hastening global warning–is there anything more galling than an SUV with anti-Bush bumper sticker? We were filling the roads with obnoxious, oversized and unsafe eyesores.  Driving a Hummer represented a giant FUCK YOU.  It was a grand expression of selfishness to which we all aspired.   Only when gas got expensive did we get our dander up.  We demanded little and received it in a massively over-horse-powered dose.

Now we are eager to blame everyone else for going along with it, for enabling our base indulgences and extravagances.  It was THEM that forced the gas-guzzling SUVs on us, depriving us of fuel-efficient hybrids.  We were powerless innocents.  Hey, if you don’t want a McDonald’s in your neighborhood, don’t buy any fucking McNuggets, okay?  The SUV binge was our own damn fault.  When will we learn that when we buy something we are voting for the kind of world we want around us?

Ultimately, the “what to do” question is far too complex for me and too complex for a short attention-spanned public looking to an obliging media for an easy scapegoat.  It’s certainly too tough to tackle in a short blog posting geared towards the digital, short-attention spanned generation.   I can only hope a lot of people far smarter than me, and not just some political poltroons, get a chance to address the problem in a meaningful way.  God help us if we get an “auto czar” in the mold of the Michaels, Chertoff or Brown–the wizards of Katrina relief.

It’s probably time to move on and a bailout is only delaying the inevitable, the necessarily inevitable.  The century of reliance on the internal combustion engine is perhaps over, and the gas-thirsty entitlement of generations of Americans is at an end. This bailout might be along the lines of sinking money into the canal system at the expense of ascendant railroads, only now the stakes are much higher, for our economy, our planet, our security, and our place in the world as a political power, as well as source of hope and entrepreneurial vigor.  The grand American tradition of problem solving by our spirit of innovation and big thinking is being diluted by this false choice of bail out or no bail out.  With private car ownership per 1,000 people at 480 in the US, in comparison to a rapidly-rising 1,000-9 ratio in China, it is an unsustainable proposition anyway.  The paradigm has to shift, but all the entrenched interests (including us) would rather point fingers or shrug shoulders or turn a blind eye; they didn’t see it coming, or didn’t WANT to see it coming; it is a solution (or non-solution) based on status quo thinking, and that’s the saddest part of all.