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THE RETREAT OF PEOPLE WHO MAKE THINGS: PONDERING THAT HARD-WORKING ENDANGERED SPECIES.

By Peter Egan, Editor-at-Large

Road & Track. Avril 2009
http://www.roadandtrack.com/article.asp?section_id=26&article_id=7716

On a working trip to California last month, I found myself in a pretty nice place. I was behind the wheel of a new ZR1 Corvette, parked on a winding road north of Santa Barbara, waiting to move the car into position so our photo staff could shoot a cover shot for our March issue. We had six high-performance sports and GT cars in the group, all making 600 or more horsepower.

The road curved downhill toward a Capuchin monastery, scenically perched on a ridge. We'd rented this private road from the monastery so we could shoot photos without highway traffic speeding by.

Only an occasional car or truck came down the road, mostly people arriving for what we were told was a weekend religious retreat. Everyone smiled and waved pleasantly, despite the almost spectral contrast between these cars and our serene location. Lamborghinis and contemplatives aren't always a combination made in heaven, but most passers-by seemed amused by our presence and cheerfully interested in the cars.

It was a beautiful spot, with the sun going down and a full moon rising over the Coastal Range, and we sat for perhaps half an hour, waiting for that magical moment of dusk when cars photograph best. Photographers, like vampires and werewolves, don't really come alive until it's that time of the evening when you should really be looking for the nearest inn. To normal people, this hour is also known as "dinnertime."

As we sat in our cars, waiting for twilight, I found myself pondering the interesting historical connection between good scenery and spiritual reflection. The two just seem to go together. Hardly anybody ever holds a religious retreat in, say, downtown Newark or Gary, Indiana. We like to mend our souls on placid mountaintops or in the clean white deserts, and then test them later in a more industrial setting.

And as I sat in the car, I suddenly realized that my own serene meditative state was slowly being eroded by something on the Corvette's radio. I was half-listening, you see, to a news program. It was a panel discussion, with congressional leaders, economists and various pundits discussing the pros and cons of a Detroit automotive bailout. I turned it up and listened.

It essentially reiterated a wide range of opinion on the subject, which I'd also been following for weeks on TV and in the newspapers.

Some thought we should throw money at the problem to stave off a general meltdown of the U.S. economy and to prevent massive unemployment, not only in the car companies themselves but in the many satellite companies that supply components. And in the companies that sell those employees pizza, shoes, homes, insurance and dish soap. Not to mention car magazines.

Others thought the car companies deserved to go broke because they'd failed to anticipate the sudden rejection of SUVs and trucks by the motoring public — and for simply making too many cars that no one wanted to buy. Bankruptcy would just be "Darwinian economics," one commentator pointed out. It was Nature's way to let dinosaurs go extinct.

Poor Darwin. The cold of heart have always forced a sociological spin on his biological work — from Spencer all the way through Hitler and Stalin — as if humans had no more free will or moral stature than trilobites or the lizards of the Galápagos Islands. Natural selection is a great excuse to ignore those who have not so richly deserved to succeed as you and I. And I'm not so sure about you...

Still others thought this would be a great time to force the automakers into bankruptcy and break the unions forever. After all, assembly line workers with high seniority were dragging down $71 an hour, if you included medical insurance and all their other benefits. Why should a person who never even graduated from law school or sold a single junk bond get to own a house or send a kid to college? It was baffling. There were highly trained English Majors who didn't make that much, and all these union guys knew how to do was build engines.

To make things worse, CEOs of the domestics had recently flown to Washington on private jets and when questioned, seemed clueless on why they needed exactly $25 billion in bailouts, rather than, say, $26 or $24 billion. Luckily, they drove back to Washington a week later in hybrid vehicles with detailed plans asking for much more money, and that seemed to make everyone happier.

Except, perhaps for the freshly unemployed pilots and aircraft mechanics. Everything has a ripple these days, and people with definable skills are usually the first to notice.

In any case, the gathered politicians were very hard on the CEOs — beat them up, really. It was not a pretty sight. And perhaps they did have much to answer for.

Yet, strangely, there was very little self-examination among the committee members. Couldn't most of these problems, after all, be traced back to simple banking rules that Congress had failed to regulate? Hadn't the real trouble started not with car companies, but with banks making ridiculously risky real estate loans and then packaging them as "commodities" and selling them on the world market?

Yet, almost without blinking, our government had thrown hundreds of billions at the banking and insurance industries to cover their mistakes, no questions asked. This was probably a necessary step, as without a working credit market nothing in America — or the world — moves.

But where, in this circus of humiliation, were the banking CEOs and Wall Street geniuses who had brought this country to its knees — and were still taking huge salaries and bonuses and using their taxpayer billions to buy other banks? Why were they not sitting in the hot seat at a congressional hearing, being pilloried? Why had no arrests been made?

Influence?

Good lobbyists?

Collusion?

Listening to the radio, I couldn't tell. My adrenaline was running high, so I finally had to shut off the program before I had a heart attack.

To restore my equilibrium, I sat quietly in the Corvette for a while and looked around at the interior.

Wonderful car, this Corvette. One of the best I've ever driven. Fast and remarkably refined, a distillation of years and years of research, engineering know-how and just plain hard work by people who really are highly trained and take their jobs seriously.

I looked at the interior of the car, the seats, dash and steering wheel. Beautifully stitched leather, nicely formed metal and several large trim sections of glossy carbon fiber. I ran my hand over those pieces of carbon fiber on the dash and console. They were perfect.

Somewhere — maybe in Detroit or elsewhere in the Midwest — was a division of Chevrolet or an outside supplier where these sections of carbon fiber were produced. Somewhere there was a real shop where people got up in the morning, came to work and made these pieces. They knew how to mix and cure the chemicals, how to lay the fiber mats and how to form, trim and polish these parts. They knew how to make stuff.

Was it really possible that all these people were going to lose their jobs to the dazzling mixture of greed and incompetence displayed by our captains of finance? Those smart, high-flying professionals we'd entrusted to handle our earnings and savings?

When I was a kid, my dad had an epithet reserved for those he held in the lowest esteem. He called them "Worse than useless." Funny, but every time I read the papers or watch the news now, that phrase pops into my head.

But it's not a description I would apply to the folks who are losing their jobs around here. The ones who can actually design and build something useful. People who know how to weld and stitch and bolt things together, and have to stand on their feet eight hours a day to do it.

Here in Rock County, Wisconsin, our big Janesville GM plant closed this past December. The plant is about 25 miles from our house, and the economic spinoff of all those lost jobs has been quite sobering to see. People need to move, but they can't sell their houses. Restaurants are in a slump, shops of all kinds are closing. The car lots are quiet white deserts of snow.

Our local paper had a front-page story today about all the churches in the area that are holding special masses and services to pray for the unemployed, and to organize relief. There's a picture of a nice young family at a church service with their two children, ages 6 and 4, and the story said both parents recently lost their jobs. Now here's a religious retreat of a different order — one that really is being held in an industrial region, rather than on a scenic mountaintop.

Should these people be bailed out?

It's all right with me. And I hope by the time you read this, it will already have happened. At this moment, the debate still rages — and Chrysler has just shut down operations "for at least a month." The people who made the Viper in our comparison test are out of work.

Maybe our friends from the recently failed — but now charitably rescued — financial sector can help.

If not, they should at least stop talking about Darwin. It draws unwanted attention to their own sociological and biological fitness.