Marian took me to the auto show in Detroit, just as the show was closing, and as we wandered the gigantic convention floor full of gleaming sports cars, adorable electric putt-putts, and trucks whose tires stood taller than my head, I couldn’t help but wonder why Americans are so angry at our state’s autoworkers and the companies for which they work, or used to work, when they still had jobs.
Marian had warned me that this year’s show wouldn’t be as glitzy or impressive as auto shows used to be. But I have lived in Michigan for fifteen years, and I felt ashamed that I had never gotten around to attending one. I didn’t mind that the crowds milling about the arena consisted not of sleek celebrities but overweight Michiganders attempting to squeeze in bucket seats too small to accommodate their bulk while their kids disappeared into Hummers, which, surprisingly, still took up a colossal expanse on the convention floor. And I enjoyed comparing the mpgs of the domestic hybrids I might buy when my trusty Corolla finally dies.
But I found myself disappointed that the auto show didn’t provide a glimpse of cars that someday might run on sun or wind or water … and still be inexpensive enough to afford. As I laughed at my slightly unrealistic expectations, I realized many people’s impatience with the auto industry no doubt stems from similarly unrealistic expectations as to what technology might provide.
Of course, innovations simply may need more time to become reality than we first expect. Last week, as I talked to my brother via Skype, we reminisced about the last time we had communicated by videophone—at the 1964 World’s Fair. But even if GM is working on a car that will run on air and simply didn’t want to tip its hand to Ford (or vice versa), the problem is less that the auto companies haven’t been innovative enough than that the rest of us have failed to change the way we think about getting from place to place.
Electric cars might free us from our dependence on foreign oil, but they require that we produce electricity using coal-fired plants, which, in their present state, are terrible for our environment, or nuclear energy, whose deadly waste we haven’t yet figured out how to store. Not to mention that we would blow the fuse on our nation’s grid every afternoon at 5 when millions of commuters pulled in their garages and plugged in their batteries.
A few weeks ago, Marian took me to see Grand Torino, a movie I never would have appreciated before I moved here. I would have dismissed a retired Polish autoworker like Walt Kowalski as an uneducated bigot who had worked with his body all his life because he was too thickheaded to get a better education and whose only method for solving problems was to curse people, beat them up, or shoot them.
But the neighborhood Marian grew up in isn’t far from the street where Walt Kowalski lives, and his father could have played the part. True, his father worked for the auto industry as an architect rather than on the line. But he abides by much the same code as Walt. At 86, he only recently gave up playing hockey. Like Walt, he’s obsessive about the appearance of his house and lawn; he used to mow his grass religiously … with a scythe. And given what I know about his resistance against the Nazis and Communists before he and Marian’s mother walked out of Poland, even if he muttered beneath his breath about his neighbor’s religion or ethnicity, he would probably risk his life to help the guy.
Before I moved to the Midwest, I wouldn’t have understood an autoworker’s pride in the cars he made or why he might have wanted to toss a rock at the Corolla I was driving. I grew up in New York and couldn’t have found Michigan on a map. My uncle owned a Pontiac dealership in Queens, and, like a teenager who still believes the stork brings babies, I assumed that automobiles came from Long Island.
I also was brought up to think that anyone with ambition or smarts would acquire an education so he or she could sit behind a desk rather than stand on an assembly line. What kind of parent would discourage his kids from attending college on the grounds that if a factory job was good enough for him, it was good enough for them?
Such an ethos seemed nonsensical until I met people who believed they deserved respect for being tough enough to withstand a grueling day of labor and whose joy in life derived from spending time with their families or sipping beer and barbecuing sausages with their friends in their well-maintained back yards. Why spend all those years in college learning things you might never use if you could earn a better wage making cars?
Bad enough that people who like to buy nicely packaged steaks and boneless, skinless chicken don’t want to know who slaughtered those cows or skinned those chickens. How can consumers denounce the workers who manufacture the products they want or need for demanding to be paid not only a subsistence wage, but enough to be able to afford a decent house and medical care?
Easterners tend to think they know the Midwest better than Midwesterners know it. I once sent a novel to an editor in New York and was amazed when she circled a passage in which the characters huddled in their basement to avoid a tornado, as my son and I used to huddle in our basement when the sirens blared. “THERE ARE NO TORNADOES IN THE MIDWEST!” the editor scrawled in red.
I find it difficult to sit still while people back east quote erroneous statistics about how much auto workers supposedly make per hour or Southern politicians brag about how they don’t need to ask for handouts because their factories produce automobiles more cheaply than ours, as if one reason for that disparity weren’t that Southern factories get their electricity at a cheaper rate because it derives from government-financed TVA projects.
Anyone who lives here knows there’s plenty of blame to go around. When Marian and I drove to Chicago a few weeks ago, we left his Explorer home because my Toyota gets so much better mileage. When we hit a pothole and got a flat, we changed the tire much more easily than the owners of the American-built SUVs that hit that same pothole because their spares were located underneath their vehicles and had rusted in place.
But before you hold autoworkers responsible for the unavailability of a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon without contributing to global warming, before you fault them for thinking that Americans might still take pride in working with their bodies, before you deny them government support to enable them to train for jobs in an economy yet to come, maybe you ought to slip behind the steering wheel of their lives, take a test drive
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