I consid er myself a good American, and a good union man too, but I'm having trouble getting worked up over the demise of General Motors.
When I was very young, some 40 odd years ago, people aligned themselves with their favorite car companies. "We've always been a Ford family," you might hear somebody say. Or "well, that Mustang looks nice, but we buy Chryslers." People who bought foreign cars were thought to be vaguely un-American; nobody would run you out of town, but it wasn't in your favor. Baltimore was a steel town back then, and American steel went into American cars. People would say, "What kind of person bets against the home team?"
My family was a GM family. The first GM car we had, that I can remember, was a '55 Chevrolet Bel Air, and it was pretty fancy too: two-toned paint, air conditioning, and power windows. Except the air conditioning never worked and the windows went down o.k., but didn't like to go back up, so we didn't use them. Driving in the summer was a horrible ordeal.
We also had a '65 Bel Air station wagon. It liked to stall in the rain. We'd drive through a puddle and the thing would just shut down for half an hour.
After that, my mom got all scientific and researched her next car purchase. The best minds of the day (in the form of Consumer Reports Magazine), seemed to indicate that she should purchase a 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass S. It was a huge lemon. The transmission broke every 3 weeks or so. The company refused to acknowledge the problem. We traded it down for a '76 Chevy Nova. We thought they'd junk the Olds, but it popped up in the used car section of the dealer's lot a few days later.
The Nova turned out to be somewhat exceptional, it ran like a tank. It also sounded like a tank, something about the valve-lifters, they said. Now most people wouldn't mind sounding like an approaching column of the Afrika Korps, but my mom was a person who dreaded calling attention to herself, and was thus mortified. But she got used to it, we couldn't afford another car.
Then there was that '78 Monte Carlo I bought: the front end refused to stay aligned, and it got more recall notices than every other car I've owned combined. My first real car - it didn't like rainy days either and it went through starters like nobody's business.
Then we reached a point where nobody knew if their American car was made in America or not, or what kind of steel went into it, and Baltimore wasn't much of a steel town anymore anyway.
All the paint fell off one side of my mom's '85 Buick Century.
I could go on, but I think you got the idea.
Last year, when we needed to replace an aging Saturn (a car I detested), we bought a Toyota at CarMax. It runs just fine. It took four decades, but we weren't a GM family anymore. I still feel a little guilty about it.
