So that post I wrote last week on the auto industry meltdown has been bouncing around some political blogs and generally the discussion has been very civil and interesting. But I have received a few nasty e-mails and there are a couple things I still want to say.

1.

I have been surprised by the anger and disgust expressed by so many at the workers (and their unions) for their role in the current state of the American auto industry. I cannot deny I have a certain sentimental appreciation for organized labor and what it has done for the working people of this country over the years, but nor can I deny that the role they've played in the weird, insular business culture of the domestic auto industry has contributed to some of its current problems (the JOBS bank, etc.). What has surprised me is how all kinds of people---conservatives and liberals---have such a visceral, angry response to the idea of the lazy union worker. In the comments I said it reminded me of the way people were so up in arms about Reagan's "welfare queen" mythology in the 1980s (you know: the black welfare mom driving all those kids around in a Cadillac and buying caviar with her food stamps). Now we have the lazy, do-nothing UAW member sitting in a room doing cross word puzzles instead of working on the line, collecting $70 an hour salaries with better health and retirement benefits than the CEOs of the company. I have no doubt that in the 1980s there were a few women on the welfare rolls driving around in Cadillacs. And I have no doubt that it wouldn't be a huge challenge to find a lazy UAW member getting paid more than he's worth. But does anyone really believe that all union members are that way---that this industry is currently crippled because lazy people without college degrees had the audacity to believe they deserved to join the middle class?

It's no secret that Americans don't like to confront real issues of class. But I'm going to do it anyway. I think this ugly response to a mythology perpetuated about blue-collar workers is particularly shameful because so many American white-collar workers in both the public and private sectors are incredibly lazy themselves. God forbid a factory worker should step away from her job twisting the tops on the toothpaste tubes for a minute, but just because someone has a Bachelor's degree that apparently entitles them to dick around on the internet all day with impunity. I once wrote (somewhat in jest), "Thank goodness almost every office worker in America has virtually unfettered access to the internet. Imagine what would happen to our economy if employers started taking away internet privileges and people were forced to actually work. The sound of crickets would reign at fark, digg, and reddit. Entire fantasy football teams would stand around on their virtual sidelines with nothing to do. Projects would get done way earlier than they needed to be. Soon there wouldn't be enough work to go around. Bureaucracies would actually become efficient. Massive layoffs would follow. The entire American economy is balanced precariously on the fact that the average American office worker spends only about 20 percent of his or her time actually working." This is corporate America's dirty little secret. Anyone who's ever worked in an office environment knows that it is at least somewhat true. Add to all that internet time the Sisyphusian piles of meaningless paperwork, unproductive conversations with coworkers, endless meetings, pointless conferences and worthless training seminars, and I think there's enough fodder for a stereotype of the lazy, do-nothing middle-class white-collar office worker who may not have a union to protect him, but who hardly deserves his salary. Where is the animus towards this mythical being?

The thing is, he's not a myth. He is real, and right now he is spitting on the men and women who still make things in America because they dared to believe they could be just like him.

2.

To all the liberals who are so eager to see the Big Three "lie down in the graves they've made for themselves" by catering to the tastes of the majority of Americans who desired those big, gas-guzzling SUVs instead of developing small, fuel-efficient vehicles, I ask this: when is the last time you visited a car dealership for one of the Big Three? A lot of those SUVs now come in hybrid versions that significantly reduce their gas guzzling. One of the best-reviewed and (in my opinion) attractive cars produced by any auto company is the Chevy Malibu, which gets 30 mpg on the highway and also comes in a hybrid version. And I know I perseverated on this in the comments on the last post, but no one acknowledged it. How many Big Three-hating liberals are even aware of the Chevy Volt, an attractive, full-sized electric car that has been in development for many years and is set to be released in 2010? They scream about Detroit's lack of innovation and failure to develop hybrids, but GM has been working on the Chevy Volt for a long time (at GREAT expense) and this vehicle is poised to revolutionize the industry. It will get 100+ mpg, and travel all but the most extreme commute distances without a drop of fuel. In other words, it will kick your Prius's ass. This isn't just a concept car, it is a car that is set to be built in Detroit and sold to American consumers in about a year if this company is still in business.

So why do crunchy Detroit-hating liberals refuse to acknowledge GM's innovation? Why is it so much easier just to follow these common memes of hatred and loathing rather consider that these companies might be worth saving not just for the jobs and the economy of the Rust Belt, but for the innovation that our American engineers and designers might bring to the table?

[I'm closing comments here because I'd like to keep the discussion going in the comments to the last post. If you have something to add, I'd love to hear from you there]

[I took the photo at the top of this post yesterday on top of a 4-foot pile of books in what was formerly a library at a recently-closed school in Detroit. The book was published in 1963, when your options for such a career in Detroit were considerably better]

I drove across the state yesterday to give the kids a few hours with their grandparents and all the way there and all the way back all I heard on the radio was talk of how the US automakers were poised for failure. From across the country people called in with their outrage over a potential bailout. They did this to themselves with their gas-guzzling environmentally-unfriendly inferior products. Let them die!. . .It's the unions' fault! Let them fail! This is what all types of people from all across America were saying on the radio.

I take pictures of the sad state of Detroit partly because I know there are people out there who can hardly believe places like this exist in their own country. From our greatest, most unique cities to our blandest, most generic suburbs, things have been pretty nice for a long time. It is easy to forget how our once-great economy was built (or what happened to the places that built it). Now it has been pointed out that this robust economic juggernaut we've believed we were for the last several years hasn't actually been wearing any clothes. And winter is here.

Some of the people saying let them fail about Detroit's automakers are very the same people who had no problem with the $700 billion bailout of the very "industries" responsible for the sudden evaporation of so many billions of dollars in equity and credit. I would like to show them the state of this city and ask them to think about how much worse it (and hundreds of other cities reliant on the auto industry) will get if any of these three employers were suddenly unable to pay their employees or suppliers. This isn't Manhattan. We're not talking about Goldman Sachs associates suddenly not being able to pay the mortgages on their $350,000 parking spaces in Tribeca for the Ferraris they bought with their 2006 bonuses. We are talking about the lifeblood of a region that has already suffered so deeply, and I can't believe how many people are speaking so flippantly about allowing this great American industry to die.

I'm no apologist for the Big Three or their ridiculous missteps and lapses of judgment. But I do care about the regular people who work for these companies and who played no role in those poor decisions. Where is the compassion? Consider the charities that receive donations from both corporations and individuals connected to the auto industry and the people those charities help. Some of the moments when I was most proud of my fellow Americans were when people stepped up in the wake of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Asian Tsunami and gave what they could to help fellow human beings who were suffering. Three years after Katrina, New Orleans is starting again to look like New Orleans again.

It hardly looks like Detroit at all anymore.

* * * * *

One thing I do like about GM, Ford, and Chrysler is that they are companies that still make something. What do the vast majority of the Fortune 500 companies even do? What does Goldman Sachs do? What do all those companies in Silicon Valley make? They shuffle paper, sure, transmit blips of binary code, attend important meetings, and make "deals." Maybe brown people somewhere across an ocean will make whatever it is they're selling or shuffling on paper or e-mailing each other about. But in Detroit, and in plenty of other industrial cities across this country there are still people making things without exploited labor, and believe it or not that still means something.

On Saturday we attended an "urban craft fair" held here in Detroit, sort of a church bazaar for hipsters. We generally like this stuff and buy many of our Christmas presents at such events (last year we drove to Chicago just to attend the Renegade Craft Fair). There was nothing being sold that anyone really needed; there were a lot of ornithologically-themed shoulder bags and tiny buttons and silkscreened American Apparel t-shirts. But despite the superfluousness of these products, I do like the fact that there's a movement afoot of people actually making something themselves and selling it at a fair price. Christ, look at the popularity of craft and knitting blogs. My own wife has recently found great satisfaction sitting at the sewing machine making things. I, too, love to make things. It is a powerful human urge tied to creativity and pride. It's just so cool to be able to say, "I made this" rather than just, "I bought it."

When researching my family's history when we were considering buying the old homestead, I found the story of when my ancestors moved from upstate New York to eastern Michigan. There were pages of details describing the difficulties of the journey and the work of building the farm once they arrived, long lists of the things they built with their hands. When I read that, I thought, God, I can't even install ceramic tile. I can't help but believe that if most of our ancestors could see us whining about "these tough economic times" they'd say, "Forsooth, what a bunch of pussies."

Still, I have a hard time believing we are a nation that will continue to sit content while the Chinese make everything for us in this now-bolstered (yet exposed) sham economy of credit and lies. We may have forked over a good chunk of our pride just to walk out of Wal-Mart with cheap 42-inch plasma screen televisions, but I don't believe that all of our pride is gone.

* * * * *

On Sunday morning I walked right into another abandoned school. This one had several vocational education classrooms full of machine tools that hadn't yet been scrapped (although the scrappers had broken a huge hole in the third-floor wall and were gradually pushing the massive pieces of equipment down onto the sidewalk below one by one). When my dad was my age (before he quit to pursue his passion of repairing antique cars) he worked in the belly of some high school as an auto body shop instructor. One of his favorite topics still is the decline of vocational education in our public schools. "We'll have generations of pencil pushers who'll have forgotten the quadratic equation by the time they get their diplomas but who don't know how to build or fix anything. They won't be qualified to do anything except make hamburgers." It's one of the few topics we agree on. As I stared at room after room of heavy machinery once used to prepare already-disadvantaged Detroit kids for jobs in the manufacturing sector, all I could think about was my dad, and wonder if the jobs these machines were preparing them for even exist in this hemisphere anymore .


I have always been interested in shipyards, those massive polychromatic piles of shipping containers and the Jurassic cranes used to hoist them. I read that in some cases it is cheaper to manufacture new shipping containers in Dalian or Tianjin than it is to ship them back empty. In my wanderings I once came across a former auto factory on the east side of Detroit that I thought was abandoned, but instead it was busy retooling and refurbishing heavy machinery formerly used in the domestic manufacturing process for export to China, something to fill a few of those empty shipping containers. I have read that the fabrics in the clothes many of us wear were made in China using the same machines that American workers might once have used in North Carolina. I once investigated for this blog if any of those factories where Mr. Rogers once showed kids how things were made were still in business. The results were just too depressing to share.

* * * * *

They say a sustainable model for future economies will trend away from globalization and be based more on localization. The yuppies and hippies have sort of turned that into "I am better than the white trash at Wal-Mart because I buy my eggs from Farmer Brown the next town over," but that doesn't mean a movement towards more local economies is without merit. For Detroiters, of course, it is hard to separate all this talk of "buy local" economics from the misery of the auto industry, and not be frustrated with those Prius-driving yuppies in the Pacific Northwest calling for the death of this massive American industry while patting themselves on the back for buying butter made from the milk of organically-fed Oregon cows. It's not a simple matter, and hopefully if there is some sort of "bailout" there will be plenty of strings attached: perhaps this could be an opportunity to start transforming manufacturing in the United States to a sustainable model that strengthens our economy and provides jobs here rather than just strengthening the portfolios of a privileged few at the expense of so many. But calling for the death of this American industry is callous and shortsighted, and I would add that slowly turning into a nation where no one knows how to make anything but hamburgers and silkscreened t-shirts can't be good for national security.

* * * * *

My parents always taught me respect for people who make things. My mother is extremely artistic and she is always making things (instead of buying things) for her grandkids. My dad built his own machines to bend steel and create automobile parts that are needed but no longer exist. From an ancient photo he can use those machines he built himself to craft a fender or a door for a 1913 Oldsmobile. He is a one-man vintage assembly line. Our family has never been wealthy, but I I've always felt a wealth of pride in what we do.

I do see this economic climate as an opportunity for change. It is a chance for us all to step back and think about where the things we buy are made, and all of what that means. It is a chance to accept that much of what we consider wealth isn't even real. If we're going to spend $700 billion to bail out those greedy firms who successfully used chicanery for years to manufacture an economy built of lies, shouldn't we also spend $25 billion to save one of the few remaining industries that actually design, engineer, and manufacture something real and necessary in this country?

The other day Wood told me that an abandoned building on her way to work was being torn down. "Which one?" I asked, because she walks past probably a dozen abandoned skyscrapers on her way to work. "I don't know," she said. "A white one."

I once spent several hours standing in a forest, watching a mighty tree crack and slowly fall after an ice storm. I was not going to miss this demolition. Juniper and I went with Wood yesterday morning and walked around and around the Detroit Commerce Building in palliative appreciation of its gentle arches and modest ornamentation: this was a building in its final days, thirteen stories that had stood since 1925, sealed off since 1997, now just standing in the way of a parking garage planned for the soon-to-be-restored Book-Cadillac hotel next door. We watched a wrecking ball slam into what had once been one of the largest department stores in a city where everyone once had good jobs and where the city was the place to shop. This building also held dozens of offices and law firms over the years. Those who've been inside it recently say many of the old files and furniture are still in there. That is not unusual. When they demolished a building that once held Motown Records' downtown offices to "beautify" the city before last year's Superbowl, they did not even save Marvin Gaye's desk---some guy exploring the building before it went down found some of Gaye's signed receipts and even a letter to his wife in the desk drawers. Juniper and I spent yesterday morning watching another building and its contents go on its way to nothing more than piles of brick and concrete and a twisted mess of rebar and wiring.

I've been doing this stay-at-home dad thing for about four or five months now, and I have to say it really agrees with me. I have intentionally not written much about it, because I have really been waiting for a day when I could complain about how boring and miserable it is. See, back when I was spending all day away from my kid and sitting in my office gasping for air as all the the sentimentality gushing out of me threatened to drown my be-khakied ass, I figured once I was at home getting a taste of how miserable stay-at-home parenthood actually is I would finally be able to write nasty things about how much being around my kid all day sucks. You know, so I wouldn't sound like such a sappy sonofabitch all the time.

But this lifestyle suits me. I am basically living the life of Riley here, folks. First of all, I don't do a lot of housework. I know that's a real disservice to all the other SAHDs out there slugging it out for equality in the homeplace, but I just don't make "doing dishes" or "picking up" a huge priority every day. Second of all, as far as childcare goes, there's only one of them around here. We play for most of the day; we go to the zoo or museums. She is my buddy. Even without television, she is so easy to distract with all the gewgaws and gimcracks that lie strewn about our house when I have to get something done. Plus, because I am so much bigger and stronger than her, she basically has to go wherever I want her to. I can just scoop her up and carry her around and there's little she can do to stop me. That is the third and most important thing: I love being able to go and do whatever I want. Lately that has meant taking advantage of the warm weather and walking around Detroit's central business district, which pleases us both. She jabbers on and on about the holiday decorations while I think and learn more every day about the city where we've chosen to live. I can't help myself: sometimes I find myself staring at her in my arms, after she's made a funny, smiling face on one adventure of ours or another, and think, Dear God this is exactly what I want to be doing with my life right now. Gag, I know. But bear with me.

When I was growing up, my own father worked from home. He ran his own auto body shop and restored antique automobiles in a building he built in our backyard. He had dozens of his own cars out there, too; most of them arrived in cardboard boxes and left fitted with shiny brass lights and 'uh-ooga' horns, sold to wealthier men who sputtered out of our driveway in the cars my father lovingly restored. I spent my childhood not going on vacations, but going to antique car shows and swap meets around the Midwest, sometimes driving 30 mph for many hours down blue highways in a 1927 Franklin or perhaps a bit faster in a 1931 Buick Phaeton. My dad worked on Packards from the 1920s and Ferraris from the 1960s, but he also repaired dented fenders on Cutless Supremes and Ford Tauri in the eighties when customers asked him to. His favorite era of the automobile was the 1910s through the 1930s, and as far as his personal tastes were concerned there wasn't a car manufactured after 1937 that mattered much. He raised me to respect the curve on a Duesenberg the way some fathers teach their sons about sports, or women. My father taught me that an Auburn automobile is a work of art, and he showed me that he himself was an artist who could turn a heap of rust into a gleaming canvas of steel.

But more than that, one important lesson I think I learned from my dad was to uncompromisingly pursue a life doing exactly what makes me happy. He never said that in so many words, but he showed me by doing what he did, quitting a job he hated to strike out on his own, creating beauty in unexpected ways and always being there when his son and daughter came home from school. I hope that as she grows, Juniper will learn that same lesson from my own life, and from the things we do together.

I have been driving with Juniper past the ruins of old automobile plants, most notably the sprawling Packard campus not far from our house. All around this city there are vacant lots and vacant buildings where other great factories once stood, places where cars were built with names that mean nothing to anyone except people like my dad: Hudson, Lozier, Rickenbacker, Hupp, Reliance, Graham-Paige, and so many others. I sometimes think about those cars when I look up at the empty buildings downtown Detroit; I think about the lives those factories sustained that kept those buildings full of working men and women. But I have been training myself when looking at ruins not to think about the past but to think about the beauty of the ruin itself. This is the city we inherited. What lessons might we learn from these stones?

I like to think they remind us that we are alive.