SUVs, Scooters and Survival

GM cut 15,000 jobs this week. Said nobody wants to buy sedans any more. That’s why they’re closing factories in Michigan and Ohio and Ontario, Canada. They have no market for their Impalas, Volt, etc..

Ford Motor Company is also getting out of the sedan business. They have no market for the Taurus, etc.. 

People want to drive big SUVs, built on truck chassis, and pickup trucks have always been a staple down here in Texas. 

I see a lot of super-clean pickup trucks—Ford F-150, Chevy pickups and Dodge Ram pickup trucks. These pickups with not a single scratch in the bed and a pristine paint job indicate a lot of white collar guys with no calluses on their hands buy pickups. Many of these wannabe cowboy wish to stay connected to their salt-of-the-earth roots. Just an observation…

But, now it seems soccer Moms need to a SUV to ride high and have enough steel to make mom feel safe. Kind of like the Cold War weapons escalation from the 1960s. Soviet Union has 50 nukes, we Americans need 100 nukes. 

Translate the Cold War to the Car War escalations of today’s consumer. You get a big car, I need a bigger car, now I need a truck (SUV).

However, I do seen sedans on the road—and most seem to be either European of Japanese. Toyota sells tons of cameras. High end sedans still have appeal. Look at all those Audi and Lexus sedans zipping down the highway. GM and Ford do not bother to address this side of the equation. Their strength is building pickup trucks and SUVs and they are sticking to it.

The scooter phenomenon is a counter-weight to the rise in truck popularity. The city streets are now littered with scooters—magically arrived from some corporate source—ad placed on the sidewalks for all to consider. A credit card app gets the scooter moving. The brave then stand astride the scooter and take their chances on transportation sans protection. 

This very interesting scooter development parallels the increased use of bikes, also a risky pursuit, on our fast-moving public streets. Bikers mostly feature helmets and some use proper illumination at night. 

Scooter and bike people may be making a grand effort to save the planet. They will give you alternative explanations but I think the core idea, “let’s pollute less,” exists behind their transportation choices.

The New York Times has been tackling global climate change as a major target of their publication. I immersed myself in the recent article, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here.” 

Here is the link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html

Do not let the title fool you—this is a human apocalypse, generated by mankind and foisted on all living things. The numbers of insects has declined significantly. Many other species have declined also.

The decreased insect population saddened me. We have all experienced the plenitude of nature. Maybe you have been in an apple orchard at harvest time? I have seen massive pecan crops on good years in Central Texas. 

Nature is no respecter of modest bounds. The California wildfires show us Nature’s limitless strength. Yet we have managed to throttle nature and toss it into an emergency state, a state with the intensity of cars racing headlong down the freeway, hell bent to get to work on time.

Mankind’s ambitious, restless personality, set on survival and prosperity and domination, has dwarfed even the Eden we were born into it. Look at Mars for alternate housing. Not good!

If you love the planet and share even a modicum of goodwill for all the other species, the Times article should get your attention.

Real War is Information War (Marshall McLuhan)

I take today’s McLuhan quote from a playful little book called the Medium is the Massage, written with Quentin Fiore and artistically rendered by Jerome Agel. I’ll use a brief paragraph, from page 100 of the book, to introduce the material which follows:

“The young today reject goals. They want roles—R-O-L-E-S. That is total involvement. They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs.” (p.100)

Real War is Information War

Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold war is the real war front—a surround—involving everybody—all the time—everywhere. Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies. These wars are happenings, tragic games. It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. The hydrogen bomb is history’s exclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence.

p.138

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

By: Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore

Produced by: Jerome Agel

Gingko Press

Copyright 1967

Berkeley, CA

 

From Russia With Love

“President John F. Kennedy had named Fleming's novel From Russia with Love among his ten favorite books of all time in Life magazine,^[4] producers Broccoli and Saltzman chose this as the follow-up to (James) Bond's cinematic debut in Dr. No. From Russia with Love was the last film President Kennedy saw at the White House on 20 November 1963 before going to Dallas.”

(Wikipedia)

The film From Russia With Love (1963) came out at the height of the Cold War. I didn’t know about the John Kennedy connection until today while reading the Wikipedia article. But the movie is an indication of where the average American stood on the subject of Russian culture. The Cold War propaganda fed to American kids at the time was best exemplified by the character Rosa Klebb, the ugly Russian spy who attempts to kill James Bond with a poisoned toe-spike.

The image of Russia offered to us featured a vast, colorless, inhumane Communist gulag filled with unattractive women and brutal men and totally lacking in consumer goods—except shoes with spikes in the toes.

And now we have learned that Russian women are hot—the beneficiaries of a fantastic make-over, historically speaking.

Vladimir Putin is depicted as something akin to the harsh Communist bureaucrats, very utilitarian and single-minded in his quest for world domination. We are always reminded he began adult life as a KGB agent. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The new twist is Donald Trump, the American president, having a pro-Putin stance. This twists America’s psyche into knots. The ugly women are now the pretty women? The bad guys are now the good guys? Or, are Russians still the bad guys—only now they may have been clever enough to have influenced an American election.

If a bunch of Russian hackers had the skill to get Donald Trump elected American president—everyone should be hiring them for their next project. Trump may have been the biggest underdog in Presidential history. Now he’s President. He’s keeping everybody engaged with his unpredictability, his erratic tweeting and his disregard to proper Presidential behavior. And added to his unpredictability, he refuses to say negative things about Putin and the Russians. Does that mean he colluded with the Russians? Not so sure about that. I can’t picture Trump cooperating with anybody.

But here’s a twist—two of Trump’s wives have been of Slovak-style background. Ivana Trump married Donald way back in 1977, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She must be celebrated by Trump for her contribution of their daughter Ivanka, the light of Donald’s life. Mother Ivana was born in Czechoslovakia and attended University in Prague. She’s really Czech! What a Czech… check her out!

Melania Trump, Trump’s present wife and First Lady of the United States, was born in Slovenia, part of Yugoslavia at the time. She went to school in Ljubljana and that’s not in Kansas. Melania speaks 6 languages--English, French, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian, and her native Slovene. She loves fancy clothes, no doubt, as a former model.

So, Donald Trump showed some open-minded freedom in his choice of mates and has a carnal connection to the part of world once firmly in the embrace of Soviet Russia, as part of the Iron Curtain countries. Trump’s women have been Russian—esque, maybe not actual Russian but certainly from the Soviet suburbs, and that part of the world has been good to him. The American press (media) never considers a man’s basic drives, sex and procreation, when understanding Donald’s Trump’s fondness for people from the cooler climes, just east of Europe.

And Ivanka will sell you all kinds of fancy shoes, but none with spikes coming out of the toes.

How We Got Into Vietnam (David Halberstam)

Finished "The Best and The Brightest" book by Halberstam on Vietnam. I'm glad I got to the end. He talks about LBJ's failed decision-making on Vietnam. LBJ looked to the past and the Cold War to try and understand Vietnam:

"The forces at work in the fifties were very real to him. If Jack Kennedy was a man who knew more about where the sixties were headed but whose intellect preceded his courage, who stepped forward gingerly, then Johnson was more a man of the past. He reacted to what he thought the country was; the country which twice defeated Stevenson for the Presidency, where the powerful people on the Hill seemed primarily to be hawks, where the dominant figures of journalism were proud survivors of the worst of the Cold War, and where American universities had also given willingly, too willingly in fact, of their talent and support to the Cold War." (p. 592)

And here is how LBJ got us so deeply involved in the war, using his astute political skills, for subtly escalating the War, while missing the boat on the sixties revolution brewing and about to explode:

"That would all come later: perhaps another politician might have sensed it, if not clearly identifying the change. But Lyndon Johnson did not sense it, rather he sensed that he had position on everybody else, he had control of the center, he had moved all opponents to the extreme. He had handled the Congress, signed it on without really signing it on: he had handled the press by slicing the salami so thin that they are never able to pin him down, and he handled Ho by making it seem as if Ho were attacking him at Tonkin. He was using force but using it discreetly, and he was also handling the military. They were moving toward war, but in such imperceptible degrees that neither the Congress nor the press could ever show a quantum jump. All the decisions were being cleverly hidden; he as cutting it thin to hold off the opposition." (p. 593)

This poses some interesting questions for me on how public policy lurches forward-- often based on the prevailing, conventional wisdom, based on the leader's beliefs about his peers and what they will find acceptable, as rational behavior. Of course, our Vietnam policy does not appear rational in retrospect, but LBJ operated within the paradigm he knew and had experienced.

What do we believe now-- based on a present-day conventional wisdom that is actually totally inaccurate and misplaced? People think we need to get industry back to America? Is there any likelihood of that? How might our energies and resources be used to improve the situation in our country? I'm sure there is much confusion on the subject, and some of our unlikely Presidential candidates (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders) have risen because of confusion around where the country should be heading. Not sure any of the candidates has proposed anything of substance. Mainly its emotion-- Make America Great Again, Stop the 1%....  Obama has kept a cool head. He didn't come out with a "New Deal" or anything on a grand scale. I doubt there would have been support for that kind of thing in this environment. The candidates kind of imply that they will achieve something on a grand scale. That seems unlikely.