An Auto Company in Winter

Driving up into the Ozarks you see lots of trucks. Yuske, who was with us, asked why the trucks had GNC on the grills. That's GMC, we said, the car maker whose potential bust we were just talking about. Oh, he said, so the drivers are not devoted to vitamins. Nope, we said, just to trucks.

It is kind of poignant that Yuske, who is from Japan, wouldn't recognize General Motor's insignia. Americans would have no trouble with the Toyota emblem. From what I read in the papers the American auto industry has pretty much ceded the car market (where it has been thoroughly out competed) to Japan and gets by instead on trucks and SUVs. Which of course Americans love, especially Americans from rural states like this one, where getting a truck can be a male rite of passage. But now, even it every vehicle sold in the Ozarks this year were a GMC truck, it couldn't save a company needing billions monthly just to keep afloat.

There is something defining and particular in the American love of the truck, and in a similar sense the auto industry and the big unions feel distinctive of a certain kind of American life. The auto makers are no longer captains of American industry. Their plants are no longer hooks for artists to paint mesmerized portraits. The American public no longer sits in theaters and gets dewy-eyed watching Henry Fonda as Tom Joad vow to unionize. Instead they watch The Wire, where union boss Frank Sabotka gazes out over abandoned factories and empty slips along the shoreline and is powerless to do much besides grease politicians. Sabotka calls a video of a super efficient Dutch port that requires only a fraction of the jobs he'd like to see on Baltimore's docks "a nightmare." And it is if you envision, as Frank does, your son knowing the life you and your father knew and working the same job too. There is human tragedy in the fact that economies evolve. You can see the continued loss of manufacturing jobs on the horizon, no matter what the government does. You can see the blow to unions as they are faulted for undermining the competitiveness of their own companies. GM can go cap in hand to politicians. Unions can ram through card check legislation. But that won't help them compete with Japan.