Adaptive Curmudgeon

Note: I wrote this post several weeks ago but didn't post it.
I figured the Volt was on life support and I don't watch T.V.
commercials so I'd let it go.  Then NPR did an interview with
a G.M. head honcho which featured this commercial's soundtrack.
It was the only station I could listen to and they inflicted
their crap on my truck's stereo.  Game on!  (I also noted that
an entire program with the GM head honcho was 100% politics and
regulation...as if cars do not require ENGINEERING.  If you are
talking cars I'd better hear words like "horsepower" and "piston"
early and often.  I didn't hear that so I call bullshit!)

An informant A reader send me a link to the Volt’s commercial.  Watch it and you’ll be embarrassed to be in the same room with that level of saccharine bullshit. 

It makes me cringe.  It’s dour propaganda from behind the iron curtain in 1978.  The ad appeals to our patriotic duty to buy it and imposes guilt and obligation.  It implies we must buy a Volt or poor people in a little town in Michigan won’t have jobs.  As if you might make little Timmy starve in his crib if you happen to buy a Ford Focus.  It’s drab and uninspiring.

You never actually see a Volt move under it’s own power.  You scarcely see one fully assembled.  You don’t see it scooting down an actual road.  You never see a smiling driver at the wheel.  God forbid someone buy a Volt because they want one.  There is nothing there to indicate anyone anywhere would simply drive it as a choice and not a duty.  There are no squealing tires, no beautiful back lit close shots of the car, no sweeping vistas with a road heading for the horizon, no snappy theme.

They don’t mention notable awesome features; good grief it’s the only electric car on planet earth and they don’t mention that it’s electric?  What about a smirking driver cruising past the suddenly unnecessary gas station?  What about zipping your electric car past some schlub standing in the rain pumping gas?  What about sexy women (or men) who want you because of your car?  What about humor?  Just guilt and malaise.  It’s an ad to send food to starving Ethiopians with Ethiopia scratched out and Michigan pasted in.

The tagline is that “it’s the car that America had to build”.  Oh dear God…it’s a car that allows me to never ever buy gasoline again and they can’t even sell that?  Just “we had to build it”?  Because what, because the Kremlin ordered it?

You have to build this car. You have no option!

I submit that even things you must do for the sake of the country needn’t be dour unpleasant tasks.  Check this out:

There will be no whining while Rosie the Riveter is watching. Muscle up and kick the Axis Powers until they're weeping in the gutter.

That’s right.  Rosie here is not worried about jobs…she’s got one.  Toughing up to kick ass.  Go Rosie!

How about this:

You want food? Pick up a damn shovel and make it.

And for turning the dial to eleven I refer to this…an older one from World War I:

The Boy Scouts have provided this Godlike person all the weaponry needed to DOMINATE. (Also check out the writing on the sword.)

What I’m saying here is not that it’s bitchin’ cool to rivet bombers, grow turnips, and buy questionable bonds…what I’m saying is that if you want to appeal to me to make a sacrifice you’re not going to do it with puppy dog eyes and weeping about union welders in Hamtrack Michigan.  Tell me that I can be awesome.  Tell me I should be awesome.  Then get the hell out of the way.

We’re Americans, up until recently we had balls of steel and everyone knew it.  We had a whole society built around the ideal of adapting, growing, and prospering.  Buying a lame-ass car because it’ll employ someone is an eastern European ideal.  The Russians had the Lada…we did not and we build Cadillacs and huge trucks.  Because that’s what we wanted and we had the cash to buy it.  Americans looked at cars and thought “I want more horsepower”; every single year for a century.  We know there is nothing noble about driving shit.

Americans shouldn’t be buying anything just to make a fake job…that’s not our game.

Talk of a car as if it were an obligation is un-American.  Cars are wings and freedom and sex and machinery and excitement all rolled into a device that just happens to get you to work in the morning.  Cars you endure come from the Soviets.  Americans don’t endure…we overcome.

Note too that we are programmed to overcome through sheer awesomeness.  Moping around is for losers.  Rosie the Riveter wasn’t whining about her boyfriend on the Western Front; she was building bombs to send up the Furher’s ass so he could get home and they could get busy creating the Baby Boom.  The farmer wasn’t grousing about tilling the backyard; he was going to feed the family even Europe was trench warfare from horizon to horizon.  And last but not least, I don’t know precisely who or what entity that Scout has equipped but you’re looking at something one unleashes upon our enemies…not a diplomat bound for negotiations.

Where is that energy in the Volt commercial?

Dammit it could happen.  An electric car could be cool.  It could be a game changer.  It could be a big giant deal.

Done right I’d buy one myself.  I’d paint “Fuck Middle East Oil” in on the hood, crank the stereo with death metal, use it as a whole house battery backup, and tinker with slinging that dead weigh battery so low that it’ll hold corners like a guided missile.   Innovation can be fun!

The gutless Frankenstein’s monster that is Government Motors took everything edgy and exciting about a new idea and made it into a jobs program.  It’s Jimmy Carter’s sweater.  It’s a poodle in a nation that likes sharks.  The Volt is the 1970’s resurrected from it’s grave.

Americans will rise to a challenge or embark on an adventure.  But they’ll reject enduring “the car we had to make”.

Some words of encouragement from the man in the big chair.  The first is while he was running for president and the second was while he was uh…  getting a head start on running for re-election.

Senator Obama, A Speech In Toledo Ohio (October 13, 2008):

We’ll create five million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in ten years…

…

…some experts say that unemployment may rise to 8% by the end of next year. We can’t wait until then to start creating new jobs.

President Obama,  Another Speech In Toledo Ohio (June 3 2011):

…two great American companies, Chrysler and GM, stood on the brink of liquidation.

…

Now, we had a few options. We could have followed the status quo and kept the automakers on life support by just giving them tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, but never really dealing with the structural issues at these plants. But that would have just kicked the problem down the road.

…

So we decided to do more than just rescue the industry from crisis. We decided to retool it for a new age.

So there you have it.  The first quote is a plan in 2008 where the  government would “retool” the auto industry back to health through green initiatives. The second quote is reflection on the plan’s performance  following three years of on the ground application of his theories.  Huzzah.

Wait?  What’s this?  Is reality knocking at the door?

Chevrolet’s Volt Sales Running Low, GM Idles the Line (March 2, 2012)

GM has decided to idle production of the Chevy Volt for five weeks. During that time, about 1,300 workers will temporarily be laid off.

…

Back when GM launched the Volt, it boldly targeted sales of 10,000 in 2011 and 60,000 in 2012. Last year, GM sold 7,671 Volts and just 1,626 this year.

Man, is reality a killjoy or what?  Well maybe things can be attributed to business cycles and bad luck and whatnot.  It’s not like you can make a direct comparison to some other company that makes a fuel efficient small car that competes with the Volt.

Volkswagen To Add 800 Jobs At Chattanoga Factory (March 23, 2012):

Volkswagen AG said it will hire to fill 800 new jobs at a Chattanooga, Tenn., factory it opened last year, reflecting anticipated demand for a new car built there.

…

VW has sold 14,507 Passats this year through February. New staffing will give VW the potential to build 170,000 cars at the plant by 2013, according to company officials.

“Quite plainly, we need more Passats to meet the market demand,” said Jonathan Browning, President and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America.

Well you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.  At least the government (or the President) has learned from the fact that unsubsidised auto makers are eating the Volt’s lunch?  Whoops, maybe not.  Looks like a double down on rainbow cars and a complete inability to look at a mistake  and say “lets stop doing that thing which doesn’t work so well”.  Color me surprised:

President Pushes to Add More Credits for Hybrids (March 8, 2012):

The president called for increasing to $10,000 an existing $7,500 credit per vehicle for consumers and businesses that buy cars and trucks powered by electric battery, natural gas or hydrogen.

Because nothing makes the most government-supported car since the Trabant profitable like…you guessed it… more subsidies.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.  I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.  Just to bring a little more humor into the day I’m posting the Trabant, or as I like to call it East German Volt Version 1.0.  (Click the photo for a description of the 1975 Trabant’s coveted place on Times’ List Of The 50 Worst Cars Of All Time.):

This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness...

Ironically… the Trabant probably was a more efficient use of subsidy than the expensive (estimated at $250,000 per vehicle) Volt.  The thought of losing to the Trabant in comparison of cost efficiency… Is it any wonder that politics have become so silly?

This really happened:

I stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere.  I pulled off the road and had to choose which pumps to go to.  Instead of heading for the two pumps up front (the land of minivans and small cars) I wanted to go to the two pumps on the side (the pumps in the dirt where farmers and loggers go because there’s room for big trucks).

I paused as a rusty old F-150 backed across my path.  It moved straight back from the minivan-pumps on my left to a little flat grassy spot on the right.  No biggie.

Except nobody was driving.  WTF?

A couple fellas at the diesel pumps watched with a big smile.  I watched with a mixture of wonder and alarm.

When the truck stopped on the soft grass I pulled through.

“Did I just see that?”  I said at the pumps.

“Yep, someone forgot about their parking brake.”  One guy replied.

I tanked up and went inside to pay.  I was passed by a confused looking gentlemen heading out; apparently his truck wasn’t where he left it.

“Did you see that?”  I asked the teller.

“See what?” She said.

I glanced out to see the Ford heading for the highway.

“Uh…nothing.”  I paid and left.  Just another day of phantom trucks rolling around randomly.  Nothing worth mentioning.

Being semi-off grid I occasionally stumble onto a rift in the iDevice/Google/Microsoft continuum.  The technological equivalent of a society which is simultaneously bitchin’ cool and too clueless to survive.  Today was such a day.

I needed semi-immediate contact with a guy I call only infrequently.  Both of us keep the Internet at arm’s distance so an e-mail might take a month to get through.  It’s a hundred mile drive to his house so showing up unexpected (while amusing) was unwise.

The only logical course would be a phone call.  Here’s the twist; I didn’t know his number.  My Trackphone is so primitive that it runs on coal but it has a phone book (which is unpopulated).  I hadn’t called in aeons so he wasn’t in the  phone call log.

Back in the Cenozonic they had these printed book things that had everyone’s number.  Worked very well but you had to you know be able to read and use an index.  How archaic is that?

So I plunged into the welcoming embrace of the Internet.  Ten minutes later I came to an odd realiziation:

For $30 I could get a background check.  It would have everything…up to and including his favorite rock band, the VIN on his car, his dog’s blood type, and almost certainly the phone number of every cell phone, iDevice, and landline he has (listed or unlisted).  But there was no way in hell I was going to get his phone number for free.

Really?  Is that not weird?

I am going to commission a time machine.  I’m going back to the 1970’s when phones had big mechanical rotary dials and AMC Gremlins lurched around following the first “great automotive bailout”.  I’m going to tell everyone “in the future Germany will be reunified, medicine will be awesome, any movie you want will be piped into your home, TV’s will be the size of picture windows, and telephones will be the size of a deck of cards.  I’ll also be able to get a background check on any American anywhere.  But you won’t get a free phone number from a phone book and there’s a fee for calling the operator.”  They’ll probably stone me to death with empty cans of Tab, run me down with a Gremlin, and go back to playing Pong.  I’ll deserve it…because no conceivable future could be that weird.

…my computer has decided that I’m British.  The reason I know this is that my spell check keeps telling me that “color” is “colour”.  I’ve been living without spell check for a couple of months and that’s fine.  However I’m getting sick of it yelling at me for using redneck America spelling; which is perfectly cromulent for an American redneck like myself.

Does anyone know where to find the appropriate setting in Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”)?

Note, if your instructions begin with “first recompile the kernel”, throw your keyboard out the window and don’t bother e-mailing me.  As an American I’m too lazy for command line unless it’s something more important than explaining the difference between “soccer” and “football” to my OS.

An optimist thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds.  A pessimist fears that it’s true. 

Adaptive Curmudgeons like to focus on the little things that make life better.  The following things are modern miracles which we should be thankful for every damn day!

• Cheap plentiful food.
• Air conditioning.
• Ice cold beer in August.
• Four wheel drive.
• Padlocks.
• The Internet.
• Pizza delivery.
• 24/7 electricity.
• Modern medicine.
• Peaceful elections (even if we have to choose between a dipstick and a jackoff).

Don’t believe me?  Try this; drive a on old station wagon without air conditioning across Texas to find two jars of peanut butter which cost $87.50 each.  Drink beer which got hot in the back of the car.  Then turn north and drive the same station wagon over Lolo pass in a snowstorm (have fun chaining it up or just plunge off a cliff, it’s your choice).  Once you get to your cabin (which has no internet because you didn’t padlock it and someone ripped the copper wires out to sell on e-bay for crack money) just sit in the dark because the power is off.  Meanwhile you’re dying of tuberculosis while a battery powered radio is reporting that Baltimore is suffering from “political upheaval” because a contested election between a dipstick with an army and a jackoff with a secret police organization got interesting.

None of this is going to get your pizza to you while the cheese is still hot.

See, our world is positively gleaming by comparison.