Once Bitten, Twice Shy?
(This is a long diary, and it's about the auto industry, and the economy, and even very briefly about how it sux to be called a troll.)
So my second-to-last diary I posted here was attacked as a troll post, and while I think this was unfair (since our definition of "troll" involves a trollish intent, and my intent was only to provoke discussion among earnest Democrats) it was a controversial stance, I should have seen what was coming.
I've been shy about posting these last few days.
Part of this included my recent exchange with the admirable cartoonist Jeff Danziger, which I didn't think would go over big among Kossites (call it a hunch). Danziger had written a notable piece about the disastrous potential merger between Chrysler and GM, and I thought he crossed a line in this.
You can see this post here.
I wrote him a letter as follows:
Dear Mr. Danziger,
For several years now I've openly described your work as my very favorite of political cartoonists. Your drawing has a precision that goes beyond a canny resemblance and your cutting captions can sum up an issue in better than a thousand words. Yours is a medium in which cheap shots seem to be both available and abundant, and the care which you take in your selections has always impressed me. After all, any sane critical thinker could spend eight years pummeling the Bush administration; your statements have been fresh and trenchant, and you've had ammo left over for the Democratic primaries, for Chinese domestic and foreign policy, and for all of the other misguided and tragically uninformed errrors in American politics this decade. Which is why I'm so dismayed by the lone autoworker you have exclaiming "we'll make 'em fit! It'll be fun" as he holds an oversized croquet mallet aloft this week.
I come to this personally: practically everyone in my family has worked for GM in Flint, Michigan and Oakland County. My father worked at Buick for almost 40 years before being bought out this year because the last plant in his division (Powertrain North) has closed. My aunt worked at EDS, my grandmother was a secretary at GMI, and my grandfather made spark spugs for AC Delco from the moment he got home from World War II.
Look, I know that doing what you do you are bound to anger people, that you can't be over-sensitive to anger, that calling things as they are is inevitably going to bruise some ribs along the way.
But I've always seen you as being very selective in choosing your targets, and more importantly, in choosing their foibles. In your recent piece you show an autoworker standing like an uneducated buffoon, a "Joe V6" who doesn't know a thing (and doesn't care) about anything other than banging metal on metal. Granted in the past you've called out the American automakers for their incompetent leadership, and maybe even for your perception that our domestic automakers have produced an inferior product. I have disagreed with many of these strips, but this is the first time it seems you've crossed the line.
Actually, excuse me, that's not right.
I should say, instead, that you've failed. After all, there are no lines that you should not cross. The mark of a great political cartoonist is the ability to eloquently disagree, and to render such disagreement visceral and visual to the larger public.
But why have you abandoned the rigor of your other pieces?
Why are you taking cheap shots at our autoworkers instead of their leadership or even their product?
For that matter, if you want to criticize autoworkers, why are you holding them up as mentally incapable, instead of criticizing a union that is as stubborn as it is often ineffective? Or holding accountable a rank-and-file that is often unable to look beyond their next paycheck to address the consequences of the agenda their employer is pursuing?
Why not pick a disagreement worth stating instead of promoting inaccurate misconceptions about the education and drive of our nation's most assertive and robust union workforce?
I could disagree with you on many of these other possible arguments, but these would be disagreements worth having.
Your characterization of the auto-worker in your recent strip is trite, pointless, obnoxious, insulting, and irrelevant. It does nothing to promote a worthwhile political argument, and it is a waste of both my own and your time. I wouldn't be so disappointed if not for the fact that you are my favorite political cartoonist. I hope that the abundance of material these days doesn't mean that your standards (the standards I most admire) are slipping; one could safely argue that an informed and powerful political critique in all media are more important these days than ever.
Sincerely,
Connor Coyne
I went as far as to post this on my blog, not figuring that such a pissed-off diatribe would actually get a response, but in fact Mr. Danziger wrote me back in a few hours.
Dear Mr. Coyne, (Actually had some Coynes in my family.)
Many apologies on the cartoon. I didn't mean to slag the hard-working autoworker, but merely to comment on the idea of ramming these companies together. The Daimler-Chrysler mix, for instance, was doomed from the start. We spend a lot of time in Germany and no one there thought it could work, mostly because of the culture clash.
But I will say that over the years the fault is the evaluation of the corporate leaders (read bozos) of the buyers as idiots who will buy anything. I lived in Vermont for many years and it was the Subaru 4-wheel drive that made life liveable. It never occurred to the Detroit people to make anything that good mileage and had 4-wheel drive. They kept turning out lummoxy boats that looked good only in the ads.
However, I will say that we rented a Chevy Cobalt for a week recently and could find nothing wrong with it. Smooth and efficient. And the best deal for the price. Normally now I don't drive much, since I live in Manhattan, but I am very loyal to American brands any time I can find them.
Overall I think we are bemoaning the same awful trend. The wealthy idiots who run this country have sold everything else down the river. In Germany, the government tell the people what the true cost of buying imports is, in terms of taxation, community cost, inflation and so on. As a result Germans buy German cars to the near exclusion of everything else. In Japan the same thing is true. In my own defence I have made this point over and over in my work. I have never worked in a car factory but I have read a good deal about it, and I certainly don't mean to blame the auto workers for the state of the American industry.
I meant to comment on the banging together of these huge corporations and I used the worker to make the comment. I am sorry about that, since I didn't mean to demean the individual.
Again, I am sorry about that, and I thanks you for bringing it to my attention.
All best wishes,
Jeff Danziger
I wrote back:
Dear Jeff,
Thanks for your prompt and encouraging reply. I don't often fire off emails like this and get a personal response, much less by the next morning, and after sending it I had a pang of regret that I've been reading your work for several years and hadn't thought fit to write you about it until I had something to complain about.
One thing my father has often commented upon is that in Detroit they do know how to make the same range of vehicles, but that they kept turning out the lummoxy boats you speak of because there is a higher profit margin per vehicle, even if far fewer vehicles are sold. This is a product of the Roger Smith-era restructuring, which favored investors speculating in a windfall profit, and not a healthy company. It's ironic that a corporation which, a decade or two ago, still had the capital and reach to design plenty of vehicles for all types of buyers now has one of the most homogeonous lines available. Which is part of the reason this notion of the self-correcting market just doesn't seem to add up.
As for the merger itself, I suspect you're right, although I haven't read enough on it to form a definite opinion.
Anyway, thanks again for your reply, and I hope all is well.
Sincerely,
Connor Coyne
Finally, my father wrote me back saying that he liked the conversation, that he wasn't offended, and that his own views were summed up in this op-ed (in the Christian Science Monitor, of all places).
...
What does this have to do with the rest of us?
Well, it depends, a lot, on how the people you care about are planning to vote, and the sort of dialogue you have with them. The people I care about often subscribe to Republican philosophy and yet vote Democratic most often, because they see the real-world disconnect between Republican rhetoric and Republican policy. In that regard, my big fat socialist self is lucky. But I do have friends and relatives who have voted for Bush both times, and I'm looking to this recent passionate and amicable dispute with Mr. Danziger as a bit of a guide in how to talk to them. I am lucky that a stranger can show me how to talk to people I know well.
The short answer is that we need regulation. We have all of the examples that we need to show that its absence has been a catastrophe. Often, conservatives are able to talk us into a defensive corner, and we argue that government regulation "isn't that bad," is "the lesser of two evils," and that inefficiency is "a price that has to be paid."
But it isn't like that.
The short answer is that, as Charles Whelan, in many ways a free-market advocate, put it, the market is amoral. It does not care about regulating itself; it cares about expanding profits. The fact that an amoral system can lead to chaos and disorder is self-evident now, but is this really any surprise? Isn't there ample precedent now to prove this? We're all talking about the Great Depression a lot these days, but 1987 wasn't that long ago. We don't have to remember that far back to know how these things go.
For the third time, the short answer is that we can't risk a McCain Presidency, a Republican Senate, a Republican House, because we can clearly see the difference between ideas that float and ideas that work. A perfect government is an illusion, but why sell out government to corporations that are even more imperfect, and that cannot regulate themselves, much less the economy?
The short answer, once more, is that we need Obama and the Democrats to restore and guide the industry, yes, the industry, of the U.S. Because industry cannot look after itself. It hasn't in decades. It needs a guiding hand, and that hand should be moved by its workers and its consumers, and this is a hand that only the Democrats will provide.
And the shortest answer, and I promise that this is the last time, is that we can passionately disagree with the people we care about, and tell them so, and if they are worth our attention, they will listen to us and still understand us in the morning.
It makes risks worth taking, doesn't it?