G.M. Still Doesn't Get It

Like addiction, news stories go through several stages. There are the early rumblings of something gone awry; the shock and chagrin of breaking news; the cacophony of questions that feed frantic, front-page banners; the peripheral angles and human-interest spin offs; and, finally, the retrospective and post mortem.

For America's imploding auto industry, we're somewhere amid the last two (no doubt auto reporters already have their G.M. obits typed up and tucked away in a folder somewhere for impending publication, assuming, that is, their publications are themselves still in business at that time). The media are all but finished telling us why they suck, to move onto telling us why we should care.

Apparently, it's because they are us. Nostolgic drivel, like what appeared in last week's New York Times Magazine, would have us believe that as goes General Motors so goes the American Dream. "G.M. is bound up with our collective identity, both national and personal," writes reporter Matt Bai.

Maybe, though perhaps it's not such a bad thing if we go down with the ship (SUV?). The American Dream is, after all, totally unsustainable. Promoting 300 million people to make enough money (or build enough credit) to move to a big house with a big lawn with an oversized car in a sprawling suburb ... it's lunatic.

General Motors may be an American icon, but it long ago ceased to be an American company -- no more American than are Toyota and Honda, anyway. And that's what we can't seem to wrap our heads around: There is no such thing anymore as an American job or an American company.

We didn't get it when a Dubai-based company bought a British-based company that had already been controlling U.S. ports; we didn't get it when Halliburton moved its headquarters from Houston to Dubai; and we still don't get it now, despite years of G.M. and Ford hacking away America's working class in a futile effort to save themselves from themselves.

In fact, just about the only American thing left of these "American" companies is the American tax dollars we've pumped into them. (In a related development, the Times has the audacity to mock on today's front page Russia's effort to bailout its automakers, arguing that "economists see little point in propping up such an aging giant.")

Call it coincidence, but G.M. has been steadily ratcheting up its sales pitch since the government swooped in to save it. Watch closely and you'll see G.M. trying to turn our criticism of it back on us: You don't get it.

Who does the fading auto giant get to deliver its message that we're the stupid ones? None other than fading football giant Howie Long.

It's a tired, and sleazy, marketing trick -- a page out of the Republican playbook. Don't fess up to missteps. Don't tell us how you're going to change your ways. Don't apologize for the damage and shame you have wrought. Just push through, stay the course, tell us why you think you're great and why we're crazy not to believe you, and distract us from your blunders with a pretty, recognizable face.

It's arrogant, out of touch and stupid, not unlike the overall behavior of the country that got us here. As Fred Kaplan quotes in his Slate piece on North Korea, G.M.'s unwavering delusion of grandier is the mark of a weak enterprise, not a strong one.

Now compare G.M.'s self-aggrandizing approach to how Japanese automaker Hyundai is handling the market downturn. Narrated by Jeff Bridges, the ads are simple, humble and personal. They show appreciation for their customers and empathy for those struggling in these difficult times. And they make Hyundai look way more American than General Motors.

Makes you want to go out and buy one right now, doesn't it?

It's astounding G.M. could squander such a vast amount of consumer capital, though perhaps it's that very amount of consumer capital that convinced the company it would always be beloved no matter what they put out for us to buy.

What General Motors missed was that there is a difference between having a personal relationship with their product, as the Times Magazine column suggests, and that product forming a part of our collective identity.

The first car I drove regularly was a Buick Regal. It got terrible gas mileage but I loved it anyway because it was a good car -- not because it was a G.M.

The Regal isn't around anymore, relegated to the junkyard of G.M. history. It's where all of General Motors is heading if it doesn't give us a better reason, and quick, to turn around our car-buying habits, and that reason has to be more than the "Total Confidence" shell game talking-head Howie is hawking.