Car_and_Driver_USA_July_2017

The Columnists
Back in the days when I had the
courage to board a commercial
aircraft, I remember a few transatlantic
trips where I was given
a little bumper sticker that could
be affxed to the side of my seat.
It said, “Wake me for meals.”
Wow. Really? Wake me for belching, too.
That was during an era when you daily saw
bumper stickers that read, “America: Love
it or leave it!” At the time, plenty of us
wanted to commission our own that read,
“America: Love it and fix it.”
Speaking of using your car as a biographical
information center,
I’ve recently seen five
or six bumper stickers—all
on pickup trucks—that read,
“If you take my guns, this is
my weapon.” It’s a little hard
to fathom the message. Does
it mean that, during holdups,
the truck will be brandished
for drive­through capers?
What’s more, if your vehicle bears a message
that maybe establishes a deadly threat,
won’t you ensure an increase in roadside
chitchats with nervous patrolmen?
At the hardware store, I met a Californian
in a gray Nissan GT­R who’d purchased
one of those license­plate covers
promising to foil red­light cameras. As
usual, the plastic had turned nicotine­stain
yellow, and the plate was incomprehensible
to both cameras and eyeballs. “Never got a
ticket in the mail,” Mr. California boasted,
“but I got pulled over twice for having an
obscured plate.”
And now, guess what’s back? “Buy
American” bumper stickers are what’s back.
I thought they had dried up and peeled off in
the Nixon administration. I recall a trio of
cars we were taking to the Chrysler proving
grounds: a Honda Accord, a Subaru Legacy,
and a Toyota Camry. When we stopped at a
convenience store en route, a customer
grabbed my arm and said: “Why don’tcha
test cars made in America?” The tat on his
neck looked like recent prison work, so I
gave him a smile instead of a snappy comeback,
which I didn’t have anyway.
But then I remembered
that all three of our test
specimens—plus our Toyota
Sienna photo van—had been
built in America. If you’re a
cheerleader for “Buy American,”
please attach to your
pompoms a chart advising
where stuff is made. Plus,
I’ll bet you $20 your pompoms came
from China.
You may have heard UAW president
Dennis Williams proposing a “Buy American”
ad campaign. The last time we stirred
that mixed stew, it gave the Big Three carte
blanche to relax on quality control and on
R&D and on their future ability to wake me
for meals. If you’re blindly loyal to “Buy
American,” don’t you undermine capitalism’s
essential better­mousetrap foundation?
I don’t know, either. My parents
overdid it a little on my fluoride treatments.
And not that it’s important or anything,
but why resurrect this xenophobia just as
Fiat Chrysler, Ford, and GM are, if not
exactly rolling in profits, at least having
trouble counting them?
Well, the reason, I’m told, is that
America is desperate to regain lost jobs.
Which is odd, because our unemployment
rate right now is hovering between a classically
low 4.5 and 4.9 percent. What jobs,
exactly, are we talking about? Our president
says 94 million Americans are out of
the workforce. The Department of Labor—
who, you know, studies these things—says
that 88 million folks who did not have a job
in 2016 did not want a job. They’re coagulated­gravy
semiretired boomers, like me,
with a happy hour that begins right after
the prunes and poached eggs.
“No, no, no,” they say. “We mean
high-paying jobs.” I’ve yet to see a dollar
figure attached to that utterance, but I
assume it refers to something beyond minimum
wage at Burger King. What happens if
we do slap a 20 percent tariff on, say, a Mexico­built
Ford Fusion? If you bought your
Fusion for $25,000, would you now pay
$30,000 to replace it? How does an overpriced
and thus poor­selling Fusion make
Ford more competitive against Germany,
Japan, and Korea? For some reason, I smiled
the other day when Mexico’s economy
minister said: “The moment that they say,
‘We’re going to put a 20 percent tariff on
cars,’ I get up from the table. Bye­bye.”
And now I’m seeing “America First”
bumper stickers, whose message in part
means banning selected immigrants. Be
careful about that, too. The Center for
Automotive Research’s Richard Wallace
recently complained to Automotive News,
“There’s not enough [automotive engineers]
to start with.”
I don’t have the mental equipment to
comprehend trade issues, but I do recall
that America had already lost half its
manufacturing jobs before NAFTA took
effect, and that was 23 years ago. So all of
this feels as if we’re just chasing our own
tails until we’ve gnawed off all the fur. I
like what Saul Bellow said: “A great deal of
intelligence can be invested in ignorance
when the need for illusion is deep.”
So paste your bumper stickers on your
fridge, where I can’t see them. Bumper
stickers don’t inform; they incite, they discombobulate.
We need to be bobulated.
John Phillips
030 . CAR AND DRIVER . JUL/2017