If you weren’t there, I don’t think I can adequately convey to you just how bad American products were back in the Seventies and Eighties.
Especially cars. American-made cars were almost Soviet, in that if you happened to get one made by the one factory the one day the workers weren’t falling down drunk on the job, it might run … for a while. American workers weren’t drunk, of course, but they were unionized, which from a quality control perspective amounted to the same thing. Chrysler and especially General Motors were little more than employee pension plans that occasionally cranked out a crappy car. Not to take anything away from underhanded Japanese business practices back then — “dumping” etc. — but you had to give the Nips this, their shitboxes actually worked.
Even ten-thumbs guys like me became at least semi-adequate shade tree mechanics, because we had to keep the Sixties hand-me-down cars that got us through college running well into the 1990s, or we’d have to walk. No one in his right mind bought an American-made car from any year after 1970. Take that out for any large consumer product, and there you had it. Thanks, Big Labor!
But here in Clown World, the dilithium crystals have reversed polarity, so what was already fake and gay back at the very dawn of the Fake and Gay Era (future historians, please credit me for that coinage in your textbooks) is now a pillar of probity. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Big Labor is definitely shaping up to be the enemy of Big Government. Brandon’s puppetmasters have clearly decided to go for the quadruple axel, politically — they’re going to totally alienate every single cisgender, heteronormative member of their old coalition, so that when they finally make Utopia with just Intersectional Genderfluids of Color, even the French judge will be forced to give them a 10.
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton … let’s see how it works out for them. In the meantime, yeah, if you’ve got a tradesmen’s local in your area, buy ’em a box of donuts or something. They’re fighting the good fight on this one.
Severian, “Friday, No Job, Etc.”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-22.
January 27, 2022
QotD: American cars after 1970
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