Autoextremist Hates TTAC– With a Vengeance!

Walt Disney’s deathbed request to his brother Roy: don’t change my plans for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). Walt spent his final cancer-fighting years planning EPCOT’s every detail, from housing to commuting to garbage collection. When Walt was cold in his grave, Roy did the sensible thing. He tore-up Walt’s work and built a cod-World’s Fair. The idea of EPCOT as a company-run city rather than an amusement park was fundamentally flawed, doomed to controversy and failure ( Celebration anyone?). Detroit reminds me of Walt’s unrealized Disney world (small “w”): a place where corporate culture dominates the community’s mindset. Brock Yates chronicled this “Grosse Pointe myopia. As does Autoextremist Peter DeLorenzo, in his own way. Or, more precisely, in a David Koresh kinda way…

“Unbeknownst to the legions of people out there in ‘fractured’ America, the ones who fill the Internet with bile and who project such a level of viciousness and unbridled glee at the thought of the collapse of our domestic automobile industry as if it were – amazingly enough – some warped opportunity for celebration, there are countless towns, big and small, scattered all across this nation that have grown up with GM as their main employer and the main source of income for thousands of American families.”

As some TTAC commentators have pointed-out, it’s Detroit’s that’s being selfish, not the “outsiders.” Why should the rest of America prop-up an insular, self-righteous industrial theme park that had every opportunity– and plenty of profit– to clean-up its act? An industry with a justified reputation for screwing the very customer whose paychecks they now seek to raid? And why should they do so when Motown boosters like Sweet Pete are spitting on them?

“Even though we as a nation don’t seem to have the stomach for hard work and sacrifice any longer – hell, I’m not sure those words and their meanings are even in the lexicon of vast swaths of our population – we must get tougher in the midst of this global economy, and we have to steel ourselves for the kind of battles we’ll face.”

We’re all in this together but you suck? Nice. I, for one, am tired of hearing all this Bill O’Reilly-esque “back in MY day” nostalgia about how America (i.e. the “fractured” bit) is becoming a lazy, contemptible, corrupted, stupid, amoral society where no one knows the value of a good day’s work. I look around me and I see people working their asses off to make ends meet, who wave me into traffic and stop to help complete strangers when needed. I saw the faces at my wife’s immigration ceremony, and I felt nothing but pride for THIS generation of Americans.

Americans are a generous people. They do not deserve the contempt that Lorenzo and Co. believe– mostly in their imaginations– that non-Detroiters feel towards them. If I was a trained psychologist, I might even wonder if Fortress Detroit isn’t guilty of “projection.” As an automotive journalist who wants to see a strong American automotive industry, I despair.

“As I’ve said repeatedly the time for all of the idyllic, ‘let the free market run its course’ hand-wringing is over. It’s far too late for that. This country’s leadership needs to get these loans to GM and the rest of the domestic automobile industry in the next 60 days, or life as we’ve come to know it in this country – and I mean every part of this country – not just here in the Motor City, will be severely and unequivocally altered.”

Threats. Is that all you’ve got? In truth, DeLorenzo’s increasingly hysterical rants do his cause no favors.