I went to visit the Borders corporate headquarters and spoke with some of their employees, followed by a question-and-answer session about my book, my time on the road with my father, and my role in politics. There were a lot of people there and they were all incredibly warm and engaging. All of them also seemed very enthusiastic about working for the company and the long legacy it had as a retailer. I remember a lot of laughs and having an unusually great time, considering it was an event where I had to “work”: give a speech and schmooze with Borders employees in an attempt to get them excited about the release of my book. I also spoke at the annual dinner held for authors of books that were going to be coming out in the next few months. I just remember all of it being extremely well done, organized, and overall a really pleasurable experience. The board and representatives made me feel welcome, and the event was held in a gorgeous hotel; I left feeling like I had the support of the entire company for the upcoming release of my book, a special feeling for any author to get from a corporate book seller.
I left Michigan thinking my friend was crazy, that there was no way a company like Borders would be on its way to going under. They were obviously running a tight ship in Ann Arbor and maintained a sense of enthusiasm for the industry. Borders filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy and was forced to liquidate and close all of its stores about eight months later. I remember hearing the news and actually feeling really sad about it. First because, like I said, this giant Borders bookstore down the street had been a sort of parent-okayed getaway throughout my adolescence that held a lot of sentimental value—I mean, I wrote many high school essays in the coffee shop on the top floor of that Borders—and because it felt like another blow to the state of Michigan. Yet another example of another American business that, for whatever reason, had not been able to evolve with the times. As a result of its failures, both a local economy would be damaged and more Americans would be out of jobs. The fact that Borders was based in Michigan, a state that has had more than its share of bruises in this recession, made it that much more tragic.
Michael: When we’re done taking turns sitting in the truck, we are led into a round room that looks like the holodeck on Star Trek. This is the Art of Manufacturing Theater. There’re about seventy seats dotted throughout the space. Once everybody is seated, we are immersed in a multimedia film about Ford and the Rouge complex, complete with wind and water effects. It’s my favorite kind of corporate propaganda: lots of shots of happy factory hands mixed with strobe lights, smoke machines, and plenty of rah-rah patriotic reverie. By the end of the spectacle, I’m ready to hug the first factory worker I see and thank them for their service.
When it’s over, we’ve got a couple of choices. We can either head upstairs to the Observation Deck, “the world’s largest living roof,” or we can take the Assembly Plant Walking Tour. Environmental stuff is great, and I’m glad Ford is trying to create “a realm where environmental innovation and industrial production work together to put an entirely new face on modern manufacturing,” but I just want to see some truck-making robots.
The plant tour is a third of a mile long along an elevated concrete pathway above the plant’s final assembly line. I’ve never been inside a factory before and don’t really know what to expect. In my head, I guess, it’ll look like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I am hoping for an Inventing Room, a Great Glass Elevator, and of course, lots of Oompa-Loompas.
The reality is different. For one thing, it looks less like Willy Wonka and more like an Ikea store. The factory is spotless and brightly lit. Workers are organized into small teams of about ten people each, walking back and forth from large plastic bins where the parts for their jobs are stored. The teams work at different stations doing certain, highly specific tasks. There’s a team that affixes side-view mirrors. A team that puts trim on the doors. A team that installs moonroofs.
That’s all they do, day after day, fitting those components onto the endless line of truck cabs rolling along the assembly line.
During its height in the thirties, a hundred thousand people made their living at the Rouge. Now that number is down to six thousand. They’ve also reduced the amount of time it takes to assemble a vehicle from twelve hours to ninety-two minutes. We see them at the end of the tour, brand new F-150s just like the one we sat in at the Legacy Gallery.
It’s kind of amazing to contemplate the overwhelming logistical complexity of making something like this work. All these people. All these moving parts. And this is just one factory making one product. How many factories just like this are scattered across the country? We hear all the time about manufacturing jobs being lost overseas. Well, these are the people losing those jobs, these people right here, about twenty feet below me on this factory floor. Every single one of them replaceable tomorrow. Maybe a new robot comes along that can do their job cheaper, or the president signs a new treaty that allows Ford to ship these jobs overseas, or the F-150 loses market share and they have to shut down the line.
I didn’t know what to think about the automotive bailouts. From where I sat as an American consumer, Detroit was making a lot of shitty cars. One bland clunker after another. Why were my taxes going to bail out lousy companies? On the other hand, I was sympathetic to all the ancillary costs of a bankrupt American automotive industry, the devastating ripple effects it could have on an already saggy economy. To me, it seemed like a fifty-fifty proposition. Maybe the bailouts would work or maybe we’d just end up flushing another 100 billion dollars into the Detroit sewer system.
Capitalism has gotten a lot of grief lately. A lot of people with my political leanings have come to believe that the bad in capitalism outweighs the good. Michael Moore even made a whole movie whose central premise was that capitalism is inherently evil.
I disagree.
I think capitalism is an imperfect economic system, but still the best one ever devised. It alone allows the free exchange of goods, services, and ideas. It creates wealth and opportunities for more people than any other system ever attempted. I am a capitalist and proud to be one.
But I reject the idea so common on the Right now that capitalism is an unmitigated good. It’s not. Capitalism is neither good nor bad. It is amoral, a tool whose purpose is the creation of wealth. But unlike other tools, capitalism has no single master, no single person in charge of its use. The master is “the corporation,” which despite the Supreme Court telling us otherwise is not a person. The corporation cannot be a person because it lacks the one thing that defines humanity: a conscience. The corporation’s purpose is to generate wealth, and it will do whatever it has to do to fulfill its purpose.
By itself, I don’t think this is a bad thing. I love wealth. Money is one of my favorite things. I like having it, smelling it, throwing it up in the air in slow motion while lying on a hotel bed. But there are rules that govern the ways in which I make my money. I can’t cheat people to make it. I can’t steal it. The rules preventing me from cheating and stealing are called “laws” or “regulations.” Yes, those regulations limit my ability to make money, but I’m glad they exist because they limit others from cheating and stealing from me.
The same principal is true for corporations. Except that, for a corporation, it’s even more tempting to skirt the bounds of legality and ethics because a corporation has no soul. If it can get away with something in the service of making a few extra bucks—dumping chemicals into a river, exploiting vulnerable workers, cheating its customers—it might do so.
That’s why we need laws to make sure there is a respectful balance between the needs of the corporation and the needs of the people. The two do not always go hand in hand. My personal belief is that capitalism works best when there is tension between markets and governments. American capitalism cannot work without the American government, and the American government cannot work without American capitalism. Sort of like the way air bag laws make cars safer. (Airbag legislation, by the way, was opposed by all of the automotive companies because the companies
feared the bags didn’t go far enough to protect drivers. Just kidding. They thought airbags would cost them too much money.)
Meghan: The factory is absolutely enormous, with a long pathway where you can look down over the entire conveyor belt. The entire place is extremely well lit, and men and women walk around putting different parts in different places. We watch as one man puts a long rubber buffer of some kind on the window of an SUV. He wears headphones, and repeats his one piece of the puzzle as each car passes by.
I know that these jobs are popular and none of the workers seem too stressed out or upset in any way, but something about it seems incredibly draining and daunting. What if one of them misses a place and doesn’t add onto the car what they are supposed to? I wonder if there were ever any accidents on the line and how much it would cost to stop the production if someone got hurt. As clichéd as this might sound, it is weird to stand here looking down at “the American autoworker.” Literally right beneath me are the men and women who have been the subject of discussion on the news and in articles across America for years now. These are the people pundits and politicians are talking about.
For all of the obvious reasons, I love the Ford company. It’s the oldest American auto company, started in 1903 by Henry Ford, and has a long history of ingenuity. It played an integral role in both the industrial revolution and American history, starting with the introduction of the original Model A. It’s a company that survived the Great Depression and has continued to be a family-controlled company for over a hundred years. It’s the second-largest automaker in the United States and the fifth largest in the world. My brother drives a huge Ford F-150 truck. My father drives a Ford Fusion. My family uses another Ford F-150 in Phoenix. I don’t know if there is another car that is as all-American as the Ford F-Series. Possibly a Cadillac, but for over a hundred years Ford has been a symbol of American pride with its great, solidly made automobiles and trucks.
I love a man in a Ford F-Series pickup truck, so much so that my girlfriends and I have a running joke about how all men should just do themselves a favor and buy Ford pickups, because they automatically become more attractive when driving them. Seriously, I will take a man in a Ford any day of the week over a man in a BMW.
The other thing about the Ford company is that it did not participate in the bailouts that both GM and Chrysler did in 2009. Ford did not file bankruptcy, but did take 5.9 billion dollars in low-cost government loans to overhaul its factories and bring out more fuel-efficient technology. However, compared to the 80 billion dollars that were spent bailing out the other two car companies, the amount Ford received was very small.
In September of 2011, Ford put out a television commercial critical of the Obama administration’s auto bailouts. In the ad, a Ford owner says that he bought an F-Series pickup truck because Ford was the only US automaker not to have taken a bailout. The man in the ad says, “I wasn’t going to buy another car that was bailed out by our government. I was going to buy from a manufacturer that’s standing on their own: win, lose, or draw.” The ad came under fire and was later removed from the air because of the controversy it caused and the fact that it didn’t address the loan Ford had been given.
Now, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I have absolutely no problem with that ad and think the Ford company has every right to tout the fact that it was not bailed out by the US government. One of the cornerstones of my Republican beliefs is that I am anti-union, and do not believe in government bailouts. Not only was I against the auto bailouts when the Obama administration gave them to the automakers, it was the first time I really panicked about the extreme damage that I felt was being done by the Obama administration. I felt like I was watching a train crash and the repercussions of that crash were going to be felt, literally, in my grandchildren’s lifetime.
Now, before you get ahead of yourself and start accusing me of overreacting and accusing the president of being a socialist, let me explain. One of the main, basic differences in philosophy between Republicans and Democrats is the role each party believes government should play. I believe that business and enterprise in America should be left alone as much as possible. I believe in small government. I believe in letting businesses work on their own in a free market.
The Democrats’ view is that we should regulate businesses and give money to the ones they think will succeed. I do not believe that works. It didn’t work under communism, it didn’t work under socialism, and it doesn’t work now. In regard to the auto industry, I believe we should have let automakers go bankrupt, like the thousands of other companies that have gone bankrupt and come back, either to emerge after reconstruction or fail because, well, their businesses were failures. Instead, the Obama administration put the autoworker unions in a superior position.
Why should a car company get a better deal than a small-business owner on Main Street America? What about that is fair or American? Why do the automakers get a special deal because of the power of the unions, as opposed to all the small businesses that have gone under in Phoenix, Arizona, where I grew up? Because last time I checked, all the small family-owned businesses in America didn’t get any bailouts. When small companies and businesses in America fail, they go bankrupt. Sometimes they reemerge as leaner and more capable companies. Sometimes they do not, but that’s capitalism: what this country is founded on. I believe in capitalism. I believe in a free market system.
Things in America should never be too big to fail. We should not be afraid of letting bad products fail, in order to let companies come back stronger and more innovative as a result. The argument President Obama and liberal Democrats give for the bailouts is that if we had let the auto companies go bankrupt, we would have lost that industry. They don’t really emphasize the fact that a large part of President Obama’s Democratic base consists of labor unions, and that it is politically expedient to placate those unions. Last time I checked, companies go bankrupt every single day in America; if they’re great enough companies with great enough products, they will come back and succeed. President Obama and the Democrats gave away 80 billion dollars of taxpayer money when they didn’t have to. Bailing out is enabling mediocrity. It is allowing the larger problems to continue—the problems that got a company in the position where it needed to be bailed out in the first place. In my opinion, this is un-American. This country did not become the greatest country in the history of the world through bailouts.
As I gaze over the factory floor, I wonder if there is ever going to be a time when technology will completely overtake these workers’ jobs, and what it will mean to the American auto industry. All I know is that I am glad this company and others like it have not been off-shored to China.
Michael: I’m so impressed with the factory tour that I do something I almost never do. I walk into the gift shop and buy myself a souvenir, a blue-and-white baseball cap with the Ford logo stitched on the front. As we board the bus for the ride back to the Henry Ford, I examine the tag sewn into the hat’s lining: MADE IN CHINA.
From the factory floor to the mosque: our next stop is the Islamic Center of America. It was important to me that we spend some time hanging out with Muslims on this trip because Islam takes up such a large part of our national dialogue. Because, let’s face it—Islam freaks people out.
My impression is that most Americans don’t know what to think about Muslims. On the one hand, we are a nation that prides itself on accepting people of all faiths. On the other hand, Muslims scare us because of 9/11. Whether or not that’s fair is a matter of opinion, but I understand the fear. If a bunch of Scientologists had blown up a couple giant buildings, we might be scared of them too.
(Actually, after seeing Tom Cruise jump on Oprah’s couch, I am a little scared of Scientologists.)
People correctly make the argument all the time that terrorism isn’t limited to Muslims. But in America, terrorism is most closely identified with Islam because most of our experience with terrorism is Islamic terrorism. There have been enough terrori
st plots and terrorist acts committed against Americans by Muslims (some of them homegrown) that we have a hard time separating crazy jihadists from run-of-the-mill American Muslims just trying to go about their lives.
Part of our apprehension probably has to do with the fact that most of us do not know any Muslims. Despite all the attention it gets, Islam is still a tiny religion here, accounting for less than one percent of the population. It’s easy to fear somebody when you have never met them. My best Muslim friend is a comedian with Elvis sideburns who does a videogame podcast; it’s hard for me to get too worked up about Islam in general when that’s the guy I most closely associate with the faith.
At the same time, Americans tend to automatically dismiss homegrown, non-Muslim terrorists like Timothy McVeigh as nut jobs because all of us know so many people who look and act like him. Who hasn’t met the paranoid, angry white guy with the buzz cut muttering about black helicopters? Most of the time, that dude is a harmless crank. When he does end up doing the unthinkable, we shrug him off as crazy. If two Muslim teenagers had gone through their high school spraying bullets like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did at Columbine, we would have blamed the whole religion instead of the kids. We would have said they were terrorists instead of maniacs.
Is that fair?
Even so, Muslims haven’t done themselves any great service in the years since 9/11. Why don’t we hear them decrying violence? Part of the problem is that they are a disparate group. There is no Muslim pope. No Muslim king. Muslims are like Jews, organized into small enclaves loosely affiliated with each other through larger umbrella organizations. They have no overall governing body. Nor is there any prominent American Muslim to stand up and speak for the faith. So, when Americans hear a collective silence from the Muslim community after an Islamic terrorist attack, they often interpret that silence as acquiescence rather than what it most likely is, a lack of leadership.
America, You Sexy Bitch Page 28
