BIG THREE AUTOMAKERS IN THE AGE OF THE SURREAL!

BIG THREE AUTOMAKERS IN THE AGE OF THE SURREAL!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 18, 2008

“While Detroit’s Big Three are laying off thousands of workers, Toyota is hiring thousands of workers right here in America, where a substantial share of all our Toyotas are manufactured. Will (a bailout) save Detroit or Michigan? No. Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal politics of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along. A bailout of Detroit’s BIG THREE would be only the latest in postponements of reality.”

Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate columnist, The Tampa Tribune, December 18, 2008

* * * * * *

Charles Wilson, CEO of General Motors in the 1950s was prophetic when he said, “As GM goes so goes America.” He meant it in a positive light. After fifty years of dodging reality and falling comfortably into a surreal existence, the American culture has followed the lead of Detroit and GM, and has gotten fat, sassy and indolent.

In an effort to control everything, it has come to control nothing. It is no accident that Robert McNamara, one of the boy geniuses of Detroit during the 1950 – 1960s, was the architect of the Vietnam War, and we know where that got us.

We also know that Walter Reuther made the United Auto Workers (UAW) a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century. He treated the auto industry as prey and fought for major concessions to the BIG THREE automakers, while conceding total control of work to these automobile manufacturers.

The UAW model became that of all unions from truck drivers to teachers, from sod carriers to steel workers. The cry was for concessions and entitlements seldom associated with competencies or results.

The pioneers gave birth to countless industries from the late 19th to the early 20th century. This included auto making, radio and telephone communications, public education, railroad building, steel production, coal mining, and vehicular commerce. These forgers into the new century were more often than not autodidactic, self-taught entrepreneurs. They struggled creatively with a changing world brought about by moving from an agrarian to a modern industrial society. By the 1950s, that paradigm was already fading. America commenced the process of coasting on the momentum of the past.

You don't agree? The original science and technological breakthroughs of today's "Electronic Age" were all a product of this earlier period. The late 19th and early 20th century was the most creative period in man's history.

Even the wake up call of the successful launching of the satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in 1957, or the surge from the East of Total Quality Management of Japan in the 1960s, which cut deeply into manufacturing markets the US thought it owned, failed to get our attention.

That is, until Tom Brokaw of NBCTV chaired an hour-long program in 1980, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” American industrial technologists who American industry had rejected were doing miracles in Japan. Suddenly, these obscure men of science and industry -- W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker –- were famous and in demand.

Each wake up call was like gnats biting at our ankles, no real threat, just an irritation. We prided ourselves in being an optimistic “can do” society, buying our slogans and catch phrases as reality. It was inconceivable for us to consider that we were a totally reactive society too self-indulgent to see the signs or to anticipate the consequences of inaction in an ever-changing world. We had lost our moral compass and our way.

Reality was no longer inescapable, as it was no longer relevant. We became a nation of apologists from the demands of work to the relevance of education, from the rigors of life to the inevitability of death, from the polarizing influences of the religious right to the atheistic left, from the high achieving elitists to the dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.

It became an anathema to stand out, or to challenge the system. Comfort was giving way to complacency, and independence to courterdependence on the workplace or government for our total well being.

We forgot that to be an individual meant to struggle, to endure pain, to embrace failure so that we might succeed, to take risks and to accept their consequences. It became much more important to fit in than to stand out. We have suffered mightily for this indulgence.

Such apologist as psychologist Nathaniel Branden claimed our malaise was a problem of self-esteem; others pointed out to the disowned self; still others continued the word game with such language as anomie, self-estrangement, alienation, and disassociation. American society became less about doing and more about explaining why we weren’t doing.

Progressive education became a playground of compassionate promotion without learning, as we didn’t want to injure the delicate psyches of our children. Teachers became essentially room monitors while the little lads and lasses were called “Robins” and “Blue Jays” to differentiate the learners from the non-learners.

We couldn’t suggest some kids were very bright and others were not. That was forbidden. If teachers criticized a child, disciplined a child, held a child back for being a non-learner, all hell would break forth for that teacher. So, teachers quit teaching and settled in to being room monitors.

The cry became everyone should be entitled to a college education whether everyone wanted one or not. Meanwhile, we lacked plumbers, pipe fitters, lathe operators, electricians, toolmakers, carpenters and builders, gardeners and landscapers, farmers and farm workers.

Somewhere along the way reality became a bypass as we are not all college material, and if we are not all college material, something must be wrong with us, when nothing is wrong with us at all. We simply have differing talents, interests and capabilities. We don’t have to create an army of one or the other, but a complement of both. That is what enriches society as it is ever changing.

When I was in college, my freshman class of more than 3,000 was reduced to 2,700 by the end of the first semester, and by graduation less than 1,000 of my original classmates were there to graduate. Being a student of a land grant university, every high school graduate was entitled to admission to a state university.

Many found that they didn’t like the atmosphere of college, the self-reliance imposed, the demands of the course work, or, indeed, the sacrifices of typical youthful insouciance. Education was a job in which you didn't get paid. That rankled those who felt life owed them a living.

If you flunked a course, then, you couldn’t take it over to erase the grade. You couldn’t substitute a core requirement for some non-college course, as is the case today, in order to preserve your chances of staying in school and ultimately graduating.

When you graduated then, the degree meant that you could teach, work as an engineer, chemist, accountant, or administrator because you had acquired the basic skills of those respective disciplines. Your employer didn’t have to conduct remedial programs in reading, writing and arithmetic, much less in the disciplines of your degree. For example, as a management & organization development psychologist, I have had engineering superviors tell me engineering graduates couldn't do engineering. Why? Because they were poor readers and writers.

Today, if you can’t read, no problem. If you can’t do simple calculations, no problem! If you can’t write, no problem!

In the surreal world of college education, these competencies are too often irrelevant. You simply have to behave, not provoke your professors, and take substitute courses that are less challenging in these disciplines, all of which are available in droves.

Then too, you can major in feminine studies, or ethnic studies, or some other politically correct major to acquire a meaningless degree. The quest is to become a college graduate, not be educated. Chances are once you have graduated you’ll never read a book or challenge your mind again. If this seems absurd, more than 50 percent of high school graduates are in some form of college, and less than 10 percent claim to book readers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, only about 10 percent of Americans graduated from high school. The curriculum was called “classical,” because it included four years of math, four years of English, four years of language (usually two years of German and two years of French), chemistry, biology, geology, four years of history, four years of literature (separate from English, covering European Literature), and practical skills training such as mechanics, etiquette and social decorum. It was a liberal arts education easily the equivalent of a college degree if not more so today.

The United States of America built its society on this core group of high school educated, and those that went on to college to embrace an even more challenging curriculum. Less than 5 percent of Americans were college degreed at the time of the Great Depression. My uncle Leonard was one of them.

I have written about him in the past. He had to drop out of high school in his freshman year to help support the family when his mother died. He was fourteen. It was 1914. Once WWI was over, he returned to school, now in Iowa City, Iowa where the University of Iowa was located. He completed four years of classical high education, and four years of college simultaneously in order to be eligible for graduate school.

One day his second year German professor at Iowa told him he was the poorest student he had ever had, not knowing he was taking first year German at the same time. My uncle went on to acquire Ph.D.’s in economics and psychology in 1929, just as the Great Crash on Wall Street occurred. He became the model of my life, and whenever I have thought I had it tough, I’ve always thought of him and his struggle.

My uncle was typical of his generation who were builders of the "American Century." Most of them came of age in the first quarter of the 20th century, with the second quarter of that century producing the "lost generation," the third quarter producing the "beat generation," and the last quarter of the 20th century producing the hippies, "x" and "y" generations, allowing American society to more or less coast to its present predicament in the 21st century.

I will close as I began with a quote from Thomas Sowell’s article:

“Can’t do math or science after they (today’s students) are in college? Denounce those courses for their rigidity and insensitivity, and create softer courses that the student can pass to get their degrees. Once they are out in the real world, people with diplomas and degrees – but with no real education – can hit a wall. But by then the day of reckoning has been postponed for 15 or more years. Of course, the reckoning can last the rest of their lives.”