Buckley’s Mix

Solving the GM Problem

Posted April 1, 2009, 12:04 ET Comments Off

The Administration has taken a lot of unfair heat for its takeover of GM. People have wondered how it is that Obama knows how to design a car.

As if that’s so very hard. As it happens, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about car designs while I was a child, and even produced a good many drawings. I’ve done the same during law school faculty meetings. And I don’t think I’ve done a worse job than Detroit–not that that says much.

Since you ask me, I have some very definite ideas about what a car should look like.

For starters, fins. Nothing better expresses the idea of exuberance, the striving that is never satisfied with the dull, the ordinary, the spare and utilitarian than fins that jut out and threaten to decapitate meddlesome pedestrians.

Another idea: push button gear shifts. We had them in the 1950s, then they disappeared. What happened?

Here’s another great idea from back then: two-tone paint jobs.

And the Mopar 426 Hemi engine. With batteries to enhance the energy-efficient demands of today.

I don’t say that everyone will like this, immediately in any event, but I have a plan for that too. The problem here is the consumers, the same consumers who wanted SUV’s and who cost the GM CEO his job when he sought to satisfy consumer demand.

What I’m going to need are mandatory aesthetic classes that train consumers to appreciate the kind of car I have in mind, and nudge them in my direction. That’s of course what the Administration will need, as it weans us from SUVs.

I knew a CEO who had just this problem. He liked photo-realism (as I do), and bought some Richard Estes for the board room. He loved them, but no one else did. When he heard that his tastes in art weren’t shared, what did he do? Return the paintings? No, he asked all his execs to take art appreciation classes.

Category: Politics as mental Illness
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