Whee, The People

I'm using the title to this article, "Whee The People" much the way Herb Caen did regularly in his column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Herb was fond of poking fun at his readers and lampooning their follies. He laughed the most at the antics and foibles of socialites and politicos in the Bay Area and became surprisingly famous and in great demand in their celebrity social circles.

My reason for using his phrase is much the same; I relate to his cynicism . . . the government bailout issue for example. The automakers, their unions, their suppliers, and ultimately we consumers created this crisis ourselves, as a group. Why try to blame General Motors when we drivers were buying the Hummers and the Suburbans? Big was good in our consumer lingo. Remember the joke "you don't need to look for a parking space when you own a Humvee. You make your own" accompanied by the video clip of a Hummer driving over the top of adjacent cars? It appealed to those very same impulses that marketing companies use today, namely own more and bigger things than your neighbor.

And the newscasts of serious-faced Congress people looking down at the automakers in the hearings? Do any of us suspect that maybe some of them were driven to those meetings in 8 mpg limos? And then tell me that "we" (meaning the government but really us, the voters) are going to do a better job. A government car czar to decide which cars to build, how much to pay the workers, etc. etc.??? I always thought that was up to the entrepeur, the business owner......

So if there is need for regulation and discipline shouldn't we look to ourselves first instead of trying to blame somebody else? After all, we vote people into and out of our government, people whom we mean to represent our needs and interests. We have a representative democracy in this country (although some, like the Illinois governor treat it more like a business) and if you think about it, so is our market economy. Nobody is making us buy those Humvees. No one forces us to watch NASCAR races, and muscle cars have been hot sellers ever since cars were invented.

I guess "whee" gets the brass ring. We could waste a lot of time and money and engergy pointing fingers when really all that is needed is for us to just look in the mirror. Self-discipline is what this crisis is all about. Taking a longer-range view of our consumer-driven mentality would go a long way toward avoiding these bloated corporations and bloated bureaucracies.

My two cents.