WASHINGTON
Maureen Dowd
You know you’re in trouble when Old Europe chastises you for being too socialist. But, hey, nobody’s perfect — except maybe Michelle Obama, who landed in London with a huge Obama entourage, wearing a daffodil yellow dress and looking like a confident ray of U.S.A. sunshine.
As President Obama renegotiates the terms of American leadership this week in Europe, those of us left at home struggle to get over our affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”
The president is obviously worried about leaving us alone and under the economic weather; that must be why his Department of Health and Human Services put up some advice Tuesday on its Web site about “Getting Through Tough Economic Times.”
“Economic turmoil (e.g., increased unemployment, foreclosures, loss of investments and other financial distress) can result in a whole host of negative health effects — both physical and mental,” the government Web page sympathized, offering warning signs such as “persistent sadness/crying” and “excessive irritability/anger” and tips for managing stress, including: “Trying to keep things in perspective — recognize the good aspects of life and retain hope for the future.” And one particularly useful for Rick Wagoner and those of us in the newspaper business: Develop new employment skills.
It even went so far as to list suicide warning signs that sagely included “looking for ways to kill oneself.”
I heard a French scientist on a radio show once explain that Americans would always insist on supersizing things because our “reptilian brain” likes things big. We’re still big, as Norma Desmond said. It’s everything around us that’s collapsing and shrinking.
The Wall Street Journal had an article last week reporting that, now that gas prices have gone back down, almost half a million fuel-frugal small cars are piling up unsold at dealers around the country.
“I don’t think Americans really like small cars,” Beau Boeckmann, a Ford dealer in California, told The Journal. “They drive them when they think they have to, when gas prices are high. But we’re big people, and we like big cars.”
That’s the big nettle we’re grasping. How big do we need to be to still feel American? How big can our national debt grow? How big can our cars be? And how big is our clout abroad these days? Will Michelle’s style in Europe make as big a splash as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s?
The cowboy push by W. and Dick Cheney to be a hyperpower and an empire left America a weakened and tapped-out power, straining to defend its runaway capitalism even as it uneasily adapts to its desperation socialism.
How do we come to terms with the gluttony that exploded our economy and still retain our reptilian American desire for living large? How do we make the pursuit of the American dream a satisfying quest rather than a selfish one?
Many people were wringing their hands about the president forcing the resignation of Wagoner, whose G.M. lost $82 billion in the last four years, took $13.4 billion in bailout money and asked for $16.6 billion more, even as the carmaker’s market share melted from 33 percent to 18 percent and its stock slid from more than $70 a share to less than $4 — about the price of a couple gallons of gas.
But Mr. Obama’s move was bracing, a sign, at long last, that the president will not tolerate failure, not when he has to print all the money in the universe to underwrite obtuseness. Wagoner showed no foresight or willingness to curb an unhealthy appetite for the big. He failed to eliminate brands and launched the Hummer line in 2001. (Hummers remain icons of power in Iraq.)
“I thought it was absolutely bizarre,” said Maryann Keller, an independent automotive analyst, adding that “it was aimed at people who didn’t know what to do with the money they had. It was discretionary spending by males who clearly had other cars in their garages.”
Wagoner stuck to gas-guzzling pickups and S.U.V.’s long after it was clear that higher gas prices meant he should vary the fleet with more fuel-efficient vehicles.
The Iran hostage crisis in 1979 put America on notice that future relations with the Middle East would be volatile and that we had better get some methadone or ethanol or switch grass or something and get over our addiction to oil.
But Detroit defiantly stuck its head in the sand. A lot of longtime auto watchers felt relief and excitement at Wagoner’s crisp dismissal, knowing that the reckoning is at last here. The problems in the car industry have been so apparent for so long, and the failure to face up to them and move into a greener future has been so frustrating.
President Obama must nurse us through our affluenza, addressing both our visceral need to be big and our cerebral decision to be leaner — and much, much smarter.
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