Christmas Trees and Cars

We bought a Christmas tree last night. It was cold, probably above freezing but there was a terrible stiff breeze. We walked around and looked at the different trees, trying to imagine them in our living room. There were two guys working the lot, a black guy who spoke Spanish and a big gringo. Plus a lady at the cash register. They had a pretty good stream of cars.

We own a Suzuki Grand Vitara, it's a kind of smallish SUV. We got it because of its safety record, really, a lot of the cars in this class tend to tip over but this one was nice and stable in the crash tests. I guess it's five years old now, and it's been nothing but trouble. Right now we are driving it around with a blown head gasket, pouring Bar's Leaks into it to delay the inevitable multithousand dollar repair job. Before that it was the timing chains -- it's got two, and if you replace one you should do both, and replace the water pump while you're in there. The car doesn't even have fifty thousand miles on it yet.

The gringo waited on us, of course. This was the most efficient Christmas tree purchase we have ever made, by the way, the kids are pretty much grown up, they live at home but we don't see them much and they weren't with us on this trip. When they were little they used to each pick a "favorite" tree, usually one they felt sorry for, and then demand that we buy that one, though of course there were two of them and neither was sensible by adult terms. So buying the tree was an exercise in diplomacy for us, it was fun and the kids were cute, but you didn't just run out for a tree, you put some time into it.

The gringo was glad to see that we had a rack on the top of the car that he could tie the tree to, and he asked about the car. I told him it was a terrible car and I would never recommend it to anyone. He said he used to have a Ford Taurus, and it was so terrible he got rid of it and swore never to buy an American car again. Now he has a Toyota, and so far it's working out. See, I have a Japanese car and it's no good, but I'd buy a different Japanese car, I don't write off the whole country. This guy won't buy another American car, and he's not the only one, you hear this every day. This gringo went on for a long time about how they take our ideas and make something out of them, we could do it but we don't, they work harder than us and try harder, we have the good ideas but they know what to do with them.

Next thing, while he was wrapping twine around that poor tree out there in the cold, he started in about the economy. The thing seems to be that we're actually in a depression but the big guys are afraid to say so, they'll only call it a recession. It's going get a lot worse, the Christmas-tree gringo said, we haven't really seen anything yet, people are going to start losing their jobs pretty soon.

Then he got to the bail-out of the car companies. He said, do you know how much that's going to cost? The billions they're going to give them now won't even start to touch it.

This is a tough one, isn't it? The Bush administration gave companies a tax break for buying gas-guzzlers, and the price of gas went up through the roof. I remember way back when it went over a dollar a gallon and the gas stations didn't know what to do, they didn't have enough spaces on their signs, they'd put "$.02" for "$1.02." People were burning gas like it was endless, and then the oil companies wanted to break every profit record in recorded history, and the price went up, economists explained it in positive but nonsensical language, and we stood there pouring sixty, seventy dollars of hard-earned cash into the tank, just to get to work.

They did everything wrong, everything evil, now nobody -- including this guy at the Christmas tree lot -- wants their products, and the government has to save them. You feel like saying, let 'em hang, except for all the people who work there, who need the jobs. And speaking of evil, the Republicans in Congress are seeing this as an opportunity to bust the union. Salaries make up about a tenth of car manufacturers' expenses, but this is a chance to win one for management, get people to work cheaper.

Looking back, you can see what they should have done. The car companies should have made cars that people want, low mileage, safe, nice looking cars with parts built to last and, one of my pet peeves, mechanical design that facilitates repairs, like on a computer, where you can reach the parts without taking the whole thing apart. It's a simple thing, really: Detroit should have made good cars.

Because decisions all along were made by people talking about money in terms of billions of dollars, us little "thousands" people don't have much say in it. We buy the cars they sell, we pay the price they ask, we work hard and live as well as we can. They're trying to increase their billions and we're trying to raise a family in safety and comfort -- those are different goals. It can work if they market their products as providing quality to the consumer, and especially if they really do provide quality, but that can be expensive, companies won't do it, sorry to say it but it comes down to greed.

Did you see what they did in England? It's unthinkable here:

Credit card giants have been given two weeks to agree to stop charging exorbitant rates to borrowers or risk losing their operating licences.

Ministers said they were giving Britain's major lenders one last chance to prove they were not profiteering from the downturn. The ultimatum was delivered at a four-hour Whitehall summit called after The Independent disclosed some credit card and store card providers had raised interest rates – in some cases to 30 per cent – even though the cost of borrowing had fallen. Two weeks to cut rates, card issuers told

Can you imagine the Bush administration doing something like that? Huh, it simply wouldn't happen. The companies are making money, and that's a good thing, right? For some reason the British government is responsive to the needs of citizens, and American government responds to the wishes of gigantic corporations. How did we get that way? How do we change? I hope the recent elections will move us in the right direction.

We got the tree home and set it up in its stand. It kept wanting to tilt, but we twisted those screws and now it looks cat-proof. The kids wandered in a little later and helped hang things on the tree, then cell phones started ringing and out they went again, man, isn't it great to be that age? This tree makes the house smell Christmasy and nice, the blinking lights and that glowing angel on top evoke a sweet nostalgia for all Christmases past and a kind of hope for all Christmases to come, knowing that life goes on, the cycle of the year rolling along from antiquity into a future that is sometimes frightening, but we know there will be Christmases, trees, glowing angels in the future.