Small Again, It’s Small, You Dummies
I thought it was Lee Iacocca calling from the west coast, but the voice was a little hollow, so it might have been Jacob Marley, rattling his chains, as the ghost of Christmas past.
“Hey you, dummy, waddya doin’ pushin’ those gas-hog SUVs? Their time is gone, it’s small again. Small, get it?”
Lee is in his eighties and he’s seen it all. Mustang through muscle at Ford and then a hop to Chrysler, where he saved their bacon with a matchbox called the K-Car. It even sounds like a box top.
Detroit had its lesson during the energy crisis of the seventies, when they left the back door unlocked by pumping out motorboats disguised as family cars and the Japanese sneaked into the house. Lee seemed to be the only guy in Mo-Town who saw it for what it was and while he publicly railed against the ‘rice-burner’ competition, he knew a gunslinger when he met one.
Iacocca is long since retired, but it’s due in large part to his legacy that Daimler-Chrysler is the only half-American firm on the street that…