In keeping with the FP piece on Joe Romm, I thought I’d have a go at turning something of our political discourse into a metaphor (metty-for in redneck-ese). Technically, I suppose it would actually be a conceit (a whut?), though I’m not really willing to slap the poem label on this. Anyhow. We begin beneath the typographically ornamental dingbat (squiggle):
The Two Mechanics
You have a car.
It is an ancient thing, all scuffed chrome and peeling paint. You got it from your parents who got it from their parents, in turn, and so on as far back as there had been cars to pass on. You buff it up every fourth of July and put it in the parade and, that one day a year, it runs like a champ. On the day before and the day after and every other day, the car barely runs. It leaks everything that can be leaked. It gets gallons to the mile instead of miles to the gallon. It’s loud enough to be annoying to everyone who hears it, but most of its horsepower fled years ago after numerous breakdowns in Vietnam, Afganistan, Iraq and one especially memorable engine failure in Florida. Despite everything, though, you love the car. You wouldn’t trade it in for anything. You might want to swap some broken bits with parts from Norway, Canada or France but only if you could still keep the fins, the Tijuana tuck-and-roll, and all the bits of chrome.
But today, the car isn’t running like it should. Truth be told, the past thirty years have taken their toll. This morning, while jiggling the key and pumping the gas and hoping for the engine to catch, you decide that it’s about time to take the old girl in for a service. When you get there— after more jiggling, more pumping, and a lot of cursing— you see the service station next-door to the one you’ve been using has a new mechanic. Truthfully you’ve used that service station before. Over the many years of car-ownership, you’ve swapped back and forth between the two any time you felt like or when something annoyingly expensive broke. A couple of times you swapped because the right-hand station promised they could give you all these neat upgrades and restore your car to exactly how it was fifty or sixty years ago. It’s never worked, but you had to give them a chance, right? This morning, though, the car is in really bad shape. It’s not riding so much as lurching from curb to curb. Once again you face your choice: which shop and which mechanic should get the chance to fix the car or, at least, keep it running for a few more years.
The chief-mechanic of the left-hand shop is a great guy. He’s always polite, always calm. He tells you what’s wrong with it, what should be done to fix it, and— when fixing it is too expensive— what can be done in the meantime. You’ve had him for a couple of years now and he’s done what he said he would. The car still runs. You know that if you’d been willing to pay a little more it wouldn’t lurch about at all and probably wouldn’t need service for another few decades. But you couldn’t afford it and, truthfully, just didn’t feel like paying for it right then. So you let him patch it up as best he could, something he always did with modesty, and tune it up enough that it would get a little better mileage and seat a few more people. He also got the wasp-nest from off the air-filter and chased the rats from their nest in the trunk, but he was always man enough to let the exterminators have all the credit for that one. His shop is always a little messy, littered with spare parts and grease-covered tools, but repairing cars is always a little messy and the tools have clearly been well-used. You couldn’t imagine switching shops, not when the left-hand mechanic has done so much with so little.
The right-hand mechanic is quite the salesman though. He’s got signs up promising all the same old things. He’ll buff your chrome and make your fins sparkle. He’ll take off all those pesky additions the left-hand shop added in like catalytic converters, windshield wipers, seat belts and airbags. Getting rid of all that will make it run better and cheaper, he says. Car companies wouldn’t make an unsafe car would they?
And his shop is so clean, not a speck of grease or grime anywhere. The tools are all in their diamond-plate drawers sorted by size and looking like they’d never once been used. He’s even got a nice young salesman talking up the little old ladies from behind the counter. The left-hand mechanic never had that, just an old, grizzled, veteran mechanic with more dirt under his nails than hair on his head who helped with the heavy machinery. You can hear the young salesmen chatting away with his smile never quite meeting his eyes, telling the little old ladies that they can keep their airbags and seat belts, never mind what the right-hand mechanic is selling.
Now right-hand mechanic is waving and shouting, trying to get you to turn your beater into his lot. But there’s something not right about him. If it wasn’t for the dickies with his name on a patch you might think the slicked-back hair, the carefully rolled up sleeves and unbuttoned collar, and the immaculately clean hands without a speck of grease or carbon anywhere meant he was the manager at the local bank and not actually a mechanic at all. If it wasn’t for the Chevy out front, you might think the Mustang, the Dodge truck, the set of Cadillacs, the yacht and the horse out back show that he cares more about owning things than actually fixing them. Also, it should probably tell you something about the cost of repairs.
So which mechanic do you use? Would you use the reliable, skilled, left-hand mechanic who’ll get you up and running and keep you on the road for years to come? Or would you choose the slick salesman who’ll charge you a boat-payment to wax your bumper and refuse to fix your poor sputtering, stalling motor because he says it’s already the best in the world and, really, is more than engine today’s motorists deserve? So the honest left-hand mechanic, or the crook on the right; it shouldn’t really be much of a choice, should it?