57. Car Guys
Book events! Timothy Snyder! Bad car men!
Blazing Eye Sees All, my second book, will be out in two-and-a-half weeks. This is hard for me to believe because (a) I lived alone with this project for so long and (b) I really thought this book would break my mind completely and, for a little while, I convinced myself I wouldn’t actually write it. The research was so involved, so completely consuming. I was drowning in it.
Recently I found myself laughing as I read journalist and novelist Gwen Florio’s newsletter, who compares writing books to learning Italian — a language that doesn’t always follow the rules — regole.
“When I first started, I thought that after I had a couple of books under my belt, I’d have cracked the code to whatever it takes to make the process easier – to find the A plus the B (let’s say character plus plot) that would equal the C of a satisfying book. Thirteen books later, I’m still looking for the damn regole.”
I had this thought many times while writing this book: I’ve written one book, so why is writing another one so hard? It’s hard because every book is hard to write. You don’t always know where you are going. That uncertainty, for me, is why I love writing. But that can be hard to remember when you’re in it.
For now, here’s a reminder of the tour dates I have currently booked; I’ll be adding more stops very soon. Pre-order at the link and come out to get your book signed:
Portland: Thursday, March 27 - Book Release at Powell’s City of Books, In Conversation with B. Toastie Oaster, 7 pm. Info here.
Spokane: Wednesday, April 2 - Northwest Passages Event at Steam Plant Roof Top, In Conversation with Emma Epperly, 7 pm. Tickets here.
Eugene: Sunday, April 13 - Gratitude Brewing, In Conversation with Brendan O’Meara, 1 pm. Info here.
Crested Butte, Colorado: Saturday, May 24 - Mountain Words Festival, In Conversation with Laura Krantz, 10 am. Tickets here.
Before we move into the newsletter bit of this newsletter, I also am very excited to tell you that I’ll be in conversation with Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny and On Freedom, who I’ve cited here many times before. It’s a virtual, ticketed event on March 26 at noon Pacific, hosted by WorldOregon. Get your tickets here and watch/listen as you eat your lunch.
I don’t know if people in this country ever really got along, but at one point, we could agree that we would not buy a used car from a man like Richard Nixon. Did you know this was a saying? “Would you buy a used car from this man?” In 1960, Americans resoundingly agreed that, no, they did not want Nixon to be President of the United States, so presumably they would also not want to buy a car from him. Eight years later, in 1968, enough Americans changed their minds on that and elected Nixon to the presidency. We all know how that turned out.
It’s such an adorable question now — cute, simple: if you can’t trust a man to sell you a box of steel and glass safe enough to hurtle your body down the freeway at 60 miles per hour, how could you trust him to run an entire country?
And, yet, look at us now: a car salesman runs the country. But we didn’t elect Elon Musk — the richest man on the planet, the CEO of the car company Tesla — as a “special government employee” to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk and his department have tasked themselves with slashing federal spending and carrying out a wholesale shit-canning of federal employees working for departments Trump and Musk have decided to shred to ribbons. Many of those decimated departments have investigated Musk’s companies.
It seems that we have differing opinions as a country on if we’d buy a used car from Trump, a 34-time felon. In November, 76.9 million people arguably voted that they would buy what he was selling. But is the car question still the question we’re asking? I think we know this man will not keep us safe.
What is with America’s long fixation on problematic car guys? A look at history shows a long story of car-men imposing their will, fomenting hate and indoctrinating wide swaths of the populace with their ideas, selling cars all the while. Look to the Ford Motor Company’s Henry Ford.
In my forthcoming book, there’s a section about Ford, antisemitism and a very old piece of propaganda, called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here’s an excerpt:
“The Protocols takes the form of meeting minutes. The meeting is fake, and the fictional minutes tell the story of a nonexistent Jewish conclave that supposedly huddled in secret at a summit in the late 1800s to carefully plot a Jewish takeover of the world. People immediately believed it was real and continue to, often referring to this so-called secretive Jewish conclave as “the cabal.” In the 1920s, two British newspaper writers penned panicked screeds claiming that The Protocols was proof that Jews intended a seizure of Great Britain. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that even though mainstream media had proved the document to be a fabrication, it was useful in achieving the Nazi Party’s genocidal ends …
For generations of antisemites worldwide, The Protocols has served as the thing that they could point to in order to justify their hate. In the United States, it was picked up by a man who spoke the language of capitalism: Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company. A wiry man with cavernous eyes, Ford attributed “all evil to the Jews or the Jewish capitalists,” as one friend described. He even believed jazz music had been created by Jews as a vehicle to covertly sow sinful ideas into wholesome minds. In response, he dumped massive amounts of money into square-dancing education programs in public schools in order to thwart the creep of jazz. Ford was so vociferous in his antisemitism, Hitler reportedly kept a life-sized portrait of him next to his desk.
Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, in Michigan, and through 1922, ran ninety-one installments of The Protocols, retitled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” These were eventually collected into a book, and a million copies circulated throughout America.”
Ford even distributed antisemitic literature at his car dealerships. He was unafraid to link his brand to his hate.
Ford’s influence in spreading hate cannot be overstated; the guy even got a shout-out at the Nuremberg Trials, when a young member of the National Socialist German Students League told the courtroom:
“The decisive antisemitic book which I read at that time and the book which influenced my comrades…was Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew. … In those days this book made such a deep impression on my friends and myself because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success.”
How is this different from today? Musk is seen now as the representative of ultimate success. And so is Trump: the TV businessman, the man with the hotels dripping in gold. We all were convinced along the way that money = smart, when really, a successful used car guy knows that money = doing whatever it takes to get it. Where are the good rich people right now? Clearly there aren’t enough of them to out-spend these two guys.
The Musk/Ford parallels continue: Musk created a space that nurtured antisemitism and hate on Twitter — our modern-day version of a mass media. Musk trotted out his support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, appearing virtually at a rally sounding very much like a modern-day neo-Nazi: “It's good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” he said.
And it is Musk alone who egregiously performed a stiff-armed Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration event (later mimicked by Steve Bannon and others at a Republican convention), because he knows there are no consequences for him. He is normalizing hate in a way Trump never could on his own.
We remain, as we have for the last 100 years, in the epoch of the car guy, when men like Ford and Musk showed that no matter what they say, or do, or what they salute, they will remain in control. There is a billionaire shaped loophole at the heart of this country. If a man is rich enough, he can get away with anything. If a man is rich enough, one day the story about them will change. History remembers Ford as an industrialist, not a bigot
Protests have occurred nationwide at Tesla dealerships. This week The New York Times reported that Tesla drivers are being called Nazis, having their businesses reviewed poorly online and threatened. People are choosing gas-powered vehicles over Tesla electric ones if it means distancing themselves from a symbol people associate with Musk.
I think a version of that old question — would you buy a used car from this man? — remains in this new context. With Tesla owners off-loading their cars, more used ones will be on the market. So I guess the new question is: would you buy a used Tesla from this man, and endure being called a Nazi for driving one?