Posted on Tue, Dec. 02, 2008

Having apparently hectored the Big Three auto executives out of their private jets, Congress welcomes them back this week for a recitation of how they plan to turn around in a few months decades of shortsighted management.

After the sardonic "how was your trip?" niceties, we can expect more harsh words to be heaped upon the heads of the people who run Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.

The hearing room atmosphere will reek of hypocrisy and selectively edited history.

The three auto chiefs richly deserve the whipping they have been getting as they ask taxpayers to chip in another $25 billion or so to save their industry. But they are only symbols, the scapegoats for a much broader societal failure.

For years, deep beneath Americans' thick layer of lust for material things, we have understood but relentlessly suppressed the reality that we were headed for the edge of the energy and environmental cliff.

We're now there.

This is no time for any of us -- Congress members, citizens, bureaucrats or shareholders -- to assuage our complicity by playing the blame game. It's time to face the problem honestly and squarely: It's all of us.

So let's clear out some of the rhetorical underbrush so that we can see clearly into the abyss, lest we mindlessly stumble into it:

• Easiest and most superficial, and therefore first, stop flaying the Big Three chiefs about their private jets and suggesting that they work for $1 a year. It makes us feel good to lash them for what was indeed a colossal public relations gaffe, but it's irrelevant.

• Then let's remember that for decades our politicians -- Congress, presidents, governors, state legislators, local officials -- have not taken seriously the threat to our well-being embedded in our oil dependency. They have not insisted upon much higher (and achievable) fuel economy standards; have chosen not to take the political risk of higher gasoline taxes or a price floor under gasoline prices; have battled against effective enforcement of clean-air standards; have not invested enough in the development of energy and transportation alternatives. But we must recognize that those failures of political will were based in large part on what they heard from the rest of us. They are, after all, the people we chose.

• The auto companies' most recent miscalculation was falling in love with high-priced, high-profit, truck-based gas-guzzlers and, as a result, being jammed up by soaring gasoline prices. They should have known better, the blame rationale goes. But so should we have known better; we're the ones who bought them.

• Without a bailout, the automakers and, some economists say, the country faces "the loss of the auto industry." People won't buy vehicles from a bankrupt company, the wisdom goes, because of concerns about warranties. While bankruptcy proceedings are full of uncertainties, millions of Americans have flown for years on intermittently bankrupt airlines, a hazard at least as grave as buying a new vehicle.

So virtually every American has been involved in bringing us to this point, and time and energy spent on anything other that addressing the problem head-on is wasted. Congress should stop the blame game and start the process of resolution. But Congress can't fix it without our participation and, yes, sacrifice.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.