by Michael Cook

Created on: May 06, 2009

Yes, I think Chrysler can survive.

The federal government's role in the company's reorganization will likely be short lived. I really don't think Washington wants to be in the automobile business.

The roles the union and Fiat will play are still being defined, but I am confident Chrysler will reemerge, perhaps not as a big player as it once was in the US auto industry but still a viable one.

But I would like to approach this whole debate from another angle.

I've watched as both the Congress and the Obama administration have belittled the auto industry executives for not building the kinds of cars American consumers want and need.

As I've watched this exercise in moral outrage and indignation being directed at the car manufacturers unfold, I want to press the pause button on the TV and ask members of Congress and the president himself, "Ah, excuse me. Where have you been?"

From the mid 1980's, until last year when gas spiked to almost four bucks a gallon, the US auto industry was building the vehicles Americans craved. Known by the acronym SUV, these vehicles were cleverly called "Sport Utility Vehicles".

My late octogenerian mother, ever the provocateur, used to say that they really ought to be called "Status Utility Vehicles" and that they, like Corvettes in the 1950's, were deigned specifically for men who were insecure about the size of a certain body part.

All that aside, they flew off the lots. GM, Ford, and Chrysler's Jeep division were raking in money hand over fist.

Americans, especially the faux green, nouveau riche, bourgeois bohemians who populate towns like Newburyport, Andover, and North Andover, couldn't. get enough of vehicles with names like Denali, Yukon, Expedition, and Grand Cherokee.

It mattered little that such vehicles were terribly wasteful and largely unnecessary when one figures we drive on some of the best maintained roads in the entire world.

It didn't matter because such vehicles were an integral part of the way so many nouveau riche, faux green, bourgeois bohemians in towns like Newburyport, Andover, and No. Andover perceived themselves.

It was all about image.

I remember one summer two or three years ago when I was living and working in Wellfleet on the Cape.

Gas prices had spiked to almost three dollars a gallon. A car dealer on the Cape interviewed in the Cape Cod Times reported sales of Status Utility Vehicles going through the floor. That interview occurred in July, at the height of peak summer gas prices.

In October, when that same dealer was interviewed again and gas prices had fallen back into the $1.90 to $2.00 a gallon range, he was able to report the sales of Status Utility Vehicles had rebounded nicely.

People had not learned any lessons. As soon as gas prices dropped, they went back to their profligate habits.

Now, to be sure, US auto manufacturers were short sighted, and perhaps even negligent, in their continued production of gas guzzling Status Utility Vehicles, especially when one figures they, more than the average American, had to be fully aware of the precarious position America's love for such tanks put the nation in - but they were also only responding to a demand, as stupid and selfish as it may have been, that came directly from the American consumer.

I am no apologist for the CEO's of America's auto industry. But they are being done a grave disservice by self serving politicians willing to scape goat them while letting the American people off the hook for the role they played in the economic and environmental mess in which the auto industry and country now find themselves in.

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