This is a car. This is an American car. It was manufactured in the 70's. A company named Ford made it. It was birthed by baffons, drawn-up by morons and sold by men named 'Joe' and 'Buck'. I hated this car; it was bestowed upon from above like boils on Job's festered skin. This car was rolled into my life and it bore the name, "Ford Mustang II".


Not the actual car. Not to scale.

I drove this car during my years in High School in the late-90's. For millions of years men reproduced quite easily with the opposite sex by flexing their muscles, acting charming or by the crude and under-academically-understood act of the wagging of genitalia - so we read. Quite like a wardrobe full of piano ties, this Mustang reversed all the hard-fought gains by men with women and produced in the opposite sex a very obvious revulsion for anyone unlucky enough to be sitting in the driver seat. If men are to tell you the opposite occurs for owners of a Mustang II, you should take their fallacious tale cum grano salis.



I did my best to modify the car, in a crude teenager manner I 'spray-painted' some interior pieces with interior-paint; mostly to hide the ghastly cranberry color some coked-up designer in the bowels of Ford's Dearborn headquarters decided on whilst spinning a color wheel. These modifications did not attract females.

The idea at Ford during the tumultuous 70's was to produce a car that gave it's owner respectable fuel economy. The Big 3 had taken it between the legs when gas prices screamed north of 25¢. So, a scrappy bunch from across the Pacific, once defeated in a large world-wide war, decided to satisfy the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars right here in America. They sent over Honda's, and Toyota's, and the people that drove these cars might have looked funny, but they still got laid. Or, so it goes.

How I see it, this confused the Big 3. One-third of the 3, Ford, decided they had a plan to beat-back the encroachment of the Japanese automakers. Their plan involved the most iconic, powerful and sexy car of the 20th century - the Ford Mustang. An interesting idea, but long-story-short a man named Lee Iacocca snuffed it all up by seemingly directing his worker's passions towards making the more like the Ford Pinto (puke) then the Ford Mustang.


Ford Pinto. A back-end only a mother could bare to take-in. Ghastly.

The Mustang lost it's soul. Sold out by an evil 'ism - short-term'ism (or complete and utter incompetence). This most certainly isn't a word, and I don't care. The Idea (capital I) still holds up to scrutiny; which is: sacrificing all alternatives and long-term goals for maximizing quarterly profit. I understand that I'm being unfair in this instance, making sweeping-general claims about an industry based on my narrow experience with a vehicle, but when I read and think about the current situation the Big 3 find themselves in currently, I can't help but think back to my own experiences and make the generalization that American auto makers have made their own bed.

Now, bailing out the Big 3 might cause a radical change in how they do business - for example GM might actually think of themselves as an automobile manufacturer, rather than a ridiculous financial thing-a-ma-jig that employs cocks who expound on the merits of the CDO market and swaps in the hallways - epic fail.

Ode - noun: 'a lyric poem with complex stanza forms'. Speaking of epic fails, my title is rubbish in describing the preceding paragraphs. There were no stanzas and the only mildly poetic thing, in all tragic sense of the composition, that I can part with is this image. Yikes.

Posted in Labels: Autos Posted by Tim at 11:40 PM