Car companies used to be places where car guys worked. Engineers,
gearheads. People who at least liked cars
and thought of them as more than commodities – like toothpaste, say.
Today, they are places where former
insurance company and fast food guys work.
Like
Jose Tomas, who is – well, was –
GM’s chief human resources officer. He’s been fired – apparently – for
unspecified reasons after only about eight months on the job. Might have been
an ass grabber but probably got axed because he is still a guy.
If
he was straight,
he never stood a chance.
Tomas
previously held “leading posts” at Anthem, the insurance giant and Burger King
Corp.
GM’s
current CEO Mary Barra, herself a human resource veteran, said that Tomas had a
“well-rounded background” and lots of experience managing “a complex global
employee base.”
Not
much about cars – for either of them.
But a great commitment – for both of them –
to “changing GM’s long-standing culture of dysfunction,” as the trade
publication Automotive
News put it. Which – as this column has noted before –
translates into English roughly as follows:
Cars are incidental – and car guys (especially guys)
irrelevant or at least inconvenient.
Race and sexual identity politics are
everything. Push it, hard.
Because
what’s between your legs – and what you do with what’s between your legs – is
critically relevant to the sort of car you might drive. Ditto your hue.
So
goes the logic.
African
Americans on Wheels. Gay Wheels. Jews in Jeeps. Aryans in Audis. The last two
are made-up. The first two are very real – and GM does everything it can to
promote and push them to the fore, even to the extent of hiring the guy who
founded Gays on Wheels, a publication which only a few gays ever read but that
doesn’t matter.
The
politics do.
When
I, your faithful keyboard monkey, began writing about cars back in the early
’90s, there were still car guys running the car companies. I had beers with
these guys and we muttered sympathetically together about the geeks and
race hustlers who were beginning to ruin everything. Turning cars into
appliances. Forcing everyone to dry-hump the leg of the Safety Goddess who now
rules the country through cucked men and women who have become sick parodies of
men.
The business no longer
cares much about cars – and forget car guys.
I
am glad I got in while there was still some fading light left. Had the
opportunity to hang out with guys like John Coletti, Bob Lutz and Martyn
Schorr. Some of you may recognize these names.
They
– and their kind – are all gone now.
I
soldier on.
Sic gloria transit mundi
. . .
Got a
question about cars – or anything else? Click on the “ask Eric” link and
send ’em in!
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