We just don't believe...

Back in the day, just around the time when Audi had its troubles - which Audi could never adequately explain or defend - I was coming home from work one night and found the garage door closed. It was raining. I slammed the gearshift from ‘drive’ into ‘park’, jumped out of the car and went to open it. Suddenly I saw the car slowly rolling towards me. I was lucky it wasn’t an Audi and that I had parked it far enough back. The car was slow enough to give me a chance to raise the door, jump to the side, get back into the vehicle and slam on the brakes before hitting the back wall. It turns out that instead of ‘P’, I had shifted to ‘1’ with the engine running. After that experience I have always doubted the tales of the Audi bashers.

What intrigues me about the Toyota story is how so many view our own government’s involvement at the periphery with suspicion. They quite rightly point out that Toyota is one of the most significant competitors of G(overnment) M(otors); but then they take a further leap in claiming (also correctly) that anything bad that can be disseminated about Toyota would help give a leg up to U. S. government-owned GM. And that this was the real reason for U.S transportation chief, Ray LaHood, jumping on the bandwagon so quickly, telling people to “stop driving them (Toyotas)”.

Besides, we just don’t believe anything the government says anymore about anything: color-coded terror threats; unemployment numbers; pandemic alerts; etc. It’s all become a great big game with this administration to say anything, but do only that which nobody talks about.

It all takes me back to when Bush was said to have personally orchestrated the World Trade Center bombing (because Cheney wanted a war).

This is what scares me: Whereas I never saw the ‘truthers’ as anything but a bunch of cranks, I’m tempted to give credence to any Chicago-style bad-mouthing, death threatening, kneecapping, cement shoeing, land filling ploy originating from within this White House. Remember: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”