04.07.11
Guitars versus arms — which jobs are worth saving?
The answer has always been obvious to me. But through inaction we are living the wrong one.
This post comes out of simple inspiration from a trip to Guitar Center yesterday.
The US invented rock and roll. It had Leo Fender, the inventor of the first widely used electric guitar, the Telecaster. And the founder of Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing, subsequently Fender Musical Instruments, the quintessentially American company founded on innovation in affordable products that gave joy to everyone.
And then you have General Dynamics Lands Systems.
The fundamentally American mega-corporate ogre, a company that makes the M1 Abrams tank and other armored fighting vehicles, most definitely not for giving joy to anyone except the mentally ill who get erections over military gear and the CEO of, well, GDLS.
Unlike the guitar, for use in endless war, selling to tyrannical regimes in the Middle East acting as toadies, and for continuing the rigged exercise of big corporate socialism.
Anyway, most of the merchandise, by weight, in the Guitar Center showroom in Pasadena is make in China although it conspicuously stills carries the names of famous American brands.
My friend needed a small 2-speaker PA system and power amplifier for his studio. And so we went into the live sound showroom at GC to look at PA speakers and power amps. After a number of minutes he’d narrowed his choices to Yamaha and Peavey merchandise.
He wanted to know where they were made. So I suggested turning them over and looking at the base plates where the speaker cables plug in.
The Yamaha was offshored from Japan to sweat shop labor in Indonesia. The Peavey — a famous American brand — was offshored to China.
“Which is better,” he asked me. He knows “China Toilet Blooz” by heart now.
I laughed and shrugged. So he picked the Yamaha because it looked better.
Peavey was a company founded in Meridian, Mississippi by Hartley Peavey. Peavey had worked for Fender and when it was bought by CBS and expanded to some detriment of its still very much American-made product line in the early Seventies, he left to form his own company and successfully exploited the perceived drop in quality.
In the years after Peavey established its name as a solid substitute of American-made guitars and amplifiers.
Now this is all gone.
The American manufacturers of rock and roll equipment have all offshored to China.
What remains in the US is essentially custom shop business. The American-made items are ten times or more the expense of the same models made in China. And the former are reserved largely for people with major label music contracts and that part of the upper middle and plutocrat class which dabbles in guitar playing. For them, the expensive American made guitar is a status symbol for a gilded age.
All down the line in the Guitar Center showroom, all the famous American-made guitar lines are now produced in China. Gretsch, like Fender, divided into two tiers. The famous big semi-hollow body guitars popularized in Nashville and Memphis, played by the inventors of rock and roll — the guys in the bands backing Elvis and Gene Vincent — are made in China. If you want to pay ten times or more for one, the premium models are still made here.
The Epiphone Casino, popularized by John Lennon and pictured here — now made offshore.
The middle class jobs and factories that produced those instruments which made the sound that went worldwide are gone. And this country, and the rest of the world, isn’t better for it. It was profit driven decision-making in a race to the bottom. And it destroyed tradition and a proud legacy in something the made the whole world a brighter place. You could be proud of working in a factory that made guitars and amplifiers for everybody in the USA.
And what jobs have we protected at all costs? You know the answer.
Tanks, rockets, missiles, bombs, jet aircraft, mines, tear gas rounds, and fighting ships.
All guaranteed by the US taxpaying middle class and inviolable.
Here, from Armchair Generalist earlier in the week, is another big parcel of mechanized joy from General Dynamics Land Systems:
U.S. ships delivered the 87th of 140 planned Abrams tanks to the Iraqi Army’s 9th Division earlier this month. The delivery is part of a $2.16 billion deal to ship the tanks and necessary logistics support vehicles to Iraq.
Built by General Dynamics Land Systems, the first M1A1s arrived in September. The deliveries are scheduled to be completed by the end of this year, when U.S. forces finish their pullout in December, [LTG Robert] Cone [USF-I] said in February before he returned to Fort Hood, Texas.
——-
The necessary parts have arrived in Iraq, but the country’s rudimentary logistics system cannot deliver the parts to military units yet. Iraq’s Army warehouses in Taji remain stocked, but the parts rarely reach the units. One Iraqi mechanic said he only receives parts for his Humvees twice a year.“They have to figure this out, or we’re just going to end up with a bunch of 60-ton paperweights sitting out here,” [LTC David] Beachman [senior advisor] said.
Protect the manufacturing jobs for premium tanks for an army of Iraqi stumblebums. Yeah!
But protect the manufacturing jobs for non-military things — an everyman’s musical instrument — that arguably had a much larger and finer impact on the world? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Leo Fender died in 1991. If he were alive today he’d turn white.
The idea that the country of guitars and rock and roll would devolve into the country of computer-networked armored fighting vehicles and smart bombs is as disgusting as it is astonishing. Think about the state of affairs and you don’t know whether to shit or go blind.
With regards to tank sales to Iraq, J. at Armchair delivers a thought puckishly delivered as if pinched from a recent Dale Carnegie correspondence course: “But hey, if this model works for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, why stop now? What a great way to win friends and influence enemies.”
One could put it a different way. We influenced people worldwide and much more to the nation’s credit with the electric guitar than the M1 Abrams tank. The former, not the latter, is one of the reasons people liked us.