I Can't Get That Part: What to Do?

Though one of the primary rules for this blog has been "no politics," I am going to sound out about tariffs, in general. In my Macroeconomics class way back, we studied how they tend to punish the populace of the nation that levies them, especially when import-substitution may take years or decades to accomplish. 

Our 2006 Honda needs bushings for the rear differential. Our 2003 Silverado needs oxygen sensors. Both are DIY jobs, but the Honda's work will be tedious so I asked a mechanic doing some brake-work to replace the bushings.

 "Sure, if I can get the parts," came the reply.

That prompted me to order the Oxygen sensors for the pickup NOW. I'm certain they are Chinese made. I think lots of Americans are panic-buying ahead of the tariffs taking effect, hedging their bets against chaos. Costco the other day was rather feral.

But let's play along with our so-called leader for a moment. In particular I want to test his crazy notion that we can bring manufacturing back home fast.

Let's say I wanted to open Tractorpunk Bushings LLC tomorrow. I'd apply for a loan, find a location in a light-industrial park, purchase equipment. In theory, I might get my first bushings molded and listed for sale in a year. But how many could I produce, even if one could 3D print them in polyurethane or rubber? And how would I buy rights to bushings patented by major manufacturers, domestic or foreign?  Where might I find employees skilled at running the machinery, which these days requires computer skills? I'd need someone to manage the advertising, shipping, and order fulfillment.

And how many vehicles in need of bushings are on the roads and in the fields of this nation?

 As a Distributist, I think we should have local manufacturers: tens of thousands making and selling things from open-source designs licensed in the Creative Commons. I could even foresee a galaxy of small firms building a hundred cars and trucks locally each year, based on low-tech utilitarian models with good pollution controls and safety features. Customers wanting high-tech or luxury in their vehicles would pay more or pay a specialist to come to Tractorpunk Cottage Motors to install that infotainment system or leather heated seats.

My idea goes back to something I wrote about before: vehicles have gotten too complex and it's best to buy a really old one and fix it yourself if possible. YouTube makes that work. Where do you think I learned to change O2 sensors and bushings? The best videos come from small companies that sell the parts. But where do they get them?

My Distributist alternate reality for a million cottage fabricators would be even harder than the Free-Market, patent-driven Capitalist model I described. 

So for now, stock up and watch YouTube. You may have to DIY things for a while. If you are serious, invest in jack-stands, a creeper, work light, and a good set of wrenches. You are going to need them.

Plant a garden too. Learn to can and dehydrate. Save seeds. Think about how to defend yourself. Meet your neighbors and share work, without talking politics or religion. Put down the phone on which you are doom-scrolling, turn off the TV for a few hours, and learn a craft for making, mending, sewing, knitting, building.

These are troubling times. I don't see them improving without a crisis of the sort we in the States have not witnessed in many, many decades.

This post may be one of the gentlest slams on our leadership, such as it is, as you will ever read. Maybe we should be screaming. I think we will, once the real price of arbitrary tariffs sink in and cut into our household budgets.

Big-City Visits and Me

How did 40 years go by so fast? I'm approaching the anniversary of leaving the US (I hoped for good). 

I loved living in Madrid, if only for a year, but that was so long ago....okay, yesterday. In a quiet neighborhood between Plaza de Cuzco and the once-village of Tetuán, an area that metro Madrid had eaten up in Franco's time, I figured I'd found the best possible combination of quiet repose and urban energy. To quote from a blogger who lived in my old neighborhood 6 years ago, Tetuán remains the right sort of un-hip place that is authentic without being dangerous, as well as affordable since "most of the young international people here in Madrid really want to live closer to the center. They want something 'vibrant' – whatever that means – and full of youngsters like themselves."

I figured Plaza Mayor and Puerta del Sol were only a short metro ride away on the blue line. Our furnished apartment, at $350 US then, was a real bargain. We only had to pay a finder's fee of one month's rent.

Now, in a visit to Baltimore's Little Italy, a neighborhood that recalls my old Madrid haunts, I realize how much life in the country has changed me in just over 12 years. I came north on Amtrak (my way to travel the NE corridor) for the big annual meeting on academic writing, CCCC. Someone not present asked why I didn't stay at the conference hotels. Simply put, the food is awful, the prices high, the scenery 1970s oppressive in a Logan's Run sort of way. Maybe that explains the conference nightmares that I have nearly every week: from burning hotels to drowned rooms with my laptop still inside, to lost directions and meanders around a strange city to find the Hyatt Regency's Crabcake Room.

 So now when I go to conferences, I look for lodgings a short walk away, usually in a traditional B&B that costs less than the conference monolith. I don't really care for Airbnb or Vrbo unless I'm somewhere longer-term, so I can prepare some food. Going to a supermarket in another country is an unalloyed joy to me. I had a great Vrbo experience that way in Fredericton, NB last year but a recent short-term stay in Winchester, VA, made me want to run back to a classic downtown hotel with a martini bar or old-school, owner-occupied B&B.

Baltimore's Little Italy seems my sort of spot. It's a short stroll to the dreary presentation rooms and throngs of professionals still on the rise who need to network. I'm semi-retired and so past all that. I met a few old friends for a drink in a boring and overpriced hotel bar, then left for something more authentically local but not twee or tarted-up. The hipsters with the parents' money or swank jobs are all in Fells Point; it's lovely but curated in a way that bothers me. On the other hand, north of the harbor, parts of Baltimore get sketchy fast. That too reminds me of certain neighborhoods not far from where I once lived in the Spanish capital, or for that matter, the block in Richmond where I grew up; the joke in the early 70s was "who beat you up today?"

These days I don't really want hip, curated, sketchy, or blue-collar urban. I don't want "busy" at all anymore. Traffic noise wakes me after living so long in a rural place. But more profoundly, it's the nature of how transient things are in a city, apart from preserved historic buildings.

Walking by myself on a rainy Baltimore day, the wind trying to destroy my umbrella and my pants cuffs getting soaked, reveals something I don't see when the sky is French blue and the colors in window-boxes call to me. 

In a city, even one where we have friends, we really are loners. Erasure of our lives lies never far away; once we are gone, our apartments will be occupied by someone else, our belongings not taken along scattered. I recall our final day in Madrid, leaving our apartment; we had piled by the curbing things we could not foist off on friends. Manolo, the building supervisor who really never seemed to like us much, did come out with a rare smile to say goodbye. He was inscrutable, but that day he seemed happy, maybe because the young and pesky Americans were finally going home.

An old Roma man with a horse-cart came along at first light a few times a week, to gather the sorts of things we abandoned. Soon our passage would be erased, like a busboy clearing a restaurant table.

You won't see old men with horse-carts in Baltimore, but the vibe is the same. You move on and it's as though you never existed. Little Italy, though charming, is not really the tightknit ethnic place it was half a century back, when children of immigrants lived there and talked to neighbors on the front stoops, as in a Barry Levenson film. The restaurants are still superb and folks friendly in businesses there and on Federal Hill. I went back to Byblos, an excellent Lebanese place I'd visited before, where my "cousin" Sami the owner recalled me, my wife, and two students who had visited him the last time. But the sense of impermanence still hung in the air as surely as over any cul-de-sac suburb. The architecture and patina of history make a cityscape more interesting, but turn a corner and you find a tragically ugly new high-rise that has erased a block of old houses and stores.

One gets erased in the country, too. Even if you have a large family with children, in a generation or two you will simply be a name and a fading photo on the wall, whatever your legacy of genetics or property.  

Maybe that's why it's healthy to visit a big town once in a awhile. I know rural folk near me in Goochland County, often older people, who have not been to downtown Richmond in decades. They still think it a crime-ridden, run-down place. It's not. But if they were to visit the hipsterific areas downtown, it might be worse than confirming old prejudices.

They'd see how quickly life moves on without us. They do miss the innumerable charms of city life: great museums, galleries, urban walks, live music, bespoke and funky-downmarket dining options. 

Yet I can still get that, plus a sense of ennui over time's passing, during a short urban visit. The woods beyond our garden? Those are not eternal, but they provide a different scale of time that stretches beyond our little lives.