Midwest Memo
Jump start
by Alan Shultz

I left my little Toyota sedan outside on the coldest night of the year. It was a dumb move. Had this particular evening been planned, I would have at least pointed the car away from the wind.

The next morning I faced the music and trudged out to the car. I mentally made note of where I might rummage around to find jumper cables and from whom I could get an early morning jump. The car is several years old, the battery is original equipment, I was asking a lot on this particular morning.

The inside of the car was frigid. The door moaned as I closed it shut. I put my key in the ignition and set my expectations on low. Then I made sure the radio was off, ditto the heater fan.

I turned the key- and the car started on the first try, it actually purred.

Memories of dead cars and dead batteries and that awful click, click, click, then rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr flooded my mind. And it came to me, all these dependable foreign cars that start in the winter, it's making us Americans soft. Maybe it's some sort of conspiracy to lull us into complacency, make us lazy - vulnerable.

The winters of my youth were spent trying to figure out how to keep my various cars running. Fuel additives and warming lights were regular staples in those days. There was one car that I carried a blanket in the trunk to wrap the engine with. That particular ritual rarely worked. The car almost always required a jump.

I've never been fond of jumping cars either. Some urban legend about cross polarity and foreign cars mixing with American cars- well, I believed it all. I spent more than my share of time standing out in below zero weather studying the jumper cables and rereading the instructions. Then there was the ritual of brushing off the darn battery to make for very, very certain that this side was indeed negative and not a double negative that would be a positive - right? For a couple years I had a little French Peuguet that rarely ran. In winter I reverted to my own hybrid legend that American cars shouldn't mingle with French cars or they would implode somehow. Those years were devoted to carrying a better pair of galoshes than of jumper cables.

But now it has come to this. I've grown soft and complacent. My car starts in winter - all the time. I don't carry jumper cables or an engine blanket or a heater light. I don't even know the number of a good tow truck.

In my imagination, under the file marked "foreign conspiracy" there it is, the master plan to get us. That will be the year that all the foreign cars shipped to the USA revert back to the winter car performance of my youth. A nation of dead batteries - has homeland security considered that one?!?

Looting

The government regulates who can call me during the dinner hour - but allows banks to consolidate into foreign

controlled entities too big to fail without destroying our

economy.

President Bush wants to send me back $800 of my tax money so I'll spend it on stuff and prop up the sagging economy. But nothing was said when Wall Street siphoned off $38 billion in year end bonuses last December - despite record investor losses due to the mortgage sub-prime write down.

No one objects, not even blushes, at the greed of Wall Street and yet the government has allowed the manipulation of everyday home mortgages into risky securities.

There is one absolute galling thing about this nationwide mortgage mess. The home mortgage has always represented a time-honored instrument for creating wealth for the average Joe. The home mortgage was designed as a low risk, long-term vehicle for wealth and community building. The idea of the home mortgage has served this nation uniquely well for decades.

Greed, not creativity, on Wall Street recently authored a way to siphon extreme short-term profit from making risky home mortgages. The irony here is that the very mortgages conceived to build households and communities are now destroying same. A very few have looted much through this debacle and it looks like all of us will pay for that looting.