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Fiero

The Source

It was without doubt the ugliest car I’ve ever owned. It wasn’t given to me, I didn’t buy it used, I purposely picked it out and had it specially ordered for me. Ugly. Just plumb ugly. A bright orange Pontiac Fiero. To refresh what may never have been a part of your memory in the first place, the Fiero was Pontiac’s stab at the Corvette market. The ill-fated experiment lasted five years and the car was finally scrapped because of little issues like poor reliability, it was a safety hazard, and no one wanted to buy one. So I got one…orange…not just a little orange, but really, really orange. I still swear that little swab of color in my dealer’s catalog wasn’t that orange, but when it arrived I remember thinking it resembled a pumpkin dropped from some height onto a hot pavement. I thought well, it was a stupid mistake but I’ll deal with it. Every morning I’d somehow forget that I’d paid good money for such a hideous-looking car and when I’d come out of the house there it would be… glaring at me in all its horrendous orange-ness. Okay, I’m not bragging about this because I then did something even more stupid. I traded the orange blob off for a tan Fiero. I swear I’d had the car less than a week but it must have been a tough week on the poor little Pontiac for when we figured the trade I had lost a thousand dollars. At that rate my entire car would be completely gone in 12 weeks. Maybe I traded just in time. Sometimes its best to live with your current headache for fear of losing your head completely. The current wave of national sentiment, and in fact a sentiment that has wafted across the Atlantic to our brothers, the Brits, is “Throw the rascal out!” with very little thought given to what new rascal we’re throwing in. I’m no special fan of Arlen Specter, but do the good citizens of Pennsylvania realize that along with throwing the scoundrel out, they also tossed out their senior senator on the all-power appropriations committee and the senate committee on the judiciary? That is, along with being a power influence on the committee for veterans’ affairs, environment and public works, and the special committee on aging? In the ugly bowels of Congress, it’s the committees who make the decisions. Pennsylvania’s new senator will slide in quietly to the bottom position on every totem pole of influence. Okay, the bath water was getting murky, but did you really mean to lose the baby? The Congress works on the seniority system. The longer you’ve been there, the more influence you wield. Of course this isn’t enough reason in itself to keep a crook or fool in office, but let’s at least see what we’re losing when our current bright-eyed do-gooder gets elected. And of course every time I see a rally on the news, whether they serve tea or not, I ask myself just how many of these folks have tried to have their grievances addressed by calling or writing their representative. My guess? Our desire to march, shout, then vote them out is greater than our inclination to work within the current system to fix things. Saint or scoundrel, the name of the game is getting elected and when it comes to votes, a congress of any sort will listen. And of course even if all this is poppycock and a genuine idiot represents us, does this necessarily make his or her opponent the better choice? Face it . . . if you’re running against Attila the Hun, you don’t have to spend much time mentioning your own likeability. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson, was pretty much chosen in a “throw the rascals out” frenzy, and he was touted as “the man of the people!” I guess he was as long as you were white and non-Indian whom Jackson regarded as less than human. Perhaps he was the man of “some people.”