I've never been one of those lame, insecure feebs who feel compelled to slam someone else's favorite brand of car. Enough already with those stickers that depict the copyright-infringed Calvin cartoon character pissing on the Chevy bowtie, or the Mopar emblem, etc etc!  Almost any carmaker you can name has made at least one model that moves me. I have no brand loyalty when it comes to cars. Suffer them all to come unto me, to paraphrase a famous Jewish carpenter.

Having said that, I must confess my mixed feelings about Ford. The cars themselves? I love 'em, from the '57 Crown Vic, to the Cougar II show car, up to the new Mustang. What I despise is what this company has done to America's roads and to the planet by getting America hooked on OSVs (oversized vehicles).

Back in the '80s, Ford sussed out that "light" trucks were more profitable than cars... at least in the short run, which is the only thing American management knows, but we digress.

Anyway, they decided to launch a marketing blitz trying to convince Joe Average that Ford pickup trucks (admittedly fine vehicles when used for their intended purpose, namely hard work) were just the ticket for everyday duty, like driving a quarter mile to the Mini Mart, or whizzing down the highway to your office job.

Soon you had millions of people using 3-ton *special-purpose* vehicles for *general-purpose* driving. Trucks that were meant to be the tradesman's trusty friend and the cowboy's uncomplaining buddy were now being used for, well, everything. The roads became filled with them, and folks who drove regular ol' cars felt like dachshunds among Dobermans.

(An old-school "road locomotive" like a 1970 Chrysler New Yorker is still l,000 pounds lighter than a Ford F-150, and a couple of feet shorter.)

Then Ford morphed the pickup into the modern American SUV, which went over like free beer. Hell, doesn't everybody need 2 feet of headroom?!? As with the pickup truck, the SUV was great for its intended purpose, but only about 10% of its buyers actually used it for, say, taking 8 people on a ski trip. Silly, yes, but thanks to clever marketing, everybody and their dog wanted one, whether it made any damned sense for their situation or not.

All the other carmakers, foreign and domestic, noticed sales of these rolling ore boats and wanted a piece of the action. They couldn't very well sit back and let Ford eat their lunch, not as long as Ford inflamed America's passion for oversized vehicles. Even sensible manufacturers like Honda and Volvo were pressured by market forces to join the dance... I mean "waddle."

Now that Americans are finally realizing that maybe they don't need an 8-foot-tall vehicle to carry mom, dad, and 2 kids, sales of these roadgoing Sherman tanks are dropping off, and guess what? Neither Ford nor any other American company is really ready for the change. Sales plummet.

So who gets laid off? If your money is on the decision-makers who created this mess, then I have some swamp land to sell you. No, it's luckless Joe Lunchbox who gets it in the shorts *again*. AND IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY!

Ford always had the talent to make vehicles well suited to the new realities of the OPEC world, but they chose to make a fast buck instead, by creating demand for gas-guzzlers that were cheap to build. Lured by the short-term success of this ruse, other makers followed suit, following Ford into the sucker punch of 2-dollar, 3-dollar, and 4-dollar gas. As a result, tens of thousands of people are out of work, billions of gallons of gasoline have been wasted, and God only knows how many people have been killed or maimed by rollovers of these top-heavy vehicles, not to mention how many cars have been crushed into little balls of tinfoil in collisions with Son of Monster Truck.

Ford started this. Yes, Chevy made the Suburban first, but they never pushed it as an everyday all-purpose ride like Ford's evil-genius ad agency did.

What's Ford gonna do for an encore? Give away free cartons of smokes to everyone who comes in for a test drive?