Wednesday: GM's Explosion, Krok's Abortion, Stumbling Sci-Fi, One Sharp Band

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yeah, but who’s gonna put it in, kid? You?

Happy New Year, everyone — although true yacht rockers such as your humble author refuse to celebrate any CNY besides The Year Of The Cat.

Congratulations, you ruined the small block

Over at General Motors, on the other hand, 2025 will once again be The Year Of Stepping On Our Own Diz-Nicks, as it has continually been since 1974 or thereabouts. This time it’s a rash of bearing failures in the L87 6.2-liter V-8, as installed in the Escalade and other full-sizers from 2019 to the present day. These failures lead to the classic “rod-out-da-block” situation.

Nearly a million engines are under investigation, and replacements for the ones that have already suicided have been slow to arrive from the Tonawanda Propulsion plant in Buffalo, NY.

Surely this is a new low point for the Reuss/Barra kakistocracy; after years of 5.3-liter V-8s that tended to die between 100,000 and 200,000 miles, they’ve created a 6.2-liter that gives up much sooner than that. What’s fascinating to me is that there was no real reason of which I’m aware to replace the L86, which did fine service in my 2017 Silverado Max Tow, with a new variant. Maybe — and I’m just guessing here — they wanted to save some money in the bearing surfaces. Or they thought they could squeeze a little more economy out of it, not realizing that Escalade owners don’t care. These two Deadly Sins, bean-counting and MPG-chasing, have been at the heart of many, many GM failures and mishaps over the years.

Surely the most depressing part of the whole L87 ordeal is that, for many years, the Suburbans, along with the Corvettes, were the only products that the General could really get right. The full-sized truck-based wagons have been genuinely decent choices, and often the best choices in the category, since the Seventies. Now they’re ticking time bombs.

I apologize to any ACF reader who took my advice to purchase a GM full-sizer with the 6.2. My experience with “JFK”, our 2017 Silvy, was pretty good, other than the fact that it lunched a torque converter in the first 50k miles. That truck was best described as “a thoroughly mediocre and unambitious vehicle with the styling of a 1982 Caprice Classic and the heart of a lion.” Now its successors have heart problems.

The best comment so far on the matter: the forum wag who said “They finally came up with a reason for people to buy the 2.7 Turbo.”

In which Millennials learn a lesson about kids

If you wouldn’t take automotive purchasing tips from Andrew Krok, and you shouldn’t, then you definitely shouldn’t take parenting tips from him. I don’t think he has any children, and that’s probably for the best. He also confuses the academic “trimester” with the pregnancy one; a child in the sixty-third trimester would be on the way to a 15th birthday. Maybe he is saying he would also invent a time machine to kill his imaginary child. Who knows.

The purpose here isn’t really to dump on Krok — I’ll leave that to the Twitterati who made such brutal fun of him in response to this post — but rather to note something that should be obvious to all would-be intellectuals but has, in fact, been rather opaque to most of them. It has long been an article of faith with the american Left that children have an inherent liberal bias; I mean, look at the Fifties! And Woodstock! And all the protests! You can even take it back to the Roaring Twenties, if you like. Kids have always been left-wing…

…except that’s not true at all. What kids are is rebellious. What are they rebelling against? We know the answer to that: Whaddya got? When the power structure is right-wing and conservative, or even monarchical, then the rebellion is left-wing. But in an era or location where the power structure is left-wing, then the rebellion is either socially conservative or outright right-wing. The fabled Victorian era was by and large created by young people who’d had enough of moral dissipation and permissiveness, led by a young queen. The brownshirts of Germany were young men, cheered on by young women.

And now we have this:

Whether it’s all-white or mixed-race, it’s an event of young people, who swung Trump’s way in 2024 against their Biden preference in 2020. Especially men. Who want the freedom to say “retarded”. This last part is confusing to people who think of history as a ratchet that only goes in one direction. They believe you can use “freedom of speech” to impose your memetic worldview on others, then shut that freedom down once you have your way — but kids are always going to want to blaspheme. When you have a relatively Christian-presenting nation, as we did in 1980, then the blasphemy is pornographic and irreligious and transgressive; you get “Piss Christ” in the museums and “Papa Don’t Preach” on the radio.

In 2024, however, the nation’s power structure presents as DEI/LBGTQQIA/woke, so the kids are going to push back against that. Saying that “That’s not really the power structure” is beside the point. There might be shadowy Koch Brothers types still running the show in the background, but what the kids see is the menagerie of deranged luggage-stealing creatures trotted out by the Biden Administration for show and tell, and they’re gonna rebel against that. They see people getting canceled for saying forbidden words, and it invests those words with magic power, and so they’re going to say those words, the same way we used to make a big deal in my Catholic school of saying the f-word when no adults were around.

Which is how you get a Millennial “cuck” type like Krok doing a pretty good, if rather unmanly, job of channeling Jerry Orbach from Dirty Dancing. “My daughter had better not be dancing with those freaks who say retard!” If you respond with the trope that “Using slurs to refer to gay and disabled people is very different from being publicly blasphemous” you’re both missing the point and being dense. Thinking that openly disrespecting Christianity in 1980 wasn’t deeply hurtful to people who had spent their whole lives in the faith and whose identities were as deeply tied to religion as a “queer” person’s identity might be tied to sexuality… well, that’s ridiculous.

It is natural, normal, healthy, and necessary for young people to want change. That’s the only way we really get change, as a matter of fact. The definition of change, of course, is “not what we have now”. So the answer is simple. If you want to return to the breathtaking days of vast liberal youth culture a la Woodstock, all you have to do is return the demographic and political makeup of country to Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority.

don’t throw me in that briar patch!

The clone bores

(This review contains spoilers, which is not usually the practice here but in this case I’m doing it.)

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005. It seems almost impossible to believe now, but prior to the 20th Century the critics tended to judge art, theater, and literature the way Todd from “Project Farm” reviews ratcheting wrenches today: by seeing how well the endeavor in question was built. A poem that rhymed and scanned well while wrongly recounting an element of Greek myth would be panned; a novel that was interesting to read but which depended on something unrealistic happening would receive demerits as a consequence.

Never Let Me Go brings out the 18thCentury reviewer in me, because it requires a suspension of disbelief too drastic for even a novel explicitly described as “sci-fi” to support. The plot, in a nutshell: Students at a 1990’s-era English boarding school for orphans go through all the usual childhood angst before discovering that they are all clones who will, as adults, be harvested for organs. The story is told from the viewpoint of “Kathy”, one of the clone children, between the ages of seven and about thirty-two.

When Kazuo Ishiguro is on form with his first-person storytelling, as in Remains Of The Day, the reader is subtly enlightened about many things that would feel unsubtle were they to be related via the third person. Here, unfortunately, in attempting to create the voice of a young girl he fails both to convince and to maintain the reader’s interest. It’s not quite as frustrating to read as, say, the opening section of The Sound And The Fury, but far too often Kathy’s voice feels like an authorial straitjacket. Especially when it comes to writing about little girls and sex, a task best avoided by any fifty-year-old man.

None of this is to say that some aspects of the book are not excellent. The author does a better than fair job of detailing how young people tend to obsess over minor details while consciously avoiding the horrors around and awaiting them, simply because they have no agency and therefore no choice. The women who run the school appear first as flat characters then as vibrantly drawn people because, of course, that’s how their students would see them over a twenty-year period of coming to adulthood. Most of us have had the experience of meeting a figure from our youth later in life; such a thing never fails to surprise, if only in small degrees.

Regardless, any Victorian critic would savage this book, and rightly so, because in attempting to draw a finely detailed and sensitive portrait of human nature it ignores the most important part, namely: in no possible implementation of this do the clones all go willingly to their own deaths. Ishiguro could have covered this with a one-sentence figleaf, to wit: “We were altered at birth to be compliant”, but he doesn’t, because he is a Very Serious Author who is making a Very Serious Point about how we, as “normals”, often placidly sleepwalk to our own deaths and dissections. Alright, we get it — except a considerable percentage of humanity does no such thing and rebels in various fashions ranging from “dropping out” via drugs to picking up an AK-47 and rolling the dice on what happens next. The book even features a clone who “acts out” via violent and difficult behavior… right up to the point that it’s time to “donate”.

Yes, Ishiguro was Japanese, but

a) he’s writing about the UK

b) it ain’t like the Japanese youth didn’t hesitate to rebel in absolutely bloody fashion when they thought their future was at risk. The entire history of Japan in the Thirties is young officers orchestrating mutiny and murder because they thought their futures, and by extension the future of Japan, happened to be at risk.

You can’t tell me that all of the clones would placidly show up for their “donations”. The novel is at pains to point out that they are indistinguishable from “normals”. Why not just go live out in the normal world? Alternately, why not flee the country, Handmaid’s Tale style? It’s just too fabulous to believe, even as metaphor, and it all but kills the book for me.

Near the end of Never Let Me Go it’s explained that the “boarding school” was a failed experiment by socially thoughtful ladies and that most clones in England were instead raised and harvested under nightmare Auschwitz conditions. The impact of this revelation is contrasted to the fact that the hoity-toity boarding-school clones are so upset about their own condition. Which, too, is likely a conscious point that Ishiguro is trying to make regarding the upper and lower classes — but at some point it’s hard to tell what is Art and what is Lazy. Never Let Me Go aims at the former, admirably so, but too often strikes the latter. Grade: C+

Any tighter and the strings would break

Last week, Chuck Mangione dropped this banger of a one-song 1979 performance from Greek singer (and now politician) Nana Mouskouri’s Seventies-era variety show on British television. His first note of the song is a little rough; those of us who played the trumpet in our youth can relate, it’s often tough to get jammed against the mouthpiece and into the swing of things. After that, however, it’s nothing but magic. Live shows shouldn’t sound this good, shouldn’t be played this well by everyone involved.

The funniest part is how relatively unfussed everyone looks during the performance. Grant Geissman, who plays guitar, throws down a flawless and faster-than-Van-Halen solo that 99.9% of his contemporaries would flub somewhere while giving the impression that he is halfway into a relaxation-yoga section. Charles Meeks, the bass player, serves as a one-man advertisement for Leo Fender’s then-new MusicMan Stingray bass. Fully in the pocket. And talk about cutting through the mix!

(Side note: the Stingray sounded like it did because Leo was so deaf by then.)

This is basically the lineup from Mangione’s studio session, so they know the tune and can play it with both verve and precision.

I have a lot to say about YouTube, most of it negative, but it’s hard for me to wish it completely gone from the earth when it brings us something like this. Whether you’re a musician or just someone who likes music, Mangione and his gang put on a masterclass here. It’s delightful, and it inspires me to put down my keyboard then go pick up my own StingRay bass. I’ll see you all later. Happy Year Of The Snake; let’s make it a great one.