Confucius say: "Illegitimate son who drive car with automatic transmission is shiftless bastard."
I don't know about the bastard part, but there has been an insidious plot to render us all shiftless going on for a really long time. I know that my esteemed colleagues haven't owned cars for awhile, but they are old enough to remember when the stick shift, or manual transmission, was the standard and the only people who drove automatics were women and old men. Okay, I am an old man now, but I'm a hardy old north woods man, which means I should still be driving a stick shift, and I am.
The Shiftless Plot must have started in the 1960s because, when I bought my first 4WD pickup in 1970, I was told that it was probably the last new stick shift vehicle I would be able to buy because they were phasing them out. They had already phased out the column shift, so the only two choices I had were an automatic or a floor shift. There were some problems associated with the column shift, but it was convenient because you could easily seat three adults in the front seat. I could still fit two adults and a child with my floor shift, although it became more difficult when the child started to grow legs. Of course that was when the front seat still was one long seat instead of two short ones with the console in between them. Come to think of it, when did they slip that one to us? Years later, I read somewhere that the Shiftless Plot suffered a setback when the US auto market became flooded with foreign cars. Apparently the foreigners were not in on the plot because their offerings, which still had stick shifts, quickly took a big chunk out of the domestic market, which caused the US automakers to back water on their Shiftless Plot. Like so many plots that started in the 60's, though, the setback was only temporary, which I just learned the other day.
My old pickup has served me well for 15 years but, although it's only got 37,000 miles on it, the body is rusting out, which led me to consider trading it in. So I went to the same Chevy dealer that I have been patronizing since 1973, although none of the original people are still working there. I told this young kid that I wanted another truck just like the one I had, but he said that was impossible. First of all, Chevy stopped putting stick shifts in their pickups in 2013, they are all automatics now. Second of all, they have added a bunch of new electronic features, most of which sound like more trouble than they're worth to me. Third of all, air conditioning is now standard and I couldn't opt out of it. I don't need no stinking air conditioning! If I get hot, I just open the window. Oh, by the way, power windows are not optional anymore either, they all have them. What the hell are you supposed to do when the windows freeze up in the winter? With a hand crank, you can just stop cranking when it doesn't work, but an electric motor will just keep trying until it burns itself out.
I told the kid that I had to think about it for awhile because I was too upset to make a decision that day. I said that I would probably come back tomorrow, but instead I called the GMC dealer on the other side of own. I always though that Chevy and GMC were the same thing, but apparently they are not. I saw on TV that GMC has a nifty new tailgate that makes all other tailgates obsolete, and Chevy does not. The guy at GMC told me that they had discontinued making stick shifts last year, but they are bringing them back next year due to popular demand. The 2020 models will be out this fall so, if I can hold my old rust bucket together that long, I will be able to get my stick shift then. Thank God for duct tape!
About that Mueller Report, did Mueller himself do all that redacting, or did somebody else? Either way, I'm sure there was a good reason for it, national security or something. I am tempted to believe that somebody is trying to hide information that is just plain embarrassing, but that would be paranoid.
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