Are we really ready for life without American cars?

We were a Ford family. My mother’s father was a mechanic at the dealership in El Reno, Oklahoma, a rusty prison town that my grandfather always described as a good place to be a workingman. He smelled of grease and cherry pipe tobacco, and he would let me sip from his Schlitz, which he drank with salt around the rim. He stored a Model A and a Model T in a garage behind their old wood-frame house.

At Christmas and during summer vacations, my parents loaded me and my sister and brother into the brown Country Squire station wagon with the fake-wood panels and drove south from Lincoln, Nebraska, down an eccentric route of two-lane Kansas highways — U.S. Highway 77 to Marysville, state Highway 15 through Clay Center and Abilene (the Eisenhower home, the Greyhound Hall of Fame and an A&W drive-in where we always stopped for root-beer floats) and through Newton to Wichita, where we hit the toll road that put us onto Interstate 35 to Oklahoma City.

We drove in summer heat that made the asphalt shimmer and through one blizzard that seemed to carve permanent lines in my mother’s face. I’m certain she imagined us as frozen corpses by the side of the road. After that blinding snowstorm, the car trips to Oklahoma ended.

Built into the itinerary was the time my dad spent worrying about car trouble. I figured these worries gave him something to talk about with his father-in-law, though now I understand that Ford owners might have had legitimate worries about breakdowns. Still, we always bought Fords. My first car was a two-door Comet (Mercury is close enough to Ford), a beater that my dad handed down when I proved to him that I knew how to change a tire.

It was the ’70s, so when the oil embargo hit and the gas lines started, my mom downsized to the classic orange-and-white Pinto. Then we learned that Pinto gas tanks sometimes exploded when the cars were rear-ended. These days, my mom drives a Sable. Every few years, she gets a new one — always white.

I’ve moved on, but I’ll always be from a Ford family because of my grandfather.

Every American family has its own car story. The American automobile is the most romanticized machine in history.

And I wonder what my grandfather would say, watching the national agony over whether taxpayers should bail out Detroit. I wonder what he would say about execs from the Big Three flying private jets to Washington to beg for a loan. About pork-producing Sen. Kit Bond twisting into socialist knots as he joins Democrats in calling for the feds to help the automakers, so he can save Ford workers’ jobs in Claycomo.

My grandfather died a long time ago, so I can’t ask him. Instead, I called Jeff Manning, president of the United Auto Workers Local 31 at GM’s Fairfax plant in Kansas City, Kansas.

“We’re definitely concerned that the general public does not see the real effects of what happens if there is not a General Motors, Ford and Chrysler in this country,” Manning says. Losing the automakers, he says, would leave a vast hole in the middle class. And autoworkers wouldn’t be the only ones who would lose their jobs.

Any company that does business with GM stands to lose, too. The railroads that ship its parts, the office-supply companies that sell it paper and printers — if GM isn’t running, those companies take a big hit.

And in a heartbreaking coincidence, as GM employees wait for Congress to decide their fates, Fairfax workers have just pledged $450,000 to the United Way of Wyandotte County. That’s almost $9,000 a week from the plant’s 2,700 full-time workers — money the charity doesn’t get if there’s no GM.

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“I saw one of the senators on C-SPAN yesterday, and it was a cryin’ shame,” Manning says. “He said that the median income in his district was $36,000 a year. If that’s the median income, I’d say he needs to get some manufacturing jobs in his district. Isn’t the poverty level at $24,000?” (Yeah, it is. In 2008, the Department of Health and Human Services puts it at $24,800 for a family of five.)

Some critics say GM has caved to the union and pays its workers too much. But since when is it the American way to blame workers for making good money? In its most recent round of negotiations, Manning points out, the UAW agreed to lower pay for entry-level employees, who now will start at just below $15 an hour. The union also released GM from responsibility for retirees’ health care.

And you can’t quite argue anymore that GM’s in trouble because it makes crappy cars. Manning says figures from Detroit show that between 16 percent and 25 percent of the people who are buying Kansas City-made Malibus had been driving Toyotas or Hondas.

“At our facility, we had the 2007 International Auto Show Car of the Year in the Saturn Aura,” Manning says. “The 2008 Chevy Malibu was car of the year at the Detroit International Auto Show. To win those awards is huge. We’re building a better car than our foreign counterparts, and it was showing. The Chevy Malibu — we were building that 10 hours a day, with six Saturdays scheduled between now and January. In our national agreement, if we work 10 hours a day, they can only work six Saturdays a year. But we renegotiated and agreed to work an additional six Saturdays. That would have taken us up into March 2009. When Wall Street crashed, it was like turning off the faucet. That was no fault of General Motors. It’s just a shame because we were winning back the American public.”

Here’s the thing about the American public, though. We never learn. We squeezed into the backseats of our moms’ Pintos in the 1970s, then grew up to fill vast suburban parking lots with Expeditions and Yukons and Escalades. Then we freak out when gas hits $4 a gallon and blame U.S. automakers for not building fuel-efficient cars — or for not making cars that don’t even need gas.

But GM has been doing that. Hybrid Malibus and Auras are coming off the Fairfax line. In 2010, GM will debut the Chevy Volt, an all-electric vehicle able to travel 40 miles on one charge.

“But if gas prices stay where they are right now,” Manning says on a day when a gallon is $1.59, “the American consumer will go and buy a Chevy Silverado pickup truck. Because that’s our nature. The American people — we like to haul our boat to the lake on the weekends, haul our camper to Colorado, put dirt bikes in the back of the truck and go down to Oklahoma and drive in the sand.”

Maybe the thing that’s so painful about watching U.S. automakers beg for a scrap of the bailout is knowing that the mess isn’t just Detroit’s fault. It’s ours, too.

Over the weekend, I called my folks, and my mom told me something surprising. “Your grandfather always said the auto industry would be the downfall of the economy.”

I had never heard that before. When I asked why he had said such a thing, she had a quick answer.

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“Because he was prescient.”

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