Car sales slump

For many years, the best of American humorous magazines – come to think of it, since it publishes some of the best serious writing in English, you could make a case for its being THE best American magazine, full stop – anyway, the New Yorker for many years used to have, and I believe still has, a weekly meeting on Tuesdays at which the editor, the art editor and one or two other members of the staff sat down with a sheaf of cartoons with suggested captions attached.

Sometimes there'd be a cartoon with no caption and also ideas, captions, without drawings. It was the job of the editor, mainly, to assign ideas to the appropriate artist – anything funereal, for instance, would almost automatically go to the graveyard talent of Charles Addams – and to suggest changes in the original draft cartoons which would make the point more sharply. In the days of the first editor, Harold Ross, the unfoolable Huck Finn from Manhattan – Manhattan, Kansas, that is – every drawing was scrutinised for its detail and Ross would make remarks like, 'Suburban matrons don't wear lace round their blouses any more' or 'It would be funny if we knew who was talking'. He would then scrawl a comment in the margin, 'Open the man's mouth wider!'

Producing humour once a week is a grim business and all humorous magazines discover, sooner or later, what you might call 'stock situations' to which the trick is to discover new captions. The New Yorker, for instance, must have printed hundreds of cartoons done by different artists which show two men standing at a bar, one drunk and the other sober. This tradition still goes on and the possibilities of cock-eyed variations on bar-room philosophy are endless.

Another useful standby is what used to be called 'the sugar daddy joke'. Now the word 'sugar daddy' is by now almost as quaint and forgotten as '23 skidoo' but since it has died, there's been no useful successor to it. I am happy to see that the latest edition of the Oxford dictionary has given it immortality in a straight-faced definition. 'Sugar daddy,' it says, 'American slang, elderly man who lavishes gifts on a young woman in the hope of ' – the Oxford dictionary tactfully doesn't say what.

Well the standard form of these sugar-daddy cartoons showed a middle-aged, not necessarily elderly, man, leaning eagerly across a table for two in a nightclub reassuring a usually well-endowed young woman. The premise of all such cartoons was that the young lady couldn't possibly be his wife. The first one I ever remember seeing in the New Yorker was, and I shake to recall it, almost 50 years ago. In those days, the old geezer was always in a dinner jacket and the young lady was always in an evening gown cut down to here.

This drawing, through all its hundreds of variations, remains as memorable as a beacon because the caption totally floored me as, indeed, did many of the captions in New Yorker drawings since it dawns rather slowly on the English first visitor he has arrived in a different culture. In this first drawing then, the old man was patting the wrist of the tootsie, which was ablaze with a new bracelet and saying, 'Have no fear for your future, Geraldine, freight-car loadings are way up.' What, I enquired of my college mates, could a freight-car loading possibly be?

It was to take some time for me to discover that of all the vocabularies of a particular trade, none is so far apart as the railway terminology of Britain and America. A freight car then was, maybe still is, known in Britain as a goods wagon. Freight-car loadings meant the weekly index of the amount of freight carried by the railroads, the volume of goods, from steel to stockings, from coal to oranges – everything people need that's loaded for transportation to another point along the vast network of the American railway system.

This weekly report, or index, of freight-car loadings was then THE thermometer of the health or sickness of the American economy. Maybe it's still published, I don't know whether or when it stopped but the American railway grid has withered and shrunk. Like an old man after several massive strokes, the nervous system is impaired; whole parts of the switchboard are out.

Moreover, nearly all the railroads would be bankrupt without a federal subsidy. The half-mile-long freight trains still thunder through the mountains and the snow tunnels but they carry less and less of the goods that Americans use. The airlines now carry over six billion ton miles of freight a year. More, the main continental load goes by truck on the highways. This threat to the railroads as freight handlers was foreseen by one sharp-eyed economic geographer as far back as 1940 but he was thought of, at the time, as an alarmist and a theorist. He wrote, in that year, 'On the eastern shore of Maryland, the swifter railroads gave the boats a heavy blow and the still swifter truck has well nigh killed them both. Trains carry peaches from the eastern panhandle of West Virginia to New York in two nights and a day. The truck does it in one night.'

In that year, 1940, there were five million registered trucks in the United States. At the last count, there were 27 million. It's why the one labour union the government must come to terms with, however honestly or badly it's run, is the so-called Teamsters union and it's why the freight-car loading index no longer tells us much about the American economy and why the automobile truck manufacturing centre, why Detroit, tells us everything.

Well, it seems we could be at an historic turn in the motorcar business and at a frightening turn in the economy. We learned last week that one car in five bought in the United States is a Japanese car and that in the past year the sale of American motorcars to Americans has gone down by over 30 per cent. That's a staggering drop and has involved at least two of the largest companies in heavy losses, with the obvious, lamentable result that we read of 60,000 automobile workers going out at one company, 10,000 at an other.

The auto workers union has come through with a predictable demand for protection from foreign cars. We've heard a good deal in the past year or two about the decline in sales of the so-called 'gas guzzler', the big American car. In 1974, we heard confident predictions out of Detroit that indeed the luxury car and the non-luxury gas guzzler had gone forever after the first OPEC squeeze on the price of petrol, but Detroit no sooner retooled for compact cars than it retooled back to the standard models. Having bought petrol for years for 15, 16p a gallon, we adjusted in no time to paying 50p a gallon, which is what we pay now.

In the meantime, the public argument thrashed on about whether the energy shortage was a fact of life or a contrivance of the oil companies. The polls said that something like 40 per cent of the American people believed the energy shortage was contrived. So we went back to normal. We went back, if not to ostentatious gas guzzlers, at least to the old, reliable standard models which look fat and guzzling only to Europeans.

Well, now it seems it is the standards, also, that are staying unbought. There never was a more popular standard, a more dependable stock than that of the Chevrolet. In the 1960s, Dinah Shore used to lend her lovely voice to a commercial jig, 'See the USA in your Chevrolet!' For 21 of the past 22 years, the standard Chevrolet has been the best-selling car in America. During this year, the sales have gone down by 32 per cent from the same period last year.

If Detroit is the new index of the economy's health, then the long-awaited and long-doubted recession is here with a bang. Certainly, no sign of American economic sickness is more ominous than the laying-off of automobile workers.

Meanwhile, the president and the Congress go their separate and wrangling ways trying to balance the budget in the year of admitted recession. To both of them if this effort means one thing more than another, it's the need, as they see it, to cut social welfare and educational programmes at a time when unemployment is rising – an effort and a philosophy that will go down badly, as the summer comes on, with the poor, the blacks, with parents, hospital workers, schoolteachers, with the huge varied army of working people that used to be the nucleus of the Democratic party's majority.

I hope you'll now forgive me if I don't, for once, go into such bothersome and pressing topics as the immediate future of Yugoslavia or the grim discovery of the NATO countries that the Soviet Union now has in being 225 army divisions, more than the United States raised in the Second World War.

I came, the other day, on a yellowing clipping. It tumbled out of the back of a desk drawer when I was looking for a credit card. It contains news I once felt it was pressing for you to hear. It turns on the case of one Ellen Donna Cooperman, a 31-year-old lady, woman or, as she would prefer to say, female person, from Long Island. In 1974, she was divorced from Mr Cooperman, she went to court to have her name legally changed to – wait for it – Ellen Donna Cooper Person. Two years later, a county court judge turned her down. Her request, he said, was inane and truly in the realm of nonsense. Might as well, it was suggested, at the time, talk about, 'Wood-person, spare that tree!'

After that, banks and credit card companies wouldn't list her under her preferred name. They kept to Cooperman. She persisted. She's a movie maker. Some time in the dim past of her childhood, she must have heard her grandmother sing, 'Yes, sir, that's my baby.' Miss Cooperman, 'To help', she says, 'my propaganda effort', thereupon made a movie called, 'Yes, baby, she's my sir.' She filed a new petition in New York State's Supreme Court and this time the judge upheld her. From now on, she is Miss Cooperperson.

She has a 10-year-old son. He will go on being known as Cooperman. Why? Why? 'Because', she says, 'as a male person, it's a name he's comfortable with.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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