You ain’t a pimp
and you ain’t a hustler.
A pimp’s got a Caddy
and a lady got a Chrysler.
—“Young American,” by David Bowie

Each year, on the third Saturday of August, people line the sidewalks along Woodward Avenue in Detroit for the annual Dream Cruise.  In the ambiance of the affluent northern suburbs of Oakland County, the spectators take in the sights of vintage muscle cars and other restored models from the 50’s through the 70’s driving up and down Detroit’s main drag.

In some ways, the spectators are every bit the participants, taking as much pride in nostalgia as the drivers do in ownership.  They watch the flashy display of headers and fins much the way Soviet officials used to watch the parade of military hardware through Red Square on May Day.

These days, Detroit’s dominance of the global car market, like Soviet dominance of global politics, is a thing of the past.  And in the older faces of spectators at the Dream Cruise, the sense of loss is as obvious as the sense of pride.

Lest one doubt the Detroit area is realistic about its long-lost clout, look no further than the million-plus crowd that assembles one day each year for the Dream Cruise compared with the smaller crowd that turns out over the span of a full week in January for the annual Detroit Auto Show.  Each year, Detroit-area newspapers attribute the declining crowds to inclement weather, but Michigan has always been a cold place in January, even when, many years ago, the Detroit Auto Show was a huge draw.

On the other hand, if Detroiters are realistic about the decline (and potential extinction) of the Big Three automakers, the Dream Cruise doesn’t really evoke in the younger spectators a feeling for what it was like when Detroit was on top.

Growing up in and around Detroit in the 60’s and early 70’s, if your father worked on an assembly line, he didn’t work for General Motors.  He worked for Cadillac or Buick or Chevrolet (or the since-scrapped Oldsmobile or soon-to-be-scrapped Pontiac).  And you wouldn’t call a neighbor’s Mercury a Ford or his Dodge a Chrysler.

Falcon was a Ford.  New Yorker was a Chrysler.  Mercury and Dodge were divisions.  And General Motors, with Chevrolet leading the way, was all divisions.  Strange how the Big Three divisions are what gave unity to Detroit.

My father was self-employed, yet as much a Ford guy as if he had worked for the company (and, in many ways, he did).  Were you to have asked me back then to name the biggest car company in the world, my response would have been Chevrolet (which, though a single division of General Motors, was bigger than both Ford and Chrysler).

General Motors is no longer the world’s largest car company, not even with all its remaining divisions combined.  That designation now belongs to Toyota.  And if General Motors should someday regain its number-one spot (and that’s a big if), it will not recover its dominance.

But back to the Dream Cruise.  So what if it doesn’t teach the kids about what Detroit was like?  So what if it’s more a form of escapism than a history lesson?  Henry Ford himself once said that history is bunk.

Perhaps one might call the Dream Cruise a humanities lesson.  Hot cars blaring out the West Coast sounds of the Beach Boys.  Great music inspired by our cars—“GTO,” “Little Deuce Coup,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun” among them.  Will anyone ever write a song about a Lexus?

Unfortunately, in real life, Daddy has taken the T-Bird away.  And the decline of the Big Three has inspired more somber music since the days of the Beach Boys.  Bob Seger rejoiced in the 80’s how “back in ’55 we were makin’ Thunderbirds.”  But in the same song, he was lamenting that we no longer make them; today, “you’re lucky if you work.”  And the city Bruce Springsteen was mourning in “My Hometown” sure sounded like Detroit.

See the Corvette?  The Mustang?  Hot cars.  Still, be careful not to miss out on the Edsel or the more recent Ford Country Squire Station Wagon.  That’s the Dream Cruise in its full effect (at least for Detroit­ers in my age group).  You’re in the back seat of that station wagon again, and Dad grumbles at the car ahead, “C’mon, Chrysler.  Move it.”  At the same red light today, you only hope the vehicle ahead is an American car—any American car.

Or maybe you don’t care.  Lots of that going around, even in Detroit.  Barack Obama promised what’s left of the auto- and steelworkers unions that he was going to put the nix on imports.  But the Mercedes in front of you at that light is sporting an Obama bumper sticker.  Who cares?  Not Jimmy’s Quality Meats, a Detroit-area business that uses imported vehicles.  Or the Checker Cab guy who drives a Honda.

Are European and Asian vehicles really better cars?  Their customer-satisfaction ratings are certainly higher.  But if customer satisfaction is based on quality, how does one explain the success of Detroit Tigers and Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch?  His Little Caesars Pizza empire makes the worst stuff ever to have come out of an oven.  And if that’s not bad enough, Detroit’s annual Motor City Bowl, played every year over the Christmas holidays, has been renamed the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl.

It’s all too much to contemplate at the Dream Cruise, which is supposed to be fun.  It will be a cold day in August before Detroit recaptures its dominance of the auto industry.  On a warm day in August every year, however, it’s enough to enjoy the display of what Detroit once built and in which it still takes pride.

And while the rest of the world sees a well-preserved car, we in Detroit still see ourselves in the backseat and hear Dad grumbling, “C’mon, Chrysler.  Move it.”