Coded Messages

FCC Eyes the Phone Monopolies, Finally

It's about time. The FCC has decided to look into Apple's decision to block Google Talk, which would let users make cheap or free calls with the iPhones. Why the surprise? The mobile carriers have blocked anything that challenges their monopolies or profits. They've blocked using cellphones as wireless modems, forcing customers to buy a separate data plan and cellular device. Some have blocked Skype and Vonage, the leading VoIP services.

It's time to open up the airwaves to new technologies and new applications. The phone companies should have realized by now that the walled garden approach is hopeless and try to find other ways to make money.

My beef is international data roaming. When I land anywhere outside the U.S. I get a warning on my iPhone that data calls cost $19.95 per megabyte over AT&T's network. I didn' t get those warnings when I started going to Europe with my Palm and I choked on my phone bill when I came back. Routine downloads of email quickly ran into hundreds of dollars. There's no cost justification for this. Fortunately, the iPhone has wi-fi and I can easily enough find a free or cheap connection when I'm not using my European phone.

I'm not surprised that Apple collaborated with AT&T on blocking Google Talk. Apple has always controlled third party access to its devices. You can say that's one reason they work so well; but it's also a reason they've been more expensive, too.

I recently switched to an iPhone and have been pleased by how well it works. But some of the other limitations on apps have also been frustrating. I used an app called Agendus on the Palm that nicely integrated your tasks, appointments, follow-ups and phone numbers on the tiny screen. When I saw a version for the iPhone, I immediately downloaded it, only to discover that it had none of the calendaring abilities because Apple has not given developers access to the calendar function.

Why? Who knows. Agendus apps on other phones shows that you can overlay an application without altering the core database. It might simply be that Steve Jobs doesn't like the idea. So we'll have to wait for that wall to come down as well.

Post-Racial? Spare Me

The reaction in the black community to the arrest of distinguished Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates is bound to puzzle some white Americans and those who live outside our American racial dynamic. The outrage will be seen by some as an over-reaction. Some critics will argue that Gates’ run-in with the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was unfortunate, but an aberration, and that the man who is arguably the most famous college professor in America could have avoided confrontation with a policeman on his doorstep by being more cooperative.

 In an American moment that some pundits desperately wanted to label as post-racial, the arrest of a black Harvard professor on his own doorstep was a stark reminder of the fragile status of black men, despite the success of Barack Obama in reaching the white house.

The Gates incident forces us to take frank measure of the racial divide that manifests itself in the divergent views of black and white Americans on the continuing significance of race.  Major polls show that the vast majority of whites no longer believe that racial discrimination is a big deal; a majority of blacks still believe it’s a major issue.

What happened in Cambridge, of course, could have been worse. Dr. Gates could have been beaten or shot – or killed. And there would have been a lot of hand-wringing about how sad it is that these things happen. Confrontations between white policemen and black men don’t usually end well. The danger increases when black men talk back. Not only did Professor Gates resist showing his ID to Sgt. James Crowley, according to the police report, he actually gave him lip.

Policing in these United States has always involved a dual role. The primary role was to prevent crime or to arrest those suspected of crime. The other role, much less explicit, but embedded in police culture since the days of slavery, was to maintain the racial order. For hundreds of years, police officers North and South sought to stamp out black militancy. They spied on civil rights groups. They harassed and arrested interracial couples. Their superiors turned a blind eye to racial brutality. And white cops didn’t tolerate black men who talked back.

Those of us who covered police for any length of time noted how quickly white policemen grew angry when a black male resisted their authority. Who can forget the video of a confused and groggy Rodney King being beaten mercilessly for defying an order to lie down?

The police role in racial control has grown ambiguous as laws changed, animosities diminished, minorities acquired political clout, and police departments became more diverse. But even in a city like New York, we have had plenty of reminders of the lingering dangers of that second role, whether it is Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times for reaching for his wallet, or more recently, Omar Edwards, a young black off-duty policeman, shot dead by another officer, when he made the mistake of chasing a car thief with his gun out. It’s another aberration. It just doesn’t happen to white cops or suspects.

Race remains a contentious issue in America because we don’t like complicated discussions. We don’t do well with ambiguous reports or competing opinions about who is winning or losing. Is racism waning, yes or no? Blacks and whites would probably agree on “Yes.” It’s the “but” that divides us.

Yes, Obama’s election was one more step in a long arc of progress that started with Brown v Bd. of Ed in 1954. Over the following two decades, voting rights legislation and civil rights laws brought African-Americans closer to political parity. Fair employment laws and affirmative action opened the marketplace to broader competition and put blacks and whites in the same workplaces. Many white and Hispanic Americans saw the disconnection between the stereotypes they had grown up with and the reality of the black man or woman at the next desk or workbench.

By the time Obama ran for office, there was enough familiarity among blacks and whites and Hispanics and Asians that traditional Republican code words were not enough. Obama didn’t get a majority of the white vote, which went to McCain-Palin, but he got enough white Americans to choose competence over skin color to become the first African-American president.

That leaves us in a painful transition. The majority of white Americans don’t want to be seen as racist. The majority of blacks don’t want to be seen as blacks first.  And then we run into reality on a porch not far from Harvard Square on a Thursday afternoon.

Bongo Drummed Out

If you believed the flood of praise that flowed from French political leaders, you'd think that the late Omar Bongo was one of the planet's great statesmen. President Nicolas Sarkozy said the death of the Gabon president had caused him "great sadness and emotion." Former President Jacques Chirac called him a wise man who greatly contributed to peace and and stability on the entire African continent. Even Sarkozy's Foreign Minister, the sometime blunt-spoken founder of Doctors Without Borders, Bernard Kouchner, declared that France had lost a friend as had all of Africa.
The most prominent dissenting French voice came from a former judge who had presided over one of France's biggest scandals, involving French oil company Elf, and, of course, Gabon, a major oil exporter. Eva Joly won election to the European Parliament last weekend, but that didn't cause her to mince her words. Bongo mostly served French interests, she declared. She pointed out that although Gabon's GDP equalled Portugal's, Bongo built just five kilometers (2 miles) of roads a year and that his country had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. "He was not concerned about his citizens," was her blunt and refeshing epitaph.
Through 41 years of ironclad rule, Bongo was France's point man in its post-colonial African policy, known as Françafrique. Manipulating Africa through corrupt leaders and with timely show's of force, France supported friends and punished enemies with little concern about democracy or corruption.
Bongo was a reliable supporter of France at the UN and host to French military units. In the meantime, he took good care of family and friends. Transparency International's French branch estimated that his "ill-gotten goods" included 70 French bank accounts in the name of relatives and 150 prestigious pieces of real estate, including 10 Paris apartments worth more than 150 million euros.
Like a lot of strongmen, Bongo sought the imprimatur of democracy. He claimed to have received 79 percent of the vote in a 2005 election that a weak opposition judged to be a massive fraud. Despite being a country rich in oil, manganese and iron, Gabon ranks 123rd of 177 countries in the UNDP's human development index.
Gabonese may hope for better, but the country is likely to stay in familiar hands. Bongo's daughter was his cabinet chief; his son-in-law was minister of economics and finance, and his favorite son was minister of defense.

Do We Still Need AvantGo?

Sybase has decided to shut down AvantGo,its content delivery service to mobile devices. It is a curious decision at a time when more and more people are turning to  handheld devices as a primary source of information. The company says in a press release that AvantGo will now focus on delivery of ads through SMS and MMS. Gee, aren't there enough people doing this?

Sybase's decision is seminal; it comes on the heels of the slow death by neglect of Vindigo, another content delivery service to handheld devices. VIndigo concentrated on restaurant, bar, music and museum listings in dozens of cities. It offered restaurant reviews and movie start times. Vindigo's exit was by stealth: the listings became more and more stale and finally just stopped being updated.

At least, Sybase put out a release explaining that "in an effort to realign the AvantGo platform with the core business of Sybase 365 -- B2B mobile messaging services" it would no longer provide downloads of mobile content. Of course, you always wonder why companies don't realize that what they're acquiring doesn't "align" in the first place.

The industry seems to believe that access to the Internet on handheld devices is now good enough that people will just browse the web for information. Of course, the truth is that other than the iPhone, browsing the web with a cell phone can still be a painful process. Most publishers have not yet created "mobile" versions of their sites, 3G access is spotty, and some phones are just too darned sluggish.

The advantage of delivery platforms like AvantGo and Vindigo was that they let you download the content to read. That meant you could be on the plane or the subway and access the New York Times, or Bloomberg or Cityvox, the European cities guide. You didn't need ot be connected to the Web.

The tech industry often embraces fashionable ideas before making a reality check about the obstacles. "Cloud" computing is a wonderful idea if you are always connected to the Web; but there still are plenty of circumstances in 2009 when you're not tethered to the Internet, wirelessly or otherwise -- or that you don't want to be.

Some years from now techies will laugh at our quaint practice of worrying about energy use. Whether it's Wi-Fi or 3G, staying connecting drains batteries. Until we get the super-nano batteries we've been promised for years, downloading to read is much more economical than maintaining a link.

Another value of the download sevices was that all your information was collected in one place, quckly accessible via a menu. Reading live from the Web means logging into each news source or switching to a new address each time you want different content -- and waiting for it to load.

Obviously, Vindigo and Avantgo did not create a viable market or they would go on. Like the larger Web,the mobile Web is still looking for a profitable business model. AvantGo suggests mysnacs.com, which offers information widgets for the New York Times, Reuters, Facebook and other sites, as an alternative. However, it only works with Blackberries and a few Windows Mobile devices.  An it doesn't have the international breadth of AvantGo. I doubt I'll find the English Premier League scores as easily.

I think there's room for a brave entrepreneur to deliver downloadable news content to mobile devices.

Lincoln Center & Me

ON THE 50^TH ANNIVERSARY OF Lincoln Center

The papers have been full of celebrations of the 50^th anniversary of Lincoln Center. The praise for New York’s premier performing arts center is well deserved, but dislocations it caused have been brushed off too easily. The neighborhood in the West 60s was neither dire nor depraved, as the official remembrances would have us believe.

I know, because the construction of Lincoln Center was the soundtrack of my high school years.(In 1960, less than a year after the ground-breaking ceremonies at Lincoln Center, my family returned to the U.S. after several years in Africa and Europe. My parents, international civil servants from Haiti, called the Board of Education about a high school and were told that I lived in the zone for the High School of Commerce. Getting to school was just a quick walk down Broadway from our apartment on 72^nd Street.  

I remember the neighborhood around Lincoln Square as a vibrant, mostly-white, working to middle-class community, a busy mix of shops, diners and modest stores on Broadway. Families lived in the apartments along the side streets while artists, musicians and the occasional drug addict resided in the many brownstones that still served as boarding houses and SROs. One luncheonette near the 66^th street IRT station delivered your order on an electric train that circled above the counter. ABC Television, then an also-ran third network after CBS and NBC, occupied barebones offices and studios above the stores and supermarkets along Broadway between 66^th and 72^nd streets.  WINS, a hot Top 40 station opposite the Coliseum, was the anchor at Columbus Circle.

I walked down one Saturday to see Murray the K host a live rock ‘n roll concert. I was shocked that the youthful voice on the radio was much older than he sounded (Murray must be at least 40, this 14-year-old estimated) and he wore a toupee. He would achieve national fame by attaching himself to the Beatles on their first U.S. tour a couple of years later.

Commerce’s hulking tan brick building on 65^th street dated to 1902.(The buildings on the left in the background of the photo). Originally built for boys only, the school housed some 3,000 co-ed students in the 1960s and sat across the street from the site of the new arts center. In my three years, my education was punctuated by the sounds of blasting, drilling and building. In my senior year, the ramp across 65^th street (now torn down again in the renovation of Lincoln Center) stuck through the hole in our library wall, a warning that we would soon be gone.

High school was my introduction to the subtleties of race and class in New York as well. The school had an illustrious history. Commerce counted impresario Billy Rose and composer George Gershwin among its alumni. Yankee great Lou Gehrig, dressed in his Commerce baseball and soccer uniforms, looked out from the ancient team pictures on the walls along with white teammates with mostly German and Jewish names.

But by 1960, the student body was 80 percent black and Hispanic, from Washington Heights, Harlem and East Harlem. Most of the handful of white students from the West Side and the Village and the smattering of middle class blacks attended the “Lincoln Park Honor School,” an essentially segregated entity within Commerce that had even had it own third floor cafeteria. We got college prep courses and AP classes; the rest of the students were being trained for jobs as clerks, bookkeepers and receptionists.

Commerce’s low status – and imminent demolition – meant a lot of neglect by school authorities. The building ran on direct current instead of the alternating current that had been standard for more than 50 years. We needed noisy converters for all our audiovisual equipment. The swimming pool had been broken for at least 30 years. 

We had no ball fields, of course, but our teams practiced in Central Park, a few blocks away. Commerce basketball was a perennial power, even in the early 1900s, with a team starring Nat Holman, who would go on to play for the Original Celtics and coach City College  to NCAA and NIT titles. In one stretch that included my three years there, Commerce made the public school playoffs at Madison Square Garden for 23 consecutive years. To practice against decent competition, our team scrimmaged regularly with nearby Power Memorial, a big-time Catholic school, and its star player, Lew Alcindor. I’d often see the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar towering above his friends at the 66^th Street subway station. Yet, it was our star player, Ric Cobb, and not Alcindor, who set the city record for most points in a single game (88) that would stand for 30 years.

In an age when urban removal of the poor was considered good social practice, many of the brownstones and small apartment buildings around Commerce had been condemned; scenes from the film of West Side Story were shot there. Ugly red-brick blocks of housing projects and Lincoln Center itself would soon erase any evidence of the old tenements. Gone, too, would be the last remnants of historic San Juan Hill, named for the black men who had fought in Teddy Roosevelt’s 10^th Cavalry against the Spanish in Cuba, and once the center of African-American life in New York.

Commerce closed the year after I graduated and the big bland box of the new Julliard School would soon swallow up its space. The gentrification of the West 60s – and the creation of convenient memories – had begun.

 

The Judge and the Cop

Omar Edwards probably never met Sonia Sotomayor, but the young policeman’s death in a hail of friendly fire and the resistance to granting the judge high office both offer some enlightenment about the state of race in America.

Ever since U.S. President Barack Obama submitted Sotomayor’s name for the U.S. Supreme Court, conservatives have been on the attack, arguing that her views on race and ethnicity are dangerous and that her support of affirmative action is obsolete, disqualifying her to be the first Hispanic and only the third woman to serve on the nation’s highest court. After all, some said, isn’t President Obama’s election as the first African-American president proof that we are all past that?

Mr. Edwards probably never had the high aspirations – or the opportunities – afforded Ms. Sotomayor. Both grew up in blue-collar families – she in the Bronx, him in Brooklyn – and both achieved their dreams. She went off to an Ivy League education and law school. He wanted to be a policeman. News reports indicate he was a positive, well-liked young man who played defensive back on the NYPD’s football team. But on a tragic May evening, he came upon a man trying to break into his car. He gave chase with his gun drawn and he was shot down by a fellow police officer who mistook him for a perpetrator.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg probably reflected the wishes of many Americans when he fiercely rebuffed suggestions that there was a racial element in the killing of Mr. Edwards.  Yet, like almost all other police shootings in New York since the 1940s, Mr. Edwards was black and the officer who fired the shots was white. There is no record of a white policeman mistakenly being shot by a black or Latino police officer. As one black police officer plaintively told reporters, “They’re going to talk about better training but it keeps happening.”

It keeps happening of course, because putting an elegant, erudite black man in the White House has not suddenly erased 300 years of negative images about African-Americans. It just simply never occurred to this young white man from the suburbs – in a moment of panic and adrenalin – that the gun-toting black man on a dark street in East Harlem could be a fellow officer.

Fear, ignorance, and a hair-trigger are dramatic reminders of the gap that still exists between the races in even a cosmopolitan city like New York. These incidents grab headlines: in the death of Officer Edwards, of immigrant Amadou Diallo, in dozens of other cases of “mistaken identity” that are so quickly forgiven by juries who empathize with the officers who, they are told, feared for their own safety. Yet law-abiding African-Americans live in fear of “driving while black” or having their children end up on the wrong end of a confrontation with police.

It is not inconceivable that there are still many white people who make hair-trigger decisions about people of color every day. But those visceral reactions don’t involve guns and don’t result in deaths. They are mundane choices that someone black or Hispanic was just not right for the job, didn’t get the apartment because they wouldn’t fit in the building, or didn’t seem as “articulate” as the other candidate, who happened to be white.

There’s also no doubt that we have made racial progress in America and that there are many fair-minded people who can judge a black man not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character, as Martin Luther King Jr. hoped. But it would be absurd to think that putting one black man in the White House has suddenly obliterated centuries of negative images, stereotypes and deep-seated fears.

And that takes us back to Judge Sotomayor. She understands that the barriers to equality are not just built with a handful of bullets fired in fear; they are also the result of thousands of paper cuts – decisions made not in the dark of night, but in the darkness of insecurity and the unease at difference.  Affirmative action many not be perfect and it sometimes makes undeserving victims, but it is our effort to close the gap that keeps “us” from being all of us.

Will Palm Seduce Me?

I'm the kind of guy Palm should convince to stick around. I've been a loyal Palm user since the very first Palm Pilot. Will I show the same love for the new Palm Pre ? I can still remember my excitement when I saw the gray, green-screen Pilot at Demo in 1996 and just knew I had to have one. I lined up with another 150 zombies to plunk down $150 for an advance unit. The simple interface, the ample storage, and the easy sync with a PC made it the first truly useful PDA. I stayed with Palm through its many iterations, Palm III, Palm V,and Palm VII; ( I thought the Roman numerals were a bad sign), and even the chunky (but Wi-Fi enabled!) Tungsten C.

I followed Palm to the Treo phones. What kept me tied to Palm were the applications. For all the talk about iPhone Apps, Palm in its heyday spawned thousands of applications for its devices. Palm apps were easy to use and ran fast. There were lots and lots of apps to manage money, look up restaurants, record patient conditions, calculate foreign exchange, or track your World Cup bracket, etc. Wireless apps blossomed when the Treo came along. But Palm, predictably, never figured out a way to make money from all this activity. The App store had not yet been invented.

I'm not sure that Palm understood why its customers stayed loyal. We knew Palm's technology was falling behind and the business steadily losing money. The Treos were mediocre phones and downright clunky next to the slim, snazzy devices from Nokia LG and Motorola. Then the iPhone exploded on the scene, resetting both the aesthetic and usability standards for a mobile device. The iPhone was beautiful. You really could browse the Web on your phone and watch videos and play your iPod music. I pined for an iPhone but my Treo was still working (other than the occasional reboot). I ran Vindigo to look up live music, Mapquest for directions, Zagat for restaurants, and my wine encyclopedia.

In recent months, several online services I subscribed to via my Palm Treo have shut down. Vindigo, which provided listings of live music and movies, restaurant reviews and museum listings slowly faded away. Last week, Avantgo sent me a brief message announcing that it would soon stop providing mobile content. Avantgo provided access to hundreds of publications around the world, from Bloomberg to the London Times to Le Monde. Avantgo didn't explain why they were shutting down. Obviously, the service wasn't making money. It may be that the iPhone's usable Web Browser renders intermediaries like Avantgo superfluous. Or maybe there still aren't a lot of people who will pay for news and information on their phones.

So I've rooted for Palm to hit another home run with the Pre. I've watched videos of the announcement, pored over specs, and avidly read reviews, but I haven't yet put my hands on one. I worry. The community of software developers who played such a crucial role in building Palm's base seem an afterthought so far. The Pre will have just a handful of apps at launch and the software developers need is late. I hope that least Palm will offer an emulator that lets you runs the old apps.

Then there's the issue of the carrier; Sprint has an exclusive,maybe to the end of 2009. I understand that a struggling Spint and a floundering Palm need each other. But the last thing I need is a phone that won't work outside the US. I went through that years earlier with Verizon, which offered to rent a GSM phone to subscribers who traveled abroard and forward calls to your U.S. phone. It was too Rube Goldberg for me.

So I'm waiting to see version 3.0 of the iPhone. Rumors are that Steve Jobs has finally deigned to allow iPhone users to cut and paste information. But the real pulling power for me is the Apps store. I've already seen my killer iPhone app: it's called iReal, an iPhone version of the Real Book, the standard repertoire of tunes for the jazz musician. Not only are the chords readable on the iPhone screen, you can change the tune to any other key with the flick of a button. Palm better hurry.

Haitian Terrorists? Give Me A Break.

I've been fascinated by a trend that none of my Haitian relatives or friends can explain: Haitians being caught up in terrorist plots. This past week it was a bunch of ex-convicts caught in a federal sting operation, accused of planning to blow up synagogues and military planes. One of the accused plotters, Laguerre Payen, caught my attention even before details were available. I knew immediately from his name that he was Haitian.
Another bunch of Haitians were also charged in a terrorist plot in Miami in 2006, accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and FBI offices and set off an insurrection against the U.S. government. It took three trials and almost three years to convict that group, with a verdict just a couple of weeks ago.
A key piece of evidence in that trial was an FBI video of the men pledging allegiance, or "bayat," to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden in a ceremony led by an Arabic-speaking FBI informant posing as "Brother Mohammed" from al-Qaida. Testimony also showed the men took photographs and video of possible targets in Miami, including the FBI building, a courthouse complex and a synagogue.
It may be that some of these guys posed a real threat, but a lot of experts have dismissed such arrests as little more than shows by the law-enfrocement authorities to justifiy their anti-terrorism funding. Most of the alleged perpetrators in these stings are poorly educated, down-and-out guys who would not have gotten beyond a lot of bluster without a facilitator, often an FBI informant or undercover agent who ends up all but leading the team.
Haiti is hardly a hotbed of anti-Semitism or anti-Israel sentiment. In the first place, there are hardly any Jews there. My grandfather, like many of the Jewish merchants who came to Haiti at the end of the 19th century, married a Catholic and his family quickly assimilated into the mainstream. The biggest anti-Jewish act I ever saw as a child there was the ritual beating of a Judas effigy on Good Fridays. Israel considered Haiti important enough to assign an ambassador (for reasons I can't fathom), and as far as I can tell, these envoys have enjoyed a pleasant, leisurely stay while they waited for a really meaningful assignment. One Israeli ambassador in the 1970s found enough free time beside his official duties to trace the history of Jews in Haiti back to the 17th century Dutch traders.
Most of the plotting Haitians did when I was growing up in New York centered on getting back to Haiti and overthrowing the Duvalier dictatorship. A few idealistic young guys tried and they ended up shot or hanged by Papa Doc and his henchmen. We obviously weren't very good at plots.
Of course, with maybe a million Haitian immigrants in the U.S., it's conceivable that a few would be indoctrinated into some form of militant Islam. But there's nothing Haitian to explain this sudden outburst of terror-philia.
So getting back to this recent spate of Haitian "terrorists," the best I can say is that these incidents suggest there's a big enough pool of Haitian that a few losers can get dragged into half-baked plots. I was hoping that the 9/11 hysteria had faded enough that we could start making rational decisions like shutting down Guantanamo. It would be ironic that a bunch of Haitian airheads end up feeding the Fox News fear machine.

Big Push for New Nokia Phone

I find the big publicity campaign for the Nokia E71x amusing. As far as I can tell, the new phone is the old E71 that has been available in Europe since the middle of last year. The  main difference (the reason for the x) is a light alteration to use US based 3G networks.
I bought an E71 in Paris last Christmas because I was tired of the outrageous roaming changes AT&T was making me pay for using a U.S. phone in France.
The E71 is not bad, but if you're accustomed to a touch screen, you keep wanting to press on an icon to get something done. Instead, you have to move the cursor with the navigation buttons and click.
The screen is bright and the camera is very good (it's a 3.2 megapixel with autofocus and electronic zoom) and a built-in flash. I found the pictures more than adequate that I could leave my Canon Powershot behind in most cases.
My European version comes with a built-in FM tuner, which is great for jogging without carrying another device. The FM radio is apparently not in the US version, maybe to make room for the extra chip needed for AT&T's high-speed HSDP network.
The Nokia can connect to wi-fi networks, which I often find faster than the cellular connection for browsing the web and dowloading a lot of email.
The E71x is not the end-all but it is a solid, slim and good-looking smart phone for those of us still resisting the iPhone..
http://www.nokiausa.com/e71x?CMP=KNC-SEM_001&HBX_PK=nokia%20e71x&HBX_OU=50&site=Google&device=E71x&adgroup=E71x#/main/landing

Can I Interest You in a Fiat?

The first American car I bought was the last American car I ever owned. As Fiat moves toward a merger with Chrysler, I tried to imagine whether I would ever be tempted to go buy a Chrysler. It's going to be a hard sell because I once owned a Fiat. The Fiat came after the Oldsmobile 88, a hulking gray piece of 1960 American automotive genius I bought as a college student in the late 1960s. The car averaged nine miles a gallon and was great for carrying all my band equipment, but even at $1 a gallon, I finally decided I couldn't afford to keep it.
The Fiat was my first new car, purchased several years later when I went to DC to work for the Washington Post. It was a red Fiat 124 Sport Coupe, the hardtop two-door version of the more popular Spider. The five-speed manual transmission drove like a dream down Rock Creek Park to the office, across the Appalachian Skyway on weekends. It was tight, responsive and exciting to drive on those winding roads. It was less fun on my frequent shuttles up US 95 to New York; the suspension was harsh and the car got noisy when it revved up.
It also broke down frequently. The Fix-It-Again-Tony reputation was growing quickly and my repair bills showed it. It got worse when I drove across country to live in San Francisco; the car was great on the city's hills and on Pacific-hugging Route 1.
Then there were the glitches. I actually ended up with an mechanic named Tony at a Mission district garage. One day, Tony opened the hood and explained the problem of Fiats in his litling Napoli accent. "See this?" he said, pointing to some mysterious box near the engine. "If American car use one part to do something,  Fiat use four."  He explained that I had an electric clutch and an electric fuel pump, while most American cars of the time used simpler hydraulic versions. The more parts, the more likely a breakdown.
Then there was the problem of getting parts. "Can't get." Tony would say after diagnosing the latest breakdown. " On strike."  Fiat or its suppliers seemed to be in constant labor turmoil, so parts were almost impossible to find. I roamed the junk yards, which were filling up with Fiats, fortunately or unfortunately, to scavenge what I need.
But Fiat's biggest problem was rust. Apparently it didn't snow much in Italy because winter was my Fiat's deadly enemy. Red rust spots blossomed everywhere, spreading out to small ragged wholes. When I was moving back to New York a few years later and decided I no longer needed a car, I ran an ad in the local papers. Several callers immediately asked, "Has this car been on the East Coast?" When I said yes, they hung up. The know about the rust problem. I finally found a buyer who decided the car's classic value was worth ingoring the lacy structure that had developed under the windshield.
I was nostalgic as my buyer drove off; I was reminded of a bumper sticker I had seen on another much-maligned brand, a Jaguar. The sticker read: " ..but when it runs..."