Hillbilly Elegy

promised he’d disown his children if
they bought a Japanese car—stopped
complaining a few days after they
announced the merger. “The truth is,” he
told me, “that the Japanese are our
friends now. If we end up fighting any of
those countries, it’ll be the goddamned
Chinese.”
The Kawasaki merger represented
an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in
America was a tough business in the
post-globalization world. If companies
like Armco were going to survive, they
would have to retool. Kawasaki gave
Armco a chance, and Middletown’s
flagship company probably would not
have survived without it.