General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, the Big Three of America’s Motor City of Detroit, were denied a bailout by the US Senate on Thursday, and thus might be collapsing. Of course, they have been collapsing for a long time. Over the past year, there hasn’t been a person who follows the American economy who hasn’t been aware that the automakers were in trouble; but they first set wheel on the downward slope well before that — perhaps when they tried fancy financial tricks to pull themselves out of competitive holes, or when they decided patriotism was more effective marketing than quality, or when they blocked American health-care reform, or when they first decided to keep building outdated gas-guzzlers and watched suburbanites throughout America switch to Hondas.

Were they any other companies, they would have fallen by now. Great firms have fallen before. Pan American and TWA once ruled the skies, Montgomery Ward and Woolworth’s the malls. Those names have vanished, wiped from airline bags and the New York skyline. Were they from any other country, they would never fall. France and other European countries don’t let national industrial jewels disappear. The Big Three are the ultimate icons of American business and mobility — Ford is the universal example cited for the efficiency of the production line, Chrysler has survived so many troubles that a past chairman, Lee Iacocca, became the face of aggressive, deal-making capitalism for a generation; and, as for GM, so closely interwoven was it with the American ship of state that in a previous confrontation in 1953, its chairman, Charlie Wilson, was widely believed to have told the Senate that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”

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