Today’s bankruptcy filing by General Motors has given me yet another item I never had on my wish list – a minority stake in one of the biggest corporate failures in U.S. history.

Sorry if I can’t muster much excitement, Uncle Sam. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought, trying to save an industry and all. But, if you were going to buy us all something, why not make it something cool? You did know the Chicago Cubs are for sale, right?

Now instead of having the ultimate fantasy baseball experience, me and millions of other taxpayers are stuck holding a 60% stake in a car company that:

• Has lost all cachet with Generations X, Y, and Z
• Is losing market share quicker than an eight year old Chevy Lumina loses oil

And last but not least

• Is being reorganized by a 31 year-old Yale Law School Graduate with no business experience, who may or may
  

  Brian Deese and his Beard Mean Business at Government Motors (Crawley/New York Times)

  not possess a magical beard

Is there any wonder I want to toss this gift aside like a tacky Father’s Day necktie?

But, as my mother always told me “it’s the thought that counts.”

So, thank you Uncle Sam. I know this GM-thing cost you (uh, us) a lot. Some 50 billion dollars by most estimates. And probably more when it’s all said and done.

Just to show you that I don’t totally hate the gift, here’s my idea on how to make General Motors into something worth owning:

Turn the company into a reality television show.

I am not talking about sending in cameras to document the day-to-day happenings in the post-Fed GM. Nor am I proposing another generic “how cars are made” show on the Discovery Channel.

What I really want to see is a Survivor-meets-The Real World-meets The Apprentice-meets American Idol type of prime-time reality program. I’m sure the networks can fit one more into their schedule.

I want to see 36 GM employees living in a shuttered dealership – each trying to design the vehicle that will save the American automobile industry. I want to see the contestants earn their tools and materials through a series of inane automobile challenges (first contestant to find a Chevy with over 500,000 miles gets a socket wrench!).

I want night-vision cameras rolling each time someone from R&D hooks-up with a Powertrain Engineer in the back seat of a prototype car they designed together. I want to watch B-List celebrities coaching the GM’ers on how to create the perfect car.

Most of all, I want me and my fellow GM stakeholders (all 300 million of us) to be able to call each week and vote on which cars GM will build.

It’s a formula that helped American Idol contestants sell over 40,000,000 records. If the same formula can help GM move 40,000,000 automobiles, that gift Uncle Sam gave us just might be worth something.

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