Why would foreign car companies open factories in the United States? The plants shouldn't make sense — Americans have to be paid so much more. Last week, BMW announced it was opening a plant in South Carolina. People were lined up for jobs paying $15 an hour. Equivalent jobs in Germany pay $30 an hour. We’re now a bargain.
The theory that Americans are better than everybody else is endorsed by approximately 100 percent of all U.S. politicians, although there is less and less evidence to support it. Democracy requires me to respect the results of the elections. It doesn’t require me to agree with them or to admire the process by which voters made up their minds. In my view, anyone who voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008 and now is supporting some tea party madwoman for senator is just a fool. But the general view is that the voters, who may be fools individually, are supremely wise as a group. Everybody will be talking in the next few days about the “message” that the voters sent. But does anybody besides Jon Stewart criticize the manipulation of that message by the media in the first place?
The 2010 elections, for all their wild witches and teabagger rallies, are basically irrelevant. Some people are voting for calorie-free chocolate cake, and some are voting for fat-free ice cream. Neither option is actually available. Neither party’s candidates seriously addressed the national debt, except with proposals to make it even worse. Neither party’s candidates had much to say about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, except that they “support our troops”. And Americans are still killing and dying in faraway wars. The reason that politicians are silent is because the solution is not what Americans want to hear. Why can’t we have calorie-free chocolate cake? We’re Americans!
There are rules such as, “You can’t have good ice cream without fat” or “You can’t borrow increasing amounts of money indefinitely and never pay it back, because people will eventually stop lending it to you.” No country is special enough to escape these rules.
The belief that we’re the greatest country ever may be self-destructive. If people already believe it’s true, they won’t do what’s necessary to make it true.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
ReplyDeleteI find it extremely odd that I've been in agreement with most of what you've said lately... including this. Has there been a shift in the space-time continuum?
ReplyDelete