And my daughter, my little eight-and-a-half-month-old daughter, is throwing temper tantrums. She can't walk on her own, and it's pissing her off. I tell her that she should just enjoy being a baby, that she'll never have it so good ever again, but she just clenches her tiny fists, pounds the floor, and emits some very angry noises. She just doesn't like being a baby, it seems.
Mostly, though, I just haven't been inspired. Nothing has struck me and made me want to jump up…er…sit down and write. Oh, sure, there are my stories of interviews, and HR people who call daily for a week, and then, after the second interview, disappear. It's honestly like the guy fled to Borneo to avoid talking to me. It took three days just to reach a different manager and have them tell me that I'm not getting the job. But, hey, that happens to everyone, right?
But on Monday, something finally made me snap out of it. Driving home, I saw the following bumper sticker on a Ford minivan:
Real Americans, it would seem, are also idiots. And yes, that's exactly how it was written, random quotation marks and all. This wasn't a crayon scrawl on a piece of paper taped to the bumper: the type was lined up, the color bands lined up (the top words were white text on blue, the bottom were red text on white), and it didn't look like something someone had just whipped up on their computer. So I'm assuming that someone who would call themselves a professional made this, and printed quite a few of these. And they were either completely oblivious to their own fumbling of the English language, or else they were enemies of America and playing a cruel joke on patriotic, yet stupid, Americans.
Of course, the sentiment is just as idiotic as the punctuation. At a very general level, I just can't see how helping the global economy is anti-American. But, hey, all those other countries can go to hell, right? As long as America is ok, who cares?
Now, I'm not an economist, but I do consider myself to be relatively well informed, and that seems like an amazingly stupid viewpoint. And I'm going to take a wild guess and say that not every component of that big 'ol American vehicle actually game from the US of A. Which reminds me of something my high school physics teacher once said: "Sure, your VCR says 'Made in Japan' on it, but take a look at a sledgehammer: Yup, 'Made in the USA.' We might not be able to make VCRs worth a damn, but America makes the best sledgehammers in the world."
When applied to cars, "Buy American" typically means "Don't Buy Japanese or German." Which is amusing, because our silly little country put quite a bit of money and effort into rebuilding the Japanese and German economies after World War II. So if they're making better, safer cars than American companies, well, we need to a nice chunk of the blame for that. After all, if we had just left Japan and Germany as smoking, bombed-out countries, they probably wouldn't be selling us too many minivans, SUVs, and sedans right now, would they? Ah, irony.
Which, of course, is lost on the kind of mouth-breathing, cud-chewing sub-moron who would stick a bumper sticker like that on their land behemoth.