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by Keone Michaels
When I was growing up we were taught that "America is the best country in the world." "No ifs ands or buts about my boy," we are the strongest, purest, cleanest, most noble and righteous, most democratic country on the face of the planet! We were taught to think America was the best in one way or another, at school, in the newspapers, and TV. My family didn't get a black and white television until I was 11 years old but I remember newsreels in the movie theater on Saturday mornings. All the movies in those days, late 40s early 50s and even sometimes into the 60s started with a newsreel glorifying the American war machine. Tanks, my overwhelming visual impression from those days in the dark theater with many other sweaty youngsters was of huge Bradley tanks, American tanks running over the enemy. Our perfect, invincible war machine.
This was and is the primary tenant that every American schoolchild is indoctrinated into until it is absorbed into his/her consciousness and is a building block of American citizenship.
Of course, for most of us of my generation, the first challenge to our belief that America could do no wrong, at least in a spiritual non-material sense, was the Vietnam war. But, I suspect, others like myself, still harbored the illusion that America was the best at least in everything material and our spiritual set was just in a temporary slump. Vietnam was merely a misstep, an unusual aberrant blip in the normal pattern of American righteousness. Iraq of course has robbed us of all spritual illusions these many years later. I was startled to realize recently that I no longer believe, even in the secret corners of my heart, that all things American, even those material things, are the best. How did this epiphany come about? Simple, in my search for a good cup of coffee. I found the so called French Press. The French Press is way of making coffee that is basically making a soup of the coffee grinds and hot water and taking a fine wire mesh press, pushing all the grinds to the bottom and leaving a dark thick rich liquid behind. It turns out that this type of process tastes so much better to me that hands down after I made my first cup I had an epiphany. I realized that Americans like myself for decades have been put thru this coffee filter marketing machine and never even given the choice until recently. I didn't even know that an alternative to the nasty tasting brown filters or the better tasting yet more toxic white filters or some other variation thereof, including gold filters, existed. Drip down schemes designed to perpetuate profits not to maximize taste and the product. Sell the fools anther filter. Snark! Anyway, so what is my point? America, to put it vulgarly, has lost it's cherry in many ways. For decades, for example we were number one in citizen literacy. We have fallen to 5th or 6th, perhaps down even more. But we need not bash America today. Instead I ask you to contemplate is what everyday items of the the culture and the market place do Americans take for granted that is best and Europeans and the rest of the world might know differently. The French Press is one example. Another I recently came across is a polycarbonate and steel can opener also happens to be made in France, that is ergonomic and flawlessly opens cans, every-time, and after 50 years of trying many many can openers, this as they say is the Sh*t. Anyone have any other product discoveries? |
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Ain't this America? | 67 comments (67 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Ain't this America? | 67 comments (67 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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