Made in China

For more on this see previous post on my Olympic boycott – which by the way is going well. I’ve not watched anything of the Olympics from Beijing yet!

A week or so ago we did the most of our Christmas decorating – actually my wife did about 99% of it. My job is usually confined to the outside lights (none up this year by the way) and the Christmas tree.

I bought one – our first real tree in years. A Douglas fir.

After my work is done, the kids and adults alike get to hang all the ornaments. Sort of a family tradition. I have to hang the lights first – don’t try it the other way around.

Once we were finished our two littlest ones decided they wanted a tree of their own. My oldest daughter has a small tree in her room that she decorates each year. The little girls felt left out.

A day or two later I went to Walgreens and bought them what must be the ugliest or tackiest artificial tree I’ve ever seen. It is shiny green – almost fluorescent and pre-lit. But the pre-lit thing was not working. My girls noticed right away that it was lit on only one side.

Seeing they were right I decided to take all the lights off and start over – hanging lights being sort of my special household skill.

It took about ½ hour to remove and re-hang a small strand of lights. I’ve never seen a strand like this one before. The wiring was all goofy and they had the funny little clips to hold the strands on each branch.

When I was finished the girls hung their ornaments and were proud of their little green shiny tree.

In cleaning up after myself, I found a small piece of cardboard on the floor that simply said “Christmas (with a small Holly leaf underneath) and beneath that the words: “Made in China.”

Which explained a lot. I doubt most people in China have any idea what a Christmas tree is supposed to look like. From what I read and hear, we are busy exporting our western culture to them so they can buy all our stuff. But wait a minute. We buy all THEIR STUFF!

Think of all the money we could save in shipping if we just made our stuff and kept it here and they made all their stuff and kept it there.

Somehow in this all-important cultural exchange I think Christmas trees got left off the list.

Will this never end? My fault for buying a fake tree. But don’t we make anything in the U.S. anymore?

I heard a piece on NPR this morning about the steel mills in Pittsburgh – there aren’t any, any more, hardly. One of them has become some sort of specialty vendor that simply stamps – actually cuts in with a laser – words etc. on steel. Steel that is probably made somewhere else.

Who is making our steel? Can’t be China since the price of steel (so I’m told) is high because all of it goes to China to help with their building boom.

How do we stop this?

Union clothing workers and sweat-shop cotton mills forced all our clothing making out of the country years ago.

The best cars are made in the U.S. by U.S. workers, working for foreign companies.

Locally, Zenith, formerly a TV maker, moved their plant to Mexico a decade or so ago.

What’s next? With the writers strike I won’t be surprised if we don’t outsource our TV programs to Bollywood. Animation is already largely outsourced (except I hope not for Pixar. Steve Jobs please tell me all your computer animation is done in the good ole US of A)

I wrote several months ago about my chagrin at finding that my cowboy boots were made in China. Now my kids’ Christmas tree. And now guess what?

My staff bought me an i-Pod Nano for Christmas and Birthday (and maybe because I’m just such a generally nice boss!) and I was looking at it. Some of the labeling says “Designed by Apple Computer, Cupertino CA.” The instructions inside say “printed in China.” I thought maybe I was OK but my curiosity got the better of me and guess what? If you dig deep enough it says my i-Pod was “Assembled in China.” I had no idea. I’m shocked. I thought at least I could have at least one genuinely American-made product.

And my question about Pixar? I don’t want to know.