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Money can’t buy you happiness but it sure can buy you nifty things like “car flags” and the right collection of magnets and stickers to show those you pass on the highway what you believe in. These colors may not run, but these nifty “I support our troops” magnets will snap off your car when you upgrade to that new canary yellow Hummer H3 you’ve had your eye on. Recently a new book called China’s Not Happy hit the bookshelves- and newsprint bootlegs hit all the tricycle cart and blanket-on-the-bridge-over-the-overpass bookshops for a significantly lower price – perhaps one of the reasons the book’s 5 authors are unhappy. While nationalism is clearly an issue in China, and expat sites like ours are regularly besieged with Chinese posters with excellent English, a lot of free time, and an ax to grind; “white satans” stealing the Chinese women notwithstanding, Chinese seem, to my satanical self, to be quite happy. There’s no debating this is a pressure-cooker society and only heating up – the pictures of job fairs are crazy – applicants jammed together until cattle call doesn’t come close to doing it justice, more like ants desperately swarming a leftover picnic. Employment is increasingly hard to find, 20 million migrant workers are out of jobs, and Zhang Ziyi has a foreign boyfriend. Across the sea, in America we’re still, according to 2008 polling, astonishingly happy – 16th in the world, in fact. Now that may be 20 or so places higher than our dreadful math ranking but we’re not letting “numbers” get us down. America’s patriotism may be weaker and more watered down than China’s – after all China has 5,000 years of glorious history including tea, gunpowder, and the Great Wall while America has 200 years of Kool-Aid, sprayable cheese food, and the Liberty Bell. Now, we Americans may be smoking the fumes of our once so-promising country and next years happy-numbers maybe even lower than our science scores, but we stay convinced, gosh darnit, that there’s something to be happy about. After some hardcore sociological study I am convinced I’ve found the reason Americans have turned their nationalism into something to be happy about (and, incidentally, something those in developing countries like China, India, and Vietnam should be happy about as well). In a word (or two – like I said, we’re not so good at math): presidential plates. While China sells all the best China memorabilia to the flocks of large-legged tourists that descend on the Middle Kingdom every year, citizens of the United States view it as our patriotic duty to act like tourists in our own land and buy up flags, ribbons, and of course those oh-so-important flag pins. Political careers have been made and destroyed, destinies diverted and derailed by this seemingly innocuous 12 cents worth of cheap tin, lead paint, and Vietnamese handiwork. After 9-11 what did President Bush do once he got done wandering around the rubble? (As Stephen Colbert said in his brutal 2006 White House Press Corps dinner, “he [Prez George W Bush] stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things.) He told us to buy duct tape. And decorate that duct tape with flags and stickers and magnets. And wear our XXXL bald eagle sweatshirts and Doritos stained t-shirts emblazoned with “Don’t Tax Me Dude” And put yellow ribbons for the troops next to the gas tanks of our cars. I am an expert from songiclaser.com, while we provides the quality product, such as E-Light Laser Hair Removal , RF Skin Tightening Machine, 808nm Diode Laser Hair Removal,and more.
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