The ABC "Made in America" series of segments indeed made for good TV - challenging Smithsonian about its gift shop sourcing, daring an average American household to turn its possessions out for inspection, and collaring Everyman on the street daring them to strip down to American-made-only clothing if any right there in front of their candid cameras and all turning up at the short end.
However I'm not sure that I care too much for their in-your-face journalism.
Can we now turn the tables on them and ask them:
- Diane Sawyer - what is the car you drive? your desk, your computer where were they made? your roofing, carpetting, at home... give us an accounting! where was the scarf you wore made? the suit? the jewelry? the perfume, the lipstick?
- David Muir - hey is that name your own? or is it French? Scotch? and the suits you wear? the shoes? the car?
- And ABC - could we please find out how local your suppliers are?
It would be so much better if they would just do their real job as journalists. There are so many layers to this story that I wish they would spend the remaining segments on addressing those layers: for e.g.
- could they probe beyond the consumer level; is consumption at the business consumption level also all non-American? planes, trains, ships, tractors, elevators? perhaps we are ceding one type of production to the world, just so that we focus on where our country's value-add is greatest - is there enough mark-up and volume there in handmade furniture to keep all our demographics gainfully employed? if so we should all become hand-crafting carpenters and get the chinese out of the business of cheap machine made furniture, if not would we be better off learning the truth and redirecting our energies?
- could they go beyond why America consumes so much more of goods produced outside but why does America consume so much at all? can we learn to live less largely, and within our means?
And then in this interconnected day and age, shouldn't we celebrate our so-very-healthy diversity of tastes and interests? granted much of the diversity is motivated by bargain-hunting, but some of it reflects our complete open-mindedness; I so love it when I walk into a World Market's store and can't tell whether I'm in my native India, or the Fisherman's Wharf at San Francisco where I first ran into one. And that is something that should be celebrated, something that the world, China, India, Brazil can emulate - for if they followed our lead and shut their markets to the rest of the world and to us, the whole world will very soon hear the giant sucking sound that Ross Perot (I never thought I'd be taking his name this reverentially!) talked about nearly 20 years ago!
