Interesting bit on Mini’s vis-a-vis the current political clime over at Instapundit.com. The only real problem I have with the post is this bit from a reader:
It is not a “boycott,” but why should I spend my hard earned dollars supporting an economy whose workers think that I am worse than Saddam Hussein?
Clarification, while BMW reengineered the Mini and ‘owns’ the car design, the manufacturing plant is still in England, so the workers that make the Mini’s are British folks, not those mean ol’ Germans.
Which isn’t to say many British aren’t against this proposed war with Iraq, but where Germany is standing against the situation as a country, Britain is not, so they are seen as being 100% on our side, as though even the American people are 100% for… anything… ourselves.
It all seems a little odd that the guys riviting doors together are seen by the public as being the actual people who determine Germany’s national policy in the first place. Or Britain’s. Or ours. As ***Dave mentioned earlier when recounting how a random pedestrian in England told him ‘please don’t bomb Iraq’ as she walked by: “It’s not my department, lady.”
But I can sort of see her point: I walked around London and saw that the primary representation of “America” to the general public: McDonalds, KFCs, Subways, Starbucks, GW’s monkey-face, and (god forbid) Newsweek, the “International News Magazine” — faced with that, I’d want to take any opportunity I could get to tell any American I could find to PLEASE STOP if I were in her shoes, too — I just don’t know what I’d tell us to stop first — there are so many viable choices. (Heck, just hearing the guy with the Missouri accent (and hooded sweatshirt) in the Gatwick airport at the end of our trip made me want to cringe away and hide.)
Of course, we’re doing the same thing: we have to strike back against anything and everyone that might be supporting… stuff we don’t. A fast- food restaurant in North Carolina is now serving “freedom fries” rather than french fries. Yeah, striking a blow for freedom there. Go you.
That’s the problem I have with International Relations: I’m being represented by George W. Bush to all these perfectly nice people all over the world; that is how they see me. Us. Every. One. Of us.
Undereducated squint-eyed oil-grubbing Texas millionaire with twenty-dollar bills to burn. That’s you. That’s me. Just ask the panhandler at Victoria Station.
