Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Flags Sell Gas Guzzlers to Stupid People


My mechanic has his shop around the corner from the Hummer/Cadillac dealer. As you might guess, it's a ghost town without the tumbleweeds. I can't think of a single sane person who is in the market for a 12 mpg vehicle.

When I drove past, I noticed that all the vehicles had little American flags on them. I don't see these little flags anywhere else around town—Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Mazda...no flags. But the Hummer/Cadillac dealer has flags galore.

There is, of course, the mother of all flags flying over the dealership, a flag the size of a football field, which is, to be honest, gorgeous. It flies 24/7 except on football Saturdays, when the giant Wisconsin W flag flies (after all, one must have priorities). It apparently has spawned thousands of little flags that have attached themselves to these gas-sucking symbols of affluenza.

It is embarrassing. Hey world, not all of us Americans are conspicuously consumptive pigs who think putting a fifty-cent flag on a $50,000 vehicle makes you patriotic.

Of course, even as I write this, the Senate fiddles while Rome burns.

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