Dear Log,
So I go into a liquor store here in town, a decent store in fact, and I poked around and found the Pernod! Yay! But ugh, it was like $40 a bottle! I remember when it was half that! So as I'm checking out, I say jovially to the clerk, who I think was the owner, "man, forty dollars! The dollar must be in the toilet, all the imported stuff is so expensive now!".
And he replied pleasantly "yeah, and prices on imports were actually going up even before the dollar started to dive".
And then he got this totally insane snarling expression on his face and sort of stared into space and practically yelled "they think their foreign stuff is so much better than things from the U.S.!!".
My crazy-detector went from 0% to 80% instantly, and I said "mm quite hm" and skittered away. (On the way out, I thought, what, so I'm buying Pernod but spurning all the domestic pastisses? All zero of them?)
Then I come home and read, in the paper, the comments of a Southern Senator speaking at the GOP convention:
«"If [the US Democratic Party] is a national party, sushi is our national dish. If this is a national party, surfing has become our national pastime," he argues. "The modern south and rural America are as foreign to our Democratic leaders as some place in Asia or Africa."»
And I think, is today Freak-ass Xenophobia Day? I mean, I know the arguments of how the components of fascism are an unavoidable part of democracy, but all it still makes me grind my teeth.
Meanwhile, from that same article: "Mr Miller's response is that it is not he who abandoned the Democrats but the Democrats who abandoned America's south and its conservative principles". Is that such a bad thing? As far as I can tell, the world can learn a lot from the South -- but only by negative example.
(Nota bene: actually, it turns out that there is a US source for pastis: Charbay in California. At $60 a bottle! Hooboy!)
(Nota bene etiam: about my crazy-o-meter: 100% is calibrated at: homeless cannibal nudist street preacher on public access cable TV.)
