Buy American Flu, Not Imports

And now Chrysler has declared bankruptcy. 

What’s worse, we can’t even manufacture our own flu virus anymore.  We’re outsourcing our pandemics to Mexico?

We used to make things, like Pontiacs.  Now we’re dependent on Mexico, a country that used to buy our cars and get sick on our flus, to drive up the stock prices of American pharmaceutical companies and makers of facemasks.

As a nation, should we be angry at Mexico or the pigs?  Or NAFTA for creating an economy where it’s cheaper to import flu than to make a terrifying world-class flu ourselves. 

With bird flu already coming from China, now swine flu from Mexico, American flumakers will have to cut labor costs to compete.  And we know that means – fewer insured workers who need help paying for flu vaccine.

We shouldn’t laugh about the flu.  But laughing about what scares us can sometimes help us through the panic generated by the media, the WHO, and the CDC’s ban on kissing.  Mouth-breathers, projectile sneezers, spitters, and kissers who insist on greeting others with a full-frontal mouth assault – you knew this day would come.  You’ve ruined it for the rest of us who like to kiss, sneeze, and spit on people we love, or hope to love one day.

Dating someone has an even newer awkward dimension – other than the usual awkward questions about STD’s.  Now we’re forced to ask the object of our affection if they’ve handled a Mexican pig lately, eaten raw bacon, or uncured pork rinds dipped in delicious salsa – all of it followed by an unromantic groping, a slap on the face, and spray down with hand sanitizer. 

I’m finding it hard to kiss my dog on the mouth not because she’s sniffed another dog’s ass, but for fear she licked the hand of a person who casually kissed another person in a dog park who kissed a pig that once lived on a farm in Mexico.  And when you can’t love your dog, who can you love?

Until the Centers for Disease Control’s own website ranks Swine Flu above salmonella and school violence, I’m going to resist the fear that is immigrating virally faster than Susan Boyle’s ear-bleeding warble of “I Dreamed a Dream,” and save my fear for things that are truly terrifying, like Air Force One screaming up the Hudson River, and the flu made right here in the U.S. of A.

Comments

[Paul]

Finally, someone is pointing out the hardship this sector of the economy has endured!