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October 6, 2009

Travels with Uncle Chet: Making waffles should be patriotic

COLUMBUS _ The phone rang and Buddy ran to check the caller I.D.

``It’s Uncle Chet!’’ he announced.

``Answer it,’’ I said from the living room, where I was tinkering with an old amplifier.

The boy said hello, and I waited.

``He says you can’t buy a waffle iron in Utica.’’

``What?’’

``An American-made waffle iron,’’ said Buddy, half into the phone, half to me.

``Oh.’’

``He says he tried three stores.’’ ``Here, let me talk to him.’’ I took the cordless handset.

``Did you know you can’t buy an American-made waffle iron anymore?’’ Uncle Chet announced.

``I thought you had a waffle iron,’’ I said.

``That’s Teflon- coated, and it smells when it warms up,’’ he said.

``Alice hates it, so we thought we’d get an old-fashioned, cast-iron one.’’

``And use it on the stove?’’

``Right, like Grandma used to.’’

``They’re the best kind,’’ I said.

``They still make ’em, but not America,’’ he said, ``and I’m not buying anything made in China.’’

``What do you have against the Chinese?’’ I asked.

``Nothing,’’ he said. ``It’s those traitors who moved our factories over there that I’m mad at.’’

``That, I agree with,’’ I said.

``So I’m not buying anything from a company that pretends to be American but has its factory overseas,’’ he said. ``The only way we’re going to bring jobs back here is to refuse to buy anything not made here, and I mean food, clothing, Sheetrock, you name it. If it isn’t made in the USA, I’m not putting a dollar toward it.’’

``Great idea, but you’re going to go barefoot this winter,’’ I said.

``No. New Balance sells American- made shoes.’’

``They do?’’

``Yes. And Lodge is our last castiron cookware maker, but they don’t make waffle irons,’’ Uncle Chet said.

``Then get a used one, off eBay,’’ I suggested.

``Now there’s an idea,’’ he said.

``Hey, that’s an excellent idea.’’

``Thank you.’’

``Now, how do we get everyone to buy American?’’ he asked.

``Get Obama to do it,’’ I said, ``although right now, he’s up to his neck in health care reform.’’

``We need ‘wealth care’ reform even more than health care reform,’’ Uncle Chet said, ``and the way to do it is to bring good-paying jobs here.

Manufacturing jobs; union jobs; jobs with benefits and security like in first-world countries _ like we used to have in our heyday in the fifties.’’

``Those were the days,’’ I said.

``When we led the world in manufacturing, workers were middleclass.

Two parents didn’t have to work; one could support a family.

But the upper class didn’t like that and launched a class war,’’ Uncle Chet said. ``They moved their factories to cheap labor markets, fattened their pockets and the American wage slave was sold down the river, where his kind of people don’t get jobs with security, pension and benefits.’’

``There’s a ring of truth there,’’ I said.

``All I’m saying is let’s fight back. Don’t buy anything from economic traitors. Buy American, wherever possible.’’

``They’re going to say you’re loony.’’

``Either we act now, while the American consumer still has clout, or the middle class is finished.’’

``You’re going to run up against the `free trade’ argument _ how our industries want to sell abroad, so we have to let others sell here,’’ I said.

``That argument is baloney, because we don’t make much of anything anymore,’’ Uncle Chet said. ``Today, I had money in my wallet and I was ready to spend it on an American-made waffle iron.

But from coast to coast, not a single American foundry makes them, and no one’s going to until we demand it.’’

___

Cooperstown News Bureau Reporter Tom Grace is traveling with his Uncle Chet, who he says is imaginary. Grace’s column appears every other week.

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