I must be an idiot for buying American products. I'd like to think it's patriotic but in the end it is just plain masochism. These American products are crap and they do not hold up. I have an RCA DVD player that had the remote die after just 6 months, another RCA product that suffered from a design flaw because even after replacement it still kept locking up. Hewlett Packard used to make good products but I've had terrible luck with those over the last few years, with CD burners that would break after 2 weeks, printers and faxes that constantly jammed, a desktop computer that continuously locked up, etc. and I won't buy anything from them any more. The list is endless.

Today's rant is about my Zenith TV set. It's just about 2 years old. Now, I don't actually watch that much TV, since I stare at screens all day long as part of my job and part of this website. This TV is a High-Def set, and was purchased in part to tube able to show High-Def work to potential clients. Being one of the last of the glass tube sets we have had endless troubles with colored spots showing up on the screen that the built-in degaussing cannot remove, but today the sound developed a noticeable hum. It's loud enough that it drowns out very low dialogue in movies with theater mixes. And before you write in, I do know about ground loops and have "cans" on all the inputs. In any case, I pulled out all the source connections to validate that the hum is originating inside the TV set itself. The power supply is failing, probably from a too-cheap capacitor someone chose because it meant that Zenith could make .00001 cent more profit from the sale of the set. In any event, the set's days are clearly numbered. When they hum this bad they are about to die.

So, to Zenith and all those other American companies I tried to be patriotic to over these last several years, good bye and thanks for all the irritation. I am swearing off American electronics products. They simply do not hold up, and when it comes to customer service, you cannot hold a candle to Japanese companies like SONY.

Maybe this it the clearest sign of America's decline. We cannot make anything any more. We developed a culture that turned its nose up at manufacturing, sent it all off shore because actually touching products was beneath our national dignity, and now we as a nation have forgotten how to make anything. Except bombs. And trouble. We still lead the world in making those.

Our management culture has shifted focus from products to their stock portfolios. That the company makes a product seems almost secondary to the game playing that can drive stock prices higher. We've all studied Enron, which didn't actually make or sell anything, but still made multi-millionaires out of their top managers shrewd enough to bail out before the crash. We've all read how top managers of companies in bankruptcy still vote themselves bonuses, with the permission of the bankruptcy court. This seems a strange disconnect.

Public traded companies have stopped being about products and have become legalized gambling for bored rich people, playgrounds for the corporate "players" for whom the stock price is the ultimate score card.

Made in America used to mean something throughout the world. But somewhere along the line we have lost our way. "Made in America" stands for junk; for over-bloated, over-priced, excessively complicated inelegant junk.

We all talk about getting our country back and putting the economy back in order but none of that will happen unless America re-learns how to make electronics products equal to those made in the rest of the world. Because like it or not, this is an electronics world. One cannot have a competitive economy without being able to make competitive electronics products.

When WW2 ended the uNited States had 30 companies making TV sets. Today Zenith is the last. And from the performance of their product, they are not long for this world.