Re: German harps.....Why?

["Ken Wolman" <kwolman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve Shaw wrote:

> I think that if I avoided buying stuff from countries I had an issue 
> with (probably a different batch of countries to yours, but this isn't 
> the time or place....) I'd have a miserable time both because I'd be 
> restricting myself severely and because I'd be spending too much time 
> researching the ethics involved.  You could have mentioned China (human 
> rights record) and Japan (ditto, and not exactly our allies in WW2 
> either).  Or Brazil, what with their rain forest destruction.

My short version: this is a compromised universe.  The whorehouse 
operates in everyone's basement.  John Francis in Bordentown told me 
before I bought a 5164 a little bit about the history of Herr Hering and 
why he wound up in Brazil in the first place, i.e., the old bastard was 
not in flight from the Nazis, he was on the run from Nazi-hunters, and 
Brazil and some of those countries in S. America love their former 
EuroScum.  Right, and Brazil on its own has gone a long way to trash the 
ecology of the planet.

So now I've got TWO Herings.  Hering himself did not make them.  Some 
poor bastard in Brazil who might not have a job at all made them.  This 
came back to the argument I had with myself years ago (1987) when my 
former wife and I bought a Volkswagen.  We were both born Jewish.  How 
does a Jew buy a Volkswagen?  My question: how does anyone--Jew or 
Gentile--blame a 25-year-old kid working in the VW factory for what his 
grandfather might have done during WW2?  Or in my case, why am I 
punishing a factory worker in Pennsylvania by not buying a car assembled 
here?

So okay...two Brazilian harps, a couple of German (hint: it's not 
Seydel), a Chinese-made Huang chrom that was like throwing money out of 
the window, and two (about to be three) Suzukis...Japanese, right?  Is 
there in fact an American manufacturer of harmonicas?  I would buy if 
there were.  Seriously, I don't know.  Or if there ever was, did all 
those jobs go to Malaysia and India too?

Ken
- -- 
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538