Okay, this has nothing to do with Hillary, McCan't's Veep-B-Cue or anything of political note. I think. There may be a subtext about America's continuing slide in innovation and prestige, but I'll leave that to the reader to figure out.
I am one of those unfortunate people with the gene sequence making the individual susceptible to any image of the lovable, uber-cute cartoon character, marketing phenomenon Hello Kitty. Please don't hate me. I didn't ask to be born this way.
Any flash of the affect-free feline blob's whiskered face will grab my attention. Any product festooned with her utterly nonthreatening mug heads immediately to my secret wish list. I am, in short, a member of the Hello Kitty Nation. William Gibson would probably call me "a spy for the Hello Kitty group mind."
I am not the only person who is an unwilling victim of HK-hood. The proprietor of the blog Hello Kitty Hell made a grave mistake some years ago when he told his wife to find some hobby she enjoyed and find a way to make an income from it. Little did he realize she would choose to become a representative for the Sanrio Corporation, whence sprung the ubiquitous, adorable cat-demon. Soon, his house, his life, his very mind was packed with all things HK, leading him to create one of the funniest, and most frightening sites on the Internets.
Being an HK-sensitive, I was thrilled at the news that Japan has named Hello Kitty the official tourism ambassador. Thrilled and, after a moment's reflection, a bit disheartened regards my own, once-proud republic.
Where, I thought, is our great national mascot? Uncle Sam is so played out that he is good for little more than flaming effigies. Besides, he looks too much like John Magnie from the Subdudes. (I often wonder how Mags feels when he sees all those foreigners burning dolls of him on CNN.)
Smokey the Bear, though a specialist, was once a proud American mascot, however, his brand was so weakened by saddling him with the pathetic Hootie Owl that Smokey has never really recovered his mascot-ulinity.
Recent attempts to find a plushy symbol of our nation's greatness have fallen terribly flat. Izzy, the symbol of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, was so confusing and formless that his very name derived from the most-common reaction to the character: "What is it?"
About Karen Hughes, the Bush administration's sole attempt to find an appealing symbol of American greatness, the less said the better.
So, my dear DK friends, I ask you: can we as a nation ever hope to have a mascot as universally recognized and beloved as Hello Kitty? What symbol could possibly reignite the love and respect we once commanded in the world?
Discuss. Or not.