But when products and non-living things are allowed to dream that dream, doesn't it all become ludicrous? 

Today, it seems as if even the most insignificant part wants to be noticed and trumpet its own importance, rather than just going about doing it's job anonymously as a part of a team effort. 

Having a browser isn't enough, now every search engine, service provider, computer corporation or anti-virus software adds their toolbar to your browser, usually when you're downloading something else you need from them.  Oops, didn't check the box to tell us NOT to add the toolbar? Congrats, you now have our toolbar slowing down your browser. 

When did it start; this trend of the parts of a machine refusing to remain anonymous and just do their friggin' job? When did parts begin to feel a need to call ever-greater attention to themselves and brag about their importance and quality instead of, just performing what they were created to do. When did corporations decide that making their money from selling their product wasn't enough? Now, we're not only "leaned on" or "encouraged" to use the other products a company makes, but they're selling ad space on their products to other companies and adding that revenue to their profits, and meanwhile, behind the scenes, the company is making their real money by out-sourcing their workforce or making all their employees part-time workers so they don't have to pay the benefits they would have to pay full-time workers. How many different ways can a company short-change the public in their Eve Harrington-like rush towards stardom?

Nowadays in the corporate world, making a decent profit is considered failure. Corporations measure success as the making of obscene profits. Decent profits are for losers.

Did things start to go wrong the moment that Microsoft convinced everyone that the software was more important than the computer in which it was put? I don't think so.  I believe it goes back much further than that (or is it farther? Ever since that Marx Bros. routine, I can never remember which is actually correct.) 

As a kid, I remember seeing Chevrolet's "Body by Fisher" tags on the door of one of our cars and wondering why they got a credit and the guys who made the cool tail-lights didn't.

What if all parts had this obsessive need to call attention to themselves?  Each American flag would have, along the bottom, a logo reading, "thread by National Thread, Inc., Design by Betsy Ross Industries", sewn by Melissa at machine 37, electricity provided to machine 37 by Con Edison, (a for-profit pimp that doesn't make it's own electricity anymore, but never mind that.)  Every wind-up toy would include a tag showing that the key was made by the Acme Key Co, and the toy was painted using Sherwin Williams high gloss enamel; Candy Apple Red.  This tagging mania would eventually lead to your specialized manicure being signed, "Thumbs by Annie".  But I digress.
 
Isn't the idea of the end product working efficiently, more important than the workings of each of the individual parts? Or are we now living in a world of perpetual product placement, where the only thing that matters is your name recognition?
 
And, while we're on the subject, Is this refusal of parts to assimilate into their machines, merely an extension of the way we humans are now more hesitant to assimilate into that amorphous mass known as 'Americans?"  My ancestors were English, French, Irish, Dutch, and German, to name a few, but they came here, starting in the 1600's), and "melted" into Americans without hyphens. But before someone jumps on this comment as 'racist', I think there is a difference between ethnic pride and nationalistic pride and a refusal to "melt," but that's a blog for another day. 

So why doesn't Java just shut up and work already?   Instead of insisting on me downloading a new version of it every 3 weeks? Do they really improve their product that often?

But if nothing works in America anymore, I suspect that at least part of the problem is due to the fact that while technically every individual thing still works, it makes the corporations more money to have their products run totally independent of everything and everyone else.

At this point, some wisequy will throw in a comment about 45rpm records or Betamax versus VHS or compatible verses incompatible color TV.   

Standardization might have prevented the prolonging of such disasters as 45 rpm records and Sony Beta videotape recorders, and would have kept us from having black and white television, but I'm not sure the principle can be applied to Congress, and that's really what this blog is about. 

I don't want to have to keep re-doing my choices for Congress any more than I wanted to replace my cassette tape collection when CDs came along. Throw all the incumbents out makes no sense to me. I'd rather replace them on a deserved basis, slowly and with discretion, based on their ability to make the gears mesh.

I think the reason that nothing gets done in America anymore, isn't the lack of civility or self-centeredness; as a disabled person living in NYC, who occasionally has to rely on the kindness of strangers, I don't see any lessening of civility or kindness in people that I deal with on a one-on-one basis.  (Of course, I may appear to be so pathetic, that it overides their innate selfishness. LOL) I think it's more that everybody has forgotten (either consciously or unconsciously), how to make all the gears mesh. 

Obviously, we need to elect fewer obstructionists and more gear-meshers.  Has anyone in the MSM asked any of the tea party candidates how they would work with others to actually pass legislation? (That line is the giveaway that most of this was written a while back, isn't it?)

Okay, back to the present. Now, with only a few days to the mid-term elections, I wonder why the press has thrown up its hands and given up on pressuring the tea-party candidates to give specific answers about how they'll mesh if, God forbid, they're elected.

I also wonder why Time magazine announced on Morning Joe this morning, that the cover of their issue coming out tomorrow will be a multiple cover issue featuring tea-partiers Meg Whitman, Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, each with their own cover, in a story talking about the 'Republican Revival'. Is it me, or does that seem a bit premature, and a story that's unfair to print four days before an election? I mean, couldn't they wait until next week?  They're not meshers either.