Money can’t buy you happiness but it sure can buy you nifty things like “car flags” and the right collection of magnets and stickers to show those you pass on the highway what you believe in. These colors may not run, but these nifty “I support our troops” magnets will snap off your car when you upgrade to that new canary yellow Hummer H3 you’ve had your eye on.

Recently a new book called China’s Not Happy hit the bookshelves- and newsprint bootlegs hit all the tricycle cart and blanket-on-the-bridge-over-the-overpass bookshops for a significantly lower price – perhaps one of the reasons the book’s 5 authors are unhappy.

Photo: eschipul

While nationalism is clearly an issue in China, and expat sites like ours are regularly besieged with Chinese posters with excellent English, a lot of free time, and an ax to grind; “white satans” stealing the Chinese women notwithstanding, Chinese seem, to my satanical self, to be quite happy.

There’s no debating this is a pressure-cooker society and only heating up – the pictures of job fairs are crazy – applicants jammed together until cattle call doesn’t come close to doing it justice, more like ants desperately swarming a leftover picnic. Employment is increasingly hard to find, 20 million migrant workers are out of jobs, and Zhang Ziyi has a foreign boyfriend.

Across the sea, in America we’re still, according to 2008 polling, astonishingly happy – 16th in the world, in fact. Now that may be 20 or so places higher than our dreadful math ranking but we’re not letting “numbers” get us down.

America’s patriotism may be weaker and more watered down than China’s – after all China has 5,000 years of glorious history including tea, gunpowder, and the Great Wall while America has 200 years of Kool-Aid, sprayable cheese food, and the Liberty Bell.

Now, we Americans may be smoking the fumes of our once so-promising country and next years happy-numbers maybe even lower than our science scores, but we stay convinced, gosh darnit, that there’s something to be happy about.

Photo: 艾德云芝

After some hardcore sociological study I am convinced I’ve found the reason Americans have turned their nationalism into something to be happy about (and, incidentally, something those in developing countries like China, India, and Vietnam should be happy about as well).

In a word (or two – like I said, we’re not so good at math): presidential plates. While China sells all the best China memorabilia to the flocks of large-legged tourists that descend on the Middle Kingdom every year, citizens of the United States view it as our patriotic duty to act like tourists in our own land and buy up flags, ribbons, and of course those oh-so-important flag pins. Political careers have been made and destroyed, destinies diverted and derailed by this seemingly innocuous 12 cents worth of cheap tin, lead paint, and Vietnamese handiwork.

After 9-11 what did President Bush do once he got done wandering around the rubble? (As Stephen Colbert said in his brutal 2006 White House Press Corps dinner, “he [Prez George W Bush] stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things.) He told us to buy duct tape. And decorate that duct tape with flags and stickers and magnets. And wear our XXXL bald eagle sweatshirts and Doritos stained t-shirts emblazoned with “Don’t Tax Me Dude” And put yellow ribbons for the troops next to the gas tanks of our cars.

Photo: justin

But let’s get back to the plates: while America didn’t invent china (the crafty durable yet elegant form of ceramic that China the country is named after) we certainly put it to good use. After all, what better way to honor the head of the free world than to paint his head onto a dinner plate? The Egyptians had the pyramids, Mao has his giant stone mausoleum (which is somehow never open when anyone goes), and Nixon can be comfortable wherever he is now knowing that, in true democratic fashion, thousands of Americans treasure a piece of his legacy, in the form of the Richard M. Nixon 37th President Plate featuring our only Quaker president looking lumpy and shifty in a quasi-impressionist rendering painted entirely with morose green and brown hues.

And in these trying times, as our deficit balloons grotesquely like an unfortunate goiter and China buys up a new American state every day out of pity, I stay happy by owning a piece of the good history – the Obama Commemorative Victory Plate™.

“The Historic Victory Plate™ is a priceless work of art featuring the triumphant President-Elect surrounded by the American flag and spectacular fireworks celebration. This first collectors issue plate celebrates with the inscription "Change Has Come" scripted in 22K Gold text. The back displays the seal of the American Historic Society and documents the historic electoral and popular vote totals on election day. “

Now the head start in plate patriotism shouldn’t make other countries sad, really, it should be the opposite. Don’t fool yourself into thinking these or any of the patriotic accessories are actually made in the US. Where do you think the firework motif came from? No doubt it was inspired by the Chinese designers and manufacturers who still had Cai Guo-Qiang’s exploding Olympic masterpiece writ large across their minds.

China has the labor, the talent, the raw materials and probably warehouses full of unsold plates featuring American presidents that have already been shipped back from Walgreens (where the young tattooed salesperson told my grandmother, sarcastically it turned out, that they were selling like hot cakes – she took the bait, though not the plate). Get out a little nail polish remover and the paint sets and soon Chinese can be enjoying the likenesses of Hu, Wen, and Wu Bangguo on plates rimmed with 22k gold!

In America, when it comes to patriotism and taking the difficult steps demanded by difficult times, we’ve learned to have our cake and eat it too (sometimes off Victory Plate itself if the dishes are just too daunting) – just go the Mall of America and look at us from behind. Actually, Mall of America isn’t even the world’s biggest mall in anymore, two retail behemoths in Dongguan and Beijing win that one – are you sill unhappy?

In short, blaming ineffectual liberals and intellectuals is only part of what you need for true happiness. It’s a good start, sure, but you need to accessorize that fight if you really want to enjoy it. Dinner’s served!

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