One of the many hats I wear at the library is that of planning and presenting programs for adults. My goal is to provide ongoing education and entertainment through arts, crafts, cooking, music, and local history. I recently offered a program about weaving dreamcatchers, including a slideshow about the indigenous cultures around the Great Lakes where the craft originated with the Ojibwe, Cree, and Chippewa tribes.
Don't worry, I made sure to include warnings about federal laws regarding the collection of feathers in the wild (lots of things are pointlessly illegal) and offering native crafts for sale while misrepresenting them as native if you're not (illegal, but also disrespectful). Basically, treat other cultures with the respect you would ask them to show yours, right?
Anyhow, along with showing some pictures from museum examples of traditional designs using willow branches to make oval hoops, and rawhide and sinew or plant fibers in the original products, I collected metal hoops, suede ribbon, and twine to make ours. Everything is made in China these days, and it's always a gamble to order online when I'm doing my best to stretch my budget. The suede was fine. The metal hoops were fine. The twine was inconsistent in its diameter and surface texture. And on top of that, there was fraud!
OK, fraud might be a bit extreme. I don't recall how long this was supposed to be exactly, and I haven't measured it to see if I got the quantity I ordered, but shortly after pulling off the lengths I needed to make these kits, I discovered the tightly-wound outer surface concealed this looser wrap inside. They made their product bulkier to ship across the ocean in order to provide an illusion of quantity and quality. I wondered why the wrap around the middle had made such a waist indentation. Now I see why: the whole ball is hollow, not just that obvious core!
This illusion of value and deliberately deceptive packaging permeates the market nowadays. Mass-produced shoes claim to be built to the highest standards, but come apart in a matter of months. Shirts get worse and worse with bad stitching and flimsier fabric. Tools don't hold up under even light use unless you pay out the nose for name brand, and that's not always even a guarantee because they badge-engineer the same low-grade Chinesium you skipped over sometimes.
It's easy to blame corporate greed for this downturn we see in every aspect of our lives, but greed isn't really a variable that ebbs and flows, it's a constant. What we have is an economy burdened by perverse incentives, artificial regulatory costs, and inflation encouraging these greedy bastards to think in the short term to maximize profits now instead of building a legacy for sustainable growth on a foundation of customer satisfaction.
Quality is still out there to be found, but it's not easy to find, and costs more than you expect. Overseas manufacturing has hidden the devaluation of the dollar behind cheap foreign goods. Not everything imported is bad, and not even everything from China is worthless, but caveat emptor is as true now as it was centuries ago, if not more so.
I'll leave you with a song loosely connecting twine and the midwest, and a link to an old post telling my own dreamcatcher story.
