I mean no discredit or insult to the good people of 404media by pullquoting this line from a recent piece on tariffs:

… as an American, it feels actually more painful to see a listing for a product I might want that costs $2,000 for shipping rather than have the listings be invisible to me altogether.

Nonetheless, it needs saying: that feeling is, in a very real sense, definitive of what it is—or perhaps what it was—to be “an American”. Few things hurt quite so much as a confrontation with one’s obsolete exceptionalisms.

(This is not schadenfreude, either; I’ve been there.)

(Well, OK, it is a little bit schadenfreude. But if your hobby is collecting largely non-functional objects from people in distant countries at hundreds of bucks a pop, I figure you can take it.)