That's a socialist mop.

I may have said this before in this space, but we Americans so strongly believe ourselves to be innovators, free spirits, iconoclasts, etc., this idea is so bound up in our self-image, that we have a hard time recognizing when we are being hidebound and traditionalist, which I think is more and more often, compared to other countries.  (There might be a book in this: The Rigid American Way.).  Take for example our calm acceptance of the dysfunctionality of the Senate as something impossible to change that must be worked within.

Here's a smaller but still particularly egregious one.  We're confronted with record deficits; everyone, left and right, seems to agree hard choices must be made, although of course we disagree what to cut.  Why, look, here's a change that would save $500 million a year that doesn't impose any hardship on anyone, just switches things up a bit -- specifically, switching out dollar bills for dollar coins.

Oh, wait.  Apparently this is unrealistic.  Not the matter of convincing the public to use dollar coins - that's a copout, as currency changes around all the time; all that needs to be done is to withdraw dollar bills from circulation, and people will get used to it pretty quickly.  And that's "probably impossible politically," according to no less than the president of Citizens against Government Waste.  Apparently we love having little green portraits of George Washington in our wallets so much (which design has been with us for no more than 90 years) that we'll rise up in revolt if he's taken away from us!  But we're nonconformists, never fear.

(Incidentally, this same assumption of American rigidity is apparently what led many, including Ralph Nader, to conclude seatbelt laws were unrealistic, with the result that their introduction was delayed by perhaps 10 years, according to the New Yorker (subscription required).)

Addendum: This also makes me hate it when people say  "Oh, the Japanese are so traditionalist."  They've gone for energy efficiency in a big way since the 70's, and imposed a national sales tax for the first time in the 90's.