Cliff Clavin’s pissed. So are Hamm (the Piggy Bank in Toy Story), Mack the Truck (from Cars), The Abominable Snowman (Monsters, Inc.) and The Underminer (a minor villain from The Incredibles). The actor behind all these characters, John Ratzenberger, most famous as Cliff, the dim but overly informed postal employee on the long-running sitcom Cheers, is using his latest real-life role—as author—to vent about America’s sad state of affairs.

“If I have a philosophy of life, it’s simply this: To get up in the morning, put your hands to something useful and be responsible for yourself and your family,” Ratzenberger recently told The Book Standard. “It’s worked for thousands of years. Why did we stop? Why are now looking to the schools, the government, next-door neighbors, other people, to solve our problems? Everyone is perfectly capable.”

Ratzenberger’s book, We’ve Got It Made In America, which was published on Oct. 11, is an extension of the actor’s television show Made In America, on the Travel Channel. The show follows the actor and director as he goes to America’s heartland and meets men and women who work with their hands to create products people use everyday.

In Ratzenberger’s essays, he gives his thoughts on how to make America great again while writing about television, politics and raising children. No surprise, then, that Ratzenberger’s recent chat with The Book Standard covered the usual authorial topics: the goals for the book, how Steve Jobs’s studio, Pixar, can help the auto industry and why eight minutes of Paris Hilton is too much.

The Book Standard: How is the book, We’ve Got It Made In America, an offshoot of your Travel Channel show?

John Ratzenberger: It’s just thoughts that have come up as I’ve been traveling, and not just with my show; I hit the road when I was 18 years old. The book’s about several things. How did we become a nation that honors failure instead of success? There was a time when songs were uplifting and positive and now songs are degrading and negative. And we honor those people who compose and perform those songs, by giving them lots of money. So, we honor failure and we’re not honoring success. I talk about people who work with their hands. It’s always been evident to me that the manual arts always take precedence over the fine arts. Always. Someone had to build the ceiling before Michelangelo could go to work. Someone had to build Bob Dylan’s guitar. To me, those are the real heroes, those are the big successes. These are the people we should be applauding because they make the things, invent the things and craft the things we rely on everyday.

TBS: What do you hope readers take away from reading We’ve Got It Made In America and from your television show?

JR: I hope that people get back to embracing common sense. As I say in the book, the further we’ve gotten from the agrarian lifestyle, we don’t seem to use common sense. We seem to always rely on other people to solve our problems. We tend to forget that we can do things ourselves. And that’s what I think we need to get back to in that way that used to be. I have two children—19 and 17—and they are different. Every time I got a project, built a shed or repaired the barn, they were right there with me. And as a consequence, they knew how to fix things. They can take care of themselves. If their screen door goes off the hinge, they can fix it themselves. And that’s important.

TBS: In your opinion, how have children and the way we raise them changed?

JR: As children, we would just go out and play and the street lights would come on and we’d go home. That doesn’t happen anymore because of concerns of safety over children and the fear that’s been spread of what may happen to your kids. But what that does is that limits the child’s experience and also the child’s opportunity to learn common sense. You learn enormous lessons in climbing a tree, especially when you fall off or get hit in the head with a branch. If you don’t let children play in the sandbox, they don’t know how to use tools and if there’s no tools, there are no tinkers. No tinkers, no inventors. No inventors, no industry. We have children growing up on computers and in front of TV sets, that individual is not going to be inventing anything. Civilization is not made up of rock stars and DJs and actors—it’s made up of the people who lay the bricks and teach our children. That’s who we are and we shouldn’t lose sight of that. Sometimes I think that we do lose sight of that when I turn on the news and they fill us with eight to ten minutes of Paris Hilton. That’s the news, for god’s sakes! A fellow just won the Medal of Honor recently in Iraq. I saw one news article on him—on like page five. Don’t you think that he should be on the news instead of Paris Hilton? That’s what I mean about us honoring failure. The media doesn’t tell us about this guy. They tell us about Paris Hilton. They tell us about Michael Jackson. So, that’s a perfect example of what I say in the book: why are we honoring failure?

TBS: How is your life in Hollywood different from what you see traveling around the country for your show?

JR: Hollywood’s a factory town. That’s the way I always looked at it. You have raw materials coming in on one end of the studio, which is the ideas and the writers and the scripts, and you have the finished product going out the other end of the studio. It’s no different than a lumber mill. You have a tree coming in one end, and you have lumber and pieces of wood going out the other. Also, I talk about this in the book too, and I say that if by some unfortunate circumstance, Los Angeles and New York had disappeared, the rest of the country would be sad and grieve for a time, but they would be just fine, as far as food and staples and getting on with their lives. If the opposite happened, if the rest of the country somehow became non-functional, New York and Los Angeles wouldn’t know what to do. There would be panic in the streets after a few days because, then, for the first time, they’d realize where their food comes from. All the things that keep us alive don’t come from Los Angeles and New York, yet very often Los Angeles and New York are not in touch with the rest of the country.

TBS: Do you still keep in touch with your old co-stars?

JR: No, I don’t think anybody really does. Now, what happens in Hollywood is that you do a job and everybody goes home. I see George [Wendt, Norm Peterson on Cheers] from time to time. My closest friends are people I went to grammar school with. I still have friends in Hollywood, because this is where I work.

TBS: What have been some of your favorite roles that you’ve been able to play over the years?

JR: I enjoyed P.T. Flea, in A Bugs Life and Mack the Truck in Cars. I’m enormously proud of Cliff, because I created that character myself. I like to do things that make people laugh. I love what I do when I’m doing it. If I’m directing a TV show, I love every second of it. I just finished a movie, I was on it for three weeks and I loved every second of it.

TBS: You’ve become a sort-of mascot for Pixar, providing voices for every one of their movies. What do you like about voice-over work and Pixar?

JR: I love working with the Pixar people. I talk about them in the book as well. General Motors and Ford should go to Pixar because Pixar can fix the auto industry in this country. The accountants took over the auto industry. If you have a company that makes several different models of cars, the accountants stepped in and said, “Let’s use the same dashboard in every car, because it saves money.” The way it was before, they let the designers design beautiful cars and then they built them, and people bought them. Then, the designers became unimportant. The same thing happened to Disney and Disney started going downhill. But Pixar has now taken over Disney, which means the artists are back in charge. That’s what Pixar is. John Lasseter is an artist first. He is basically what Walt Disney was. That’s why I say in the book that General Motors should look at Pixar for an example and just get out of the way of the designers. Hire great designers, creative people, let them do their job and then just build the cars. And we’ll buy them!

TBS: What can you tell us about the movie you were recently working on?

JR: It’s called The Village Barbershop and I play a barber named Art who just lost his barber partner, the guy he owned the shop with. Also, he hasn’t had a social life in 11 years, since his wife died of breast cancer. He still very much loves his wife and her clothes are still hanging in the closet. And that’s what attracted me to this part. Here’s someone who remembers a sense of dignity. Immediately after his wife’s death, he didn’t get a new suit of clothes and go out and make the rounds at the discos and singles bars. He still loves this woman and hasn’t met anyone to change his mind. It’s about his life and the changes he goes through. It’s a very sweet movie, and it’s not too often that parts like that come around.