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Smell that in the air? It’s that sweet yet salty aroma, flavorful
yet bitter and with just a hint of formaldehyde. It’s the smell of
ejaculate and regret (not unlike my bed sheets) with a side of
cheese fries. It’s the scent of burning crosses and the fiery
passion passed down by our forefathers and their black mistresses.
That’s the smell of America, baby. And we’ve just finished celebrating the
best damn day to be an American of them all:
the Fourth of July. It’s a holiday so important we need four days just to
recover from it—a time known as “July 4th Weekend.”
Some of you may be familiar with July 4th, probably because it’s
the day that Jesus came down and proclaimed us winners, past and present, of a
worldwide game no one knew they were playing. But we knew. He handed out guns
and right-wing conservatism as our prizes and quickly fled, because as
impressive as he sounds in the Good Book, our Messianic friend just looks like a
dirty hippie in real life. And since we spend 365 days a year kicking ass and
taking names, sometimes we just need some time for ourselves. We need a day off
to celebrate our origins and the men who made this beautiful and morbidly obese
country possible. We need July 4th.
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In America, single mothers most commonly use T-Rex as a
replacement father figure. |
I’ve been told the perfection of our kingdom began since dinosaurs have
walked the earth. For some reason, those beasts that lived on the hallowed
ground that would soon become ours grew bigger and stronger than the others.
They were kind of loud, roared in a pointedly ignorant way, and for a brief
period of time decreed that the votes of those dinosaurs of a darker hue were
only worth 2/3rds of the votes of the other dinosaurs. Also, they made fun of
herbivores mercilessly. Since I believe in creationism this story rings false,
but it’s good to know that even the heathens who haven’t yet found the way to
God still understand that our country was destined for greatness.
Every year Chicago holds a weeklong “Taste
of Chicago,” an event which is just what it sounds like—a literary
celebration of the long-standing traditions of local librarians. And by
“literary” I mean “drunken” and by “local librarians” I mean “sweaty
drunkenness.” Thousands upon thousands of rednecks, minorities, and incredibly
misled tourists pour into a park that violates every law of physics by becoming
smaller as the week wears on. By the night of July 3rd you’re so
closely pressed against your fellow man that unwanted pregnancy is inevitable,
and half of the city can describe the texture of your taint in vivid detail.
It’s an abortionist’s dream holiday.
The more I think about it, this shitshow event perfectly reflects the
values of the Juggernaut (my little pet name for our empire). The Taste
offers a variety of heart-stopping treats from across the world, foods that
we’ve blatantly stolen from other countries and more than that, blown up to
absurd proportions and offered at half the price. In other words, progress. The
Taste offers everything from beef to ribs, hamburgers to meat hash,
corn-flavored pork to pork-flavored corn. In other words, variety.
It also brings together people from all walks of life—everybody
from college students with nothing to do, unfathomably large
Hispanic families with nothing to do, poor people with nothing to
do, and the entirety of the African-American population of Chicago
and its outlying suburbs with nothing to do. I don’t know what it is
about explosions of light in the air, but
minorities love their fireworks. Also, the Taste once invaded
another festival in Indiana under the false pretense that the
festival was harboring fireworks of their own. Our bad.
Throw in cheap alcohol, cheap women, and infrequent infighting and you’ve
got the perfect metaphor for the United States. Better yet, throw in the people
who will laugh at this article and then you might have the best metaphor of them
all. Because sure, America’s got its problems (like simply being too fucking
awesome), but our ability to laugh at ourselves and everything else too gives us
an edge that most people don’t understand. We’re like the bipolar cousin in your
family that makes you giggle hysterically and then cry just as quickly. Our
capacity for switching between lightheartedness and dead seriousness in an
instant is unrivaled, and that makes us unpredictable and oh-so-fucking
attractive. Do you think people in Germany joke about the Holocaust? Do you
think the Chinese have a word for “poot”? And yet jokes about slavery are
commonplace, and if a day goes by without me making a joke about rape or
molestation, bury me because I’m probably dead.
We’re the best of the worst, the worst of the best, and we’ve got so much
potential and just as much laziness to match it. We’re the land of untold wealth
and broken dreams. We’re every bad stereotype you’ve ever heard, and
more progressive than you’ll ever imagine.
We’re America. Deal with it.
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