Some Words of Appreciation for my Fellow Americans

On my way to Dayton, Kentucky for a couple stand-up shows. I’d never heard of Dayton, KY, but if it’s anything like the rest of the places I’ve been playing of late, it’ll be a goddamned delight because the people of this country are generally a goddamned delight, despite all evidence to the contrary.

We are regularly inundated with images of Americans being shitty to each other. We’ve got Karens and Waffle House brawls a-plenty in this glorious nation of ours. We’ve got various white nationalist marches and mass shootings and people swinging at each other in the streets over petty shit. We’ve got all kind of lunatics here, many of them armed, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that these people - and the chaos they cause - are uncommon, if not exactly unusual.

The truth is, assemble any group of Americans together into any sort of non-political public setting and you’re likely find yourself a pretty good time. We’re a good-time kind of people, given to good-time people things: overdrinking, overeating, and generally overdoing everything that can be overdone. We’re a people founded partially on the modesty of a puritanical religion who have, over the centuries, gradually disposed of the moderation in favor of excess Even our most popular religion is now replete with laser lit rock-n-roll mega-churches popping up all over the heartland like so many meth labs.

Americans like to make anything and everything into a party. We have an entire city in the middle of the Nevada desert dedicated to the prospect that people wanna get crunk. (Is that the correct usage of an almost certainly outdated term?) We have a pizza chain that features animatronic rodents singing birthday songs while you play Skee-Ball. We’ve got shopping malls with theme parks inside. Our national independence is celebrated each year with a war’s worth of pyrotechnics and a seaside competition featuring contestants attempting to shove as many hot dogs into their fat gobs as possible. We are a people who have elevated the stupid to the sublime. We are Idiots and we are Legion.

It’s glorious.

O, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light/What so proudly we hail/A monster truck driving through a mud pit.

It's true that Americans get a bad rap for our boorishness. We smile too wide and talk too much and make dumb comments about whatever pops into our heads because we’ve been raised to believe our opinions matter even when they do not. But we’re also open-hearted and friendly to strangers, which is often misinterpreted as cluelessness. In fact, the reason I disliked the Borat movies was because they attempted to portray Americans as idiots when, from what I could see, most of the people in those movies were simply trying to accommodate a foreign weirdo with as much courtesy as they could muster.

(Not Rudy Giuliani, who was just trying to get his dick sucked.)

I know I’ve been down on my country of late. Too many seemingly intractable problems with too few people willing to sacrifice anything for the greater good. Too little forethought, too much Monday morning quarterbacking. So much of our energies are spent tearing each other down over political/religious/cultural differences and not enough energy spent lifting each other up. And yes, I’m as guilty of it as anybody else, but hopefully I can be excused for calling out twats when they behave like twats.

Clarence Thomas, for example: twat.

But most of us, the vast majority of us, are decent enough. No better than anybody else on the planet, but also no worse. Worrywarts like myself tend to feel defensive about our Americanness when traveling abroad, knowing that global opinions about our nation are, shall we say, not great. And who can blame them? From the outside looking in, it probably looks like we’re a hot mess of a country, willing to spend our way out of the various messes we cause around the world and willing to elect any old fool to our highest office. In fairness, it looks like that because it is like that.

But when I talk to my fellow Americans, our language is the same. I don’t mean English, I mean American. Any citizen learns the language of their nation; the social cues, pop cultural references, food, flash points, shared memories. The United States of America is much closer to the name that describes it than people tend to give it credit for. We are a group of states united, not by a king, but by an idea written on an old sheet of parchment.

The idea has always been greater than those who committed its principles to page: a more perfect union. It’s a beautiful turn of the phrase because it makes no bones about the fact of our imperfections. We are an imperfect people in an imperfect land trying to make this union as good as it can be. That might mean abolishing slavery, but it also might mean turning a VW into a goddamned monster truck and driving it through a mud pit.

All in all, we’re a middlebrow people who like making a big fuss over mediocre nonsense, and also blowing shit up. If America was a band, we’d be KISS. Dumb, fun, and a little bit scary. Like I said, I’ve been down on the ol’ US, but I wanted to inject a little hope into my usual dour ramblings. As a nation, I don’t know where we’re heading, but as a people, I hope we arrive there together. If not united, then at least not so divided. Let us take comfort, friends, in our similarities. It’s the summer and it’s the weekend, my fellow Americans. Get together and get crunk.