Happy Birthday, America

July 4, 2011 in Montana

by lizard

America, you’ve been good to me. I exited my Mother’s womb through her vagina in 1978 with a golden ticket that said “Welcome to America, land of freedom and opportunity, now don’t fuck it up.”

I did my best to be a good kid, got good grades, played sports, and developed socially acceptable heterosexual urges, which later evolved into a lawfully recognized union between myself and my wife, allowing us to officially propagate our genetic material, which we successfully accomplished, twice (and both my kids also received golden tickets).

But somewhere along the way I grew disenchanted, America, with your shiny image, and began to scrutinize the messy underbelly of your well-crafted top-side.

Down there it’s a different story. Despite the best of intentions, we never got too far away from the old world, and America is just a 235 year old extension of the age-old desire to gain as much power and control as possible. In this narrative the peasants never mattered, but their existence was still required, so a general upgrade of their respective cages was granted. This was known as “The Enlightenment”.

It wasn’t until the Great Wars that the divine role of America became solidified in the national consciousness. This new strain of unassailable exceptionalism is an impenetrable armor that casually dismisses any historical comparisons of other failed empires to the long skirts of Lady Liberty’s brash style of Imperialism.

Because it can’t happen here. Until it does.

But you, sweet America, are a brightly-feathered peacock on 24-hour display, and with powerful media engines massaging thought into certain shapes, this warped game of value late-capitalism is forcing us to play may still take decades to prove itself as catastrophically unsustainable as many of us already know it is.