Why You're Here:

You've said to yourself, "beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine."

You've often thought about what it would have been like to drop acid with Groucho Marx.

You know that until you measure it, an electron is everywhere, and your mind reels at the implications.

You'd like to get drunk on the wine from my sweet, sweet mind grapes.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

My Kinda Funny

Apologies if you've seen this particular version of this internet meme, but damn if I didn't spit take (see here for a delightfully deconstructed spit take) the first time I saw it in a comment thread. Whenever it pops up I still fucking laugh.

I'm tempted to break down why it's so awesome, but that would require a level of hubris I don't yet possess. (Though if you don't get the Christmas reference it's not nearly as funny, so here ya go. Victory or Death, indeed.)

Finally, in connection with this topic I want to share with you one of the formative images in my life. On a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1993 I saw a statue in a museum (can't remember which) depicting a seated George Washington. Sounds unremarkable, right? Ah, but this one was marble, oversized, and was basically Washington's head atop a body I can only describe as that of a Greek god. I devoured Greek mythology as a young lad and I also had a deep reverence for our founding fathers; clearly, this conflation blew my mind up. Myth meeting reality and merging into some sort of super-myth.

Sure, it's easy to relegate what we learned about America's origins into the dustbin of names and places foisted on us through rote memorization in a ham-handed attempt at a civic-minded socialization that passes for education. And it's just as easy to think that those same people and events have been mythologized all out of proportion by almost-dead white dudes who make their living writing books about long-dead white dudes. And it's even easier to think we can minimize the importance of such events and people because everybody back then was a misogynist/racist/native-murdering cretin. What makes me sad is that even though all of the above is true, it truly misses the point.

But I'm not going to tell you what the point is, because I keep my patriotism quite close to my vest, for it is deeply held and, I believe, deeply considered. Hard to get across in type, far harder to do in conversation. As it is for so many things, you can't know where to go if you don't know what to make of where you've been. Sometimes I just think Americans miss the entire point of being American.

1 comment:

  1. you might like this book--
    wu-li and the dancing masters

    in fact youll love it

    ReplyDelete