A Patriotic Independence Day Story

It was early evening and the sun still blazed on the horizon, casting shards of soft yellow light across faces and dewy beer pints. Sitting on the bar stools to my right were two white women. I could tell they were friends by their isolationist banter. I looked over and visually judged them; both were in their late 20s or early 30s, frumpily dressed, and of average attractiveness. Not hard on the eyes, but not boner inspiring, either. They didn’t exercise with weights; the first betrayals of droop were beginning to intrude. They looked like typical city yuppies, likely SWPL to the bone. One smiled invitingly at me. I decided neither one was good-looking enough to warrant an effort to hit on them, so I smiled back perfunctorily and returned to my dinner. (Note to Satoshi Kanazawa at ‘Psychology Today’: this is what is known as male mating choice.)

By the by, two men approached the women seated to my right in what looked like an obvious pickup attempt. There was no other reason for them to have struck up a conversation with the ladies; where the women were sitting was out of the way of the main patron thoroughfare, so a cold approach meant, quite accurately, “I have designs to fuck you for the least amount of resource investment and on the shortest timetable possible”. The men ably paired off with the women, (a smoothly executed maneuver that suggested they had discussed beforehand which of the two women appealed to whom), and a dry four-way commenced.

Because of my proximity to their group, I couldn’t help but overhear the ensuing rapid fire chit chat. The men sounded like they had some rudimentary understanding of game, or at least of how to be cool enough not to trigger a woman’s anti-dork alert system. They were able to stay in set for about ten minutes before the whole thing dissolved in a debris heap of… well, judge for yourself. What follows is the critical excerpt of their conversation.

MAN 1: You guys watching the World Cup? That Ghana game was incredible.

WOMAN 1: The one where they played Uruguay?

MAN 1: Yeah, Ghana was robbed of a goal. It’s too bad we didn’t beat Ghana. The US had a pretty good team. I think we could have taken Uruguay.

WOMAN 2: I wouldn’t have rooted for America.

MAN 1: What do you mean? You wouldn’t have rooted for America against Uruguay? [smiling crookedly, a pained lifeline to a sucker punched rapport in its infancy] That’s weird. [looking at his buddy, then back at the girl] Are you anti-American?

WOMAN 2: Anti-americaaaaaan??! [looking at her girl buddy, open-mouthed, then back at the guy] Haha, I just think America isn’t as good at soccer. They don’t really deserve to win.

MAN 2: You always root for the home team, even if they suck.

WOMAN 2: I don’t. Ghana and Uruguay are real soccer countries. They have so much more tradition. I would have totally rooted for them against America.

MAN 2: That’s anti-American!

WOMAN 2: Well, whatever, you can call it what you like. We don’t have to win everything, you know.

Tempers flared, then subsided as the men worked diligently to keep the pretense of a seduction going. The conversation fizzled to a snippy end and the men left for another bar. The women giggled as they recounted the awkwardness of the interaction, placing the blame for the failed seduction entirely on the men, as is the wont of the unaccountable and unreflective gender.

I would not claim the men performed with verve. Their game — if you could call it that — was haphazard, verging on slapstick. They let their anger bubble to the surface, and allowed their alpha prerogative to remain calm under pressure accede to the juggernaut of their hothead emotions. As noxious as the women were, calling them out on their anti-Americanism would only have served to confirm their self-satisfied pseudomorality of nation-state transcendence. If it was pussy the men wanted, a bristle-backed argumentative posture is not the way to get it. If, however, they merely wanted the exquisite sadistic pleasure of getting under the women’s skins, there are better ways than raw effrontery to accomplish that.

Allow me to demonstrate. Here is how the conversation would have transpired if I was at the helm and had it in mind to cruelly twist the shiv in their stunted SWPL souls.

THE DEVIL U LUV: You guys watching the World Cup? That Ghana game was incredible.

WOMAN 1: The one where they played Uruguay?

THE DEVIL U LUV: Yeah, Ghana was robbed of a goal. It’s too bad we didn’t beat Ghana. The US had a pretty good team. I think we could have taken Uruguay.

WOMAN 2: I wouldn’t have rooted for America.

THE DEVIL U LUV: Interesting. So you wouldn’t have rooted for America against Uruguay?

WOMAN 2: I just think America isn’t as good at soccer. They don’t really deserve to win.

THE DEVIL U LUV: [totally straight face] Hm, you know, I agree. I like the way you guys think for yourselves. Not many people are cool enough to root for a foreign country.

WOMAN 2: I suppose…

THE DEVIL U LUV: It’s important to be cool, wouldn’t you agree?

WOMAN 2: [starting to feel the burn] I guess… are you mocking us?

THE DEVIL U LUV: Not at all. I like you guys. Stay cool. [exit, stage sweet victory]

******

On this 4th of July, We the post-Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 People should spend a moment to reflect on the tenuous grasp the inheritors of the great American tradition have to their homeland. When you wave your sparklers with your kids this holiday weekend, cast a wary eye at your neighbor. A disease has metastasized in huge swaths of the American population and threatens to suffocate the grandiose and noble idea that ironically nourishes their trite impudence. The host which ennobles has become the rotting carcass upon which to feed. Gnawing and chewing parasites dripping venom and toxic bile have replaced the immune boosting white blood cells and defiantly proud armies of red blooded corpuscles of a body politic once happy, grateful, and giddy to be alive. And not just any sort of alive; the kind of exalted living that comes from knowing your good fortune to have been born in a prosperous country culturally superior to so many alternatives. Yes, superior. The very word sends shudders down the spines of the mincing globocrats and mewling equalist butterfucks.

A vector of patricidal vengeance, a boiling plume of acrid anti-native stock spite, travels up and down our coasts, from Miami to Boston, LA to Seattle, in our newsrooms, our boardrooms, our schools, and our social gathering places, carrying a message of spastic hate for America, her founding ideals, and the historically great figures who have traveled her hallowed corridors. Pockets of internal organs are infected, Chicago and Austin. These are not traitors in action… mostly… but their souls are traitorous in configuration. Their feelings are the knee-jerk bleats of a bastard people at growing unease with the country they are required by law to call home. A nation of latchkey kids — stupid in their ahistorical ignorance and frightened of the breaking surf of censored knowledge about to crash on their heads — has been in open revolt against its beneficent parent for generations now, and the opiate of distracting technoporn and glam mags can only hold off the coming reckoning for so long. They live for the comforting swaddle of the trend, and right now every trend is pointing in the direction of dialectic anti-patriotism.

In reaction, hordes of indignant evangelist armies in middlemarch shout their loyalty from rooftops. But theirs is the rearguard wail of a dumbfounded, shellshocked bit player forced by circumstance and disposition to play by the stronger enemies’ rules. It is the enemies’ first principles they must attack and subvert, but servility and cowardice prevent them from unleashing the hell they must if victory is to be total. They scream guns and glory for wars they know deep in their hearts serve no true American interest. They laugh jovially at diversity seminars that they then attend dutifully, mouths shut, for they have families to feed. They stupidly stand four square behind leaders who have checkmarked the correct ideological box despite all evidence to the contrary putting the lie to those leaders’ presupposed beliefs. They retreat to a chapel ghetto as the gleaming city around them shatters to the ground, confident that the Word and the Faith will see them through. They fight incoherent losing battles with phantom threats while ignoring or resignedly acquiescing to the real threats in their midst. They toe the line of rebellion, then quickly scuttle back under a counterstrike of nerve-rattling platitudes and orchestrated insults.

Soon… sooner than you think… the status-fueled citizen hate will yield to indifference, and exhausted resignation, if it hasn’t already. (We Americans do things on a sped-up time schedule.) And then the final days of America will descend, a tattered curtain closing on a dream corrupted by the nightmare of human nature and the willful blindness to the motivations of our enemies, internal and external. There is no stopping it now; it must play out. The smart man, making his way through this current decaying epoch, has but one choice before him — one self-interested choice — and that is the path of hedonism.

Many eons from now, when anthropologists are picking through the remains of the American Empire and piecing together a narrative for why things went so horribly wrong, may they come upon this blog post as an answer to their questions. For I truly believe that nothing else than that small snippet of a conversation on a rooftop bar in an American city circa 2010 between two typical youngish men and two typical youngish women better illuminates the cause of America’s decline and the depravity of her people who are the nominal heirs to Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin.

When the World Cup comes around again, I will be rooting for the soccer-indifferent USA to crush the smaller soccer-fanatic countries. And I won’t apologize for my loyalties, even as I laugh at soccer for being the girly, flop-happy sport it is.