Fire Up the Fox News Crack Pipe

Possums for Sale, New York City, 1916.

Americans look down their nose at the fraying ends of other cultures, with little reflection on our own.

In America, we hunt and eat every kind of wild animal, including animals so similar to humans they are used as body part replacements for living people.

You did not know?

Now you do

They eat snake in country XYZ?

They eat snake in America too (as well as giant lizards).

They eat rat in country XYZ?

We do too. We even have Muskrat beauty queens, Nutria festivals, and possum fries.

In America, the main religion is based on a talking snake.

Adherents are told they are mud people cursed by a mass-murdering god who sent his “son” to be murdered before he returned as a zombie. To show their fidelity to this story, practitioners of the faith wear a copy of the murder weapon of their messiah around their neck.

It’s strange stuff, but Americans manage to bridge the gap by never reading.

My father’s job was to explain America to the rest of the world — how a country that said “all men are created equal” could in fact be the same country that built its economy on slavery and institutionalized racism and sexism.

Strange stuff.

How do you explain that the country that says it was “founded on the rule of law” somehow forgot to teach about the stolen lands and broken treaties?

Do people not know that the “rule of law” (and supporting religious texts) made it legal to own slaves and disenfranchise women?

And now we face a new spate of xenophobia because a foreign microbe has been unintentionally spread around the world?

Ha! There’s a story the Chippewa, Choctaw, Cherokee, Sioux, Navajo, and Hopi have heard before, only this time no blankets seem to be involved.

And what is the solution?

Why, it’s not to rush out and provide free health care for all, is it?

No. Instead the politicians who only a month ago were demonizing Medicare For All as “socialist healthcare” are pushing a $7.5 trillion government bailout, mostly directed towards Wall Street and big corporations.

Apparently socialism is needed to save capitalism, but it can’t be used to save you.

Get sick with Covid-19?

Even if you survive a hospital stay, the bill is likely to kill you.

Think most Americans have thought about any of this?

Nope.

We don’t read much. We don’t Google.

Instead, we believe in American Exceptionalism, which appears to be one hell of a drug.

Fire up the crack pipe; let’s see what’s on Fox News.