The Last Idiot Who Earnestly Believes in the American Experiment

The American right has a question. They want to know why the people of the Twin Cities didn’t just let the Department of Homeland Security wander through and take whoever they felt like. Why do we insist on following them when we could stay home instead?

I can’t speak for the frame of mind that my neighbors in Saint Paul and Minneapolis are in when they choose to oppose ICE. However, I know the reason I decided to dedicate time and effort to keeping the government from securing the full weight of the homeland upon my community is that I am an idiot.

Some time before I was born, America’s finest comedic minds decided it would be really funny if we all pretended that there was no greater idea than the notion that all people had inalienable rights, and that there could be no cause more noble than any effort to protect those rights for others. I, perhaps the biggest Bozo in the United States, totally missed that they were kidding.

I commend the Andy Kaufmanesque commitment to the bit. Without cracking a smile, adults I respected taught me about a thing called the American Revolution, and how it gave rise to a new kind of society where people could converse freely, even going so far as to criticize their leaders, and this would help uncover a more truthful and better way of living.

Hilariously, at some point people suggested our society was exceptional among all other societies in history specifically because there was no other group more committed to these ideas than we were. I suppose I should’ve heard the muffled titters and guffaws when the people who expressed skepticism about that particular claim were treated as suspicious troublemakers, but who likes somebody who can’t take a joke?

There is a genre of movies which dominated my childhood, which I only recently learned were in fact a subgenre of comedy. They followed a pattern where a normally peace-loving person who wanted to stay home had no choice but to risk everything and fight when masked goons came to their door. The punchline in a lot of these movies was that it worked out for the heroes.

The small town I grew up in contributed to this incredible deadpan bit by holding annual ceremonies where special honors were conferred on those who’d died for the ideas that, apparently with a knowing wink and nudge, we were claiming to hold dear. My parents and I sat quietly, clutching American flags in the May heat while the funniest people in town fired blank rounds in the air or read speeches. These rituals climaxed with two trumpeters playing an echoing rendition of “Taps”. Nobody laughed once.

When the comedic tension finally grew too much, first bit by bit and then all at once, when our government could finally quit playing around and go back to openly creating one desired group who could do whatever they wanted and another undesired group who must bear everything in silence, when our elected officials, who are surely the brightest and most civic-minded among us, could finally go back to mumbling vague statements and checking if the plain text of the fourth amendment polled well, and when the outlets that claim to monopolize the space of respectable discourse could finally stop mugging to one other as they pretended to be dogged pursuers of the truth and could again equivocate between the plain evidence of our own eyes and the claims of people who have been proven to lie again and again and again, I—one of those unfortunate souls doomed to live life with no sense of humor—totally missed that there had been a joke at all.

With an earnestness that only the truly dim can have, I tried to help my neighbors. I was blissfully ignorant of the private laughter enjoyed by the eminent and comfortable among us when I set out to do something that I was stupid enough to think was not only right but expected of me.

I realize that this is already a time of great levity, but I think I can risk lightening the mood even further. I’d like to offer myself, possibly the biggest dope in America, for you to point and laugh at.

Crack a smirk as I grasp the joy-buzzer of calling my representatives. Chortle as I plop down on the whoopee cushion of writing my dissent. Hee and haw as I take my turn in the dunk tank of marching in the streets.

Don’t worry about me. I’m still not sure I get it.

Featured image is Uncle Sam and His Boys