They say America is dumb. Stupid. Brainless. Europeans say the morons are in charge. Australians say we're living "Idiocracy." Canadians say the only Border Wall that should be built would be between them and us — with a door Americans can open only by solving a basic math problem.
Well, nuts to that. Americans might not be 100 percent Einsteins. They can knock us for eating Tide pods and cheering girl fights and pioneering Flat Earth theory. They can say we don't "go to the theatre" or "recite poetry" or "understand postmodernism," and they'd have a point.
But they're wrong in saying we're dumb. We were not dropped on our heads as children (we were banged later, repeatedly, in football practice). We did not drink out of lead pipes (we guzzled Jagermeister by the gallon — and still we have brain cells left). We didn't huff paint (we did whippets).
We're street smart. Merica has figured shit out. We engineer. And despite all the ridicule, we're still World Champion in so many areas you'd need a dumpster truck to carry all our trophies — thankfully, we also make the best dumpster trucks.
For instance:
SPACE
Ever heard of Neil Armstrong? No other country put a man on the moon, or even faked it convincingly in a sound studio. We got so good at moon landings we ended up bored; on our last trips we were playing golf up there.
America is still Numero Uno up in the Big Black Nothingness. In the last few years, we discovered thousands of new planets. We're building a telescope that'll see 13 billion years backward in time. And last year an American shot an electric car out toward Mars. (Yes, Elon Musk has an accent, but he's as American as stripper heels.) Why fling a commuter car into space? Maybe no reason. Maybe 'cause we'll need to drive somewhere after we land on a planet near Vega some day.
ENTERTAINMENT
No country's movies travel as far and as fast as Hollywood's. In every country, folks in the street know Iron Man and Terminator, Simpsons and South Park. One single flick last year, Avengers: Infinity War, took in $2 billion, more than the entire economies of 22 countries. That's influence.
NATIONAL PARKS
If other countries have a beautiful spot of nature, they're apt to bungle it. Europeans tend to let their open spaces get owned by kings. South Americans tend to strip mine their forests and jungles.
In America, we invented National Parks. Yosemite, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain. Pretty and untouched and ready for vacay.
Sure, there are places in Thailand and Nepal as pretty as Glacier or the Grand Canyon; but the Thais and Nepalese usually build villages in the middle of them. You'll be looking at Nature's grandeur, then you'll notice, right in the middle, a noodle joint.
TECH
When you dial an English phone number, you add the prefix 44. Dial Mexico, add 52. American phone numbers? Just add 1. Why? We invented the fucking telephone.
Same with the Internet. Websites in Britain end in co.uk. In Mexico, it's com.mx. But in America, you just add .com. We got to websites first, too.
And we still crush it with software. Anywhere there's a nerd with glasses peering into a software terminal, bet that the code he's typing is based on something that comes from the U.S.A.
FREE REFILLS
In some European restaurants, you have to pay for ketchup packets and tap water. In America, you can eat condiments like Otter Pops and put your face under the Coke machine and open your throat. And yet they call us greedy capitalist pigs.
All these innovations require brains and guts and hard work. Which we got like crazy. As Time magazine pointed out in 2011, "one American produces as much, per capita, as six Chinese." Sure, some of that production is related to producing new flavors of Funyuns. But in Funyuns, We're Number One!
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