One of the biggest poisoners of Merkin politics is Some. Some are always getting in the way of the rest of us. And now Some are saying that jello, the Ramones and double-can hats are somehow anti-Merkin, just because leftward fellow travellers enjoy them together on a holiday in this fairly free country. Some are unaware that glorying in the excesses and high-low crunch-up that makes this country unique in the cultural department is a perfectly acceptable and irony-free way of celebrating our Day of Independence.
If we are exceptional as a nation, certainly it is in our marvelous ability to create monuments to excess unequaled in the rest of the globe. Well, except maybe for the UAE, but theirs is a whole different flavor of excess.
As exhibit A (and B and C, on up to Z), I submit Shoji Tabuchi. Where else but in America could a Japanese (as in former enemy) fiddler with a Moe haircut and a flag suit fly around on a wire playing country music in a theater he owns? Isn’t that worth celebrating?
He–and, in fact, Branson, Missouri itself, where his theater can be found–embodies the uniquely American mashing together of disparate cultures, too much capital, and exuberant disregard for the conventions of genre or even conventional taste. Glorying in such things is very different from poking fun at them, and the inability to see the unique tasteful/distasteful genius of Elvis, of Conway Twitty (and Twitty City!), and all-American phenomena like the awful/wonderful Shoji Tabuchi, well, that actually may mean your American citizenship should be called into question.
Is there any other country on earth in which this could happen? Is there anything more mind-bendingly American than this?:
