Dear Dirty America

I’m so tired of hearing about gay rights and Chick-fil-A. I also get a lot of glee to watch one of America’s most hotly debated civil rights movements end up in a cheap chicken joint. That is what America has become. That’s the direction America has been going for a long, long time. We deserve this spectacle.

If we held high standards toward living life in this country, those ideals would extend to our collective national diet. In that case, nobody would care about the opinions of a guy who owned a restaurant called chick-fil-a. It’s like we manifested this horror.

But, with the way this country acts and eats, I can’t think of a more appropriate place than a greasy fast food chain to serve as the battlefield. Like those video games from the nineties where the player could pick the fighting venue in which to battle his opponent. Sometimes it was street fighting. Mortal Combat, I believe, was the name of one of the games. There must have been boxing games like that, too. Fight in the city, the country, on the top of a skyscraper, in a meat locker, or in the back of a cargo plane.

The gay rights squabble finally took its tumble into Chick-fil-A. I hadn’t heard of that restaurant until this hubbub kept dominating the news feed. Gay people and their rights activists were outraged when the company’s president, Dan Cathy, started spouting Bible-fueled condemnations about gay marriage, and overturning the true version of marriage that God had in mind.

By the vicious reaction in this country, I would have thought Cathy had ripped out the Koran’s first surah. Like this: “In the name of God (Allah), the compassionate, the merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds. The compassionate, the merciful.” Like that, except in Arabic. Like this: “bismi-l-laahi-r-raHmaani-r-raHiim. al-Hamdu-lillahi rabbi-l-aalamiin.” Like that. Nothing riles up the folks in this nation like verbally tearing through verses of the Koran while waiting in line at a fast food chicken shop.

Gay rights people have every right to brawl with Cathy over what he said, and Cathy has the right to use lines inspired by Revelations to denounce gay marriage. Hell, I read the Book of Joel all day and end up walking in circles outside my local coffee shop delivering alarmingly incendiary lines about God’s army forming out of a cloud of locusts and picking clean from our bodies every last morsel of sinful flesh. It’s coming. Signs of the times: a Dutch man builds a modern day Noah’s Ark.

If there’s an Ark, American logic has it that there must be a flood coming. Don’t expect to get a seat on board. I’ve already called and tried.

Then Rahm Emanuel, the mafioso and Great Craver of Attention, threatened to ban the chicken joint from Chicago. Never mind that’s one of the most un-Constitutional threats, and un-American provocations a government official can make, what’s even worse is that a fair number of yuppies, liberals, and members of the gay community backed his offer.

Like idiots. An army of free speechers who think nothing of free speech in the larger context. Men and women with dried prunes for brains. Fiber, but nothing else. Let’s summon the old adage: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote it. Not Voltaire. She wrote a biography on him. I can see how people mix up the attribution. Either way, that sentiment should be true in any good American.

Maybe Dan Cathy was reading the Book of Joel too heavily, or Leviticus. Maybe he had ink on the tip of his nose. My dollar store Bible does that. But let him say what he wants. If you don’t like it: don’t eat his goddamned fast food. You shouldn’t be eating it in the first place. Fan of gay rights, actually gay, anti-gay, or anti-gay rights, eating fast food causes diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. It doesn’t care about your sexual appetite.

Roseanne Barr said it best on Twitter: “anyone who eats Shit-fil-A deserves to get the cancer that is sure to come from eating antibiotic filled tortured chickens 4 christ”. One goofball called that hate speech. But that’s only because it’s obvious (from his picture) that he’s eaten plenty of Shit-fil-A food in his lifetime. He’s too loaded with fats and hormones and processed sugars (probably) to notice that Barr’s tweet was a joke with just the right nastiness to be culturally effective.

Sometimes you have to use the right tone to make a statement. There is a time to be harsh, and a time to be harshly funny. Besides being darkly comic, Barr’s tweet touched on something else: our American diet is synthetic and atrocious. Why anybody eats at these gut-busting, heart-wrenching fast food pits is another mystery.

Chick-fil-A is setting sales records due to the controversy. We can see firsthand the struggle for gay rights by  counting the big bottoms waiting in line to get their plates of foul, factory-grown chicken. Let us announce to the rest of the world: Americans don’t get politically involved in this country, unless their concerns are centered around one of our many raunchy, eyesore chain restaurants.

In other news, Cindy Sheehan has become Roseanne Barr’s running mate. Barr is running for president as the candidate for the Peace and Freedom party. There are not two more qualified people to end the corruption in this country: end the wars, including the one on drugs, stop the illegal drone strikes that are terrorizing over half a dozen countries, and crack down on Wall Street fraud. End Big Business tax loopholes. Punish the complete disregard for the environment by the likes of BP Oil and Koch Bros. Choke off the flow of billions of dollars streaming into political campaigns from Big Money special interests.

That’s a good start anyway. At least these women are intelligent, passionate, and serious about cleaning house in this country.

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