WEEKLY WHINE

Helping you understand the United States

For those of you who live in countries that are not the United States, the United States has a message for you: Sorry.

The message from liberal Americans is “Sorry” as in “Sorry for wrecking your food, television, film, and travel industries.”

The message from conservative Americans is “Sorry” as in “Sorry that you’re not Americans like we are.”

In response, many of you who are not Americans have some questions for those of us who are Americans. We here at GoobNet, an American website [a fact that you can validate by our colour scheme prominent American flags frequent references to American films and television shows frequent references to American sport frequent references to American politics snarky remarks about other nations], decided to help you understand America with a special edition of the GoobNet Mailbox: Helping You Understand the United States!

If at the end of this Whine, you do not fully understand the United States, contact your nearest GoobNet Superior Travel Agency and Reservation Experts, and we will provide you with a free trip to the United States. Possible destinations include Ft Leavenworth, KS; the Charleston, SC Naval Consolidated Brig; and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba [limited time only].

What is Thanksgiving? Every year there is a “special Thanksgiving episode” of all of your television shows, but we don’t understand what Thanksgiving is. Can you explain?

– Ophelia Hardgrove
Gossfern, NSW, Australia

Thanksgiving is a holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November every year. It was created so that Americans could do the following things:

1. Spend the previous day overwhelming the nation’s transportation network.
2. Gripe about how inefficient the nation’s transportation network is, though they will all have forgotten when it comes time to vote on tax increases to improve the nation’s transportation network.
3. Eat lots of food.
4. Watch lots of American football.
5. Give token acknowledgement to the friendly hospitality shown by Native Americans to European settlers, which of course the European settlers interpreted as naïve gullibility.
6. Have an official day off the following day to do all their Christmas shopping, and occasionally trample and kill a store employee.
7. Do all this on a different day than the Canadians.

There are so many American TV shows and movies available in my home country. What can we do to encourage the development of domestic shows and movies?

– Charles Nkumba
Tshwane, South Africa

Owing to Americans’ in depth knowledge of capitalism and the free market, we have identified two things that you can do. The first is to stop watching our damn television shows. The second is to stop buying tickets to our damn films. Thanks for asking.

I have a question about the American economy. My country has its own economy, but when the American economy is destroyed, our economy is also destroyed. However, when our economy is destroyed, the American economy is undamaged. Why is this?

– Carlos Javier Cisneros
Santiago, Chile

In short, this is because Chilean Americans who make money send much of it back to their families in Chile, so that when Chilean Americans lose their jobs, the flow of money back to Chile stops. However, American Chileans who make money keep it, having learned the American dream [to make money without having to send it to anyone].

Of course, this question is built on a faulty premise. Most people believe that there are two types of economies: large economies [such as the American economy] and non-large economies [such as the Chilean economy]. In fact there is only one type of economy: those that Chuck Norris allows to exist.

Why don’t Americans like George W Bush any more? He’s been doing a great job, and he has been a great friend.

– John Howard
Sydney, NSW, Australia

Americans don’t like George W Bush because he and his cohorts have turned appointees into political favours at the detriment of the important tasks that those appointees should have been doing but were clearly not competent for, have based policy on an obvious misunderstanding of scientific consensus in particular and the scientific process in general, have shown a clear lack of regard for the American lower and middle classes, have shown a clear lack of interest in the rest of the world except for when it can get something out of the rest of the world, have egregiously mismanaged unimaginable sums of money that would have solved uncountable global problems if allocated in the correct directions and managed properly, have signaled to the rest of the world that declaring the existence of a perceived threat [rather than demonstrating the existence of an actual threat] is all that is necessary to begin major military operations against another sovereign nation, have all but erased the US’s influence and ability to encourage progress in the rest of the world, and have thrown two nations into deep states of disarray that could have been lessened by even the most cursory study of history.

But it’s nice that you’re still loyal to him.