Desperate and wild-eyed with terror I fled across an ocean in the company of screaming pygmies (plus a woman who was led off the plane first, wearing a mask and in the company of paramedics). Even then, newly alighted on a far-flung continent, I did not halt my flight - the danger was too great. Scrambling through underground caverns and catapulted about in subway cars I arrived at the bus terminal. There I hid amongst the goats and crates of chickens until I could slip aboard a transport as it left, delivering me into the dark anonymity of the rural wilderness.
Verily, 'tis a great boon to have escaped the dangerous and perverse land of social health care. Where, disgustingly, the poor and disadvantaged can share hospitals with decent tax fearing God paying folk, because there are no money grabbing misery anuses at the door to turn them away. A place so debased that people walk around without even the common vanity to demand precision regiments of burning white teeth and so backwards that it has yet to grasp the profit making potential of institutionalised male genital mutilation. The final nail in the coffin is the depraved insistence on providing care for chronic womanisers who are also wheelchair bound scientists.
Nice to be back really. On the radio I heard a caller complaining to a talk show host that President Obama doesn't say "how great this country is" enough. In order to win over his critics he sorely needs to create the post of Secretary of Greatness. And maybe wear a t-shirt and baseball cap with "America is awesomest" written on them. Health wilderness Britain got round this tricky issue long ago by prepending the name of the country with "Great" so that everyone has to acknowledge how wonderful it is whenever conversation turns to the birthplace of deep fried mars bars and Phil Collins.
Clearly, the solution is to re-brand the USA as the United States of Awesome. Keeps the acronym, but removes the association with less awesome countries also found in the Americas.
ReplyDeleteNational self-perception is a funny thing, e.g. 'mateship' is taken as a definitively Australian trait, to the extent that we nearly wrote the word into our constitution. (For those of you unfortunate enough to live elsewhere, mateship = same sex friendship + homophobia.) Earlier this year, when the place caught fire, a brief interest in the suffering of others was seen as confirmation of the Australian monopoly on mateship.
Strangely enough I recently discovered one of the people renovating the apartment above mine is Ocetrahleanne. I discerned this through not just through his accent (which I have a strange tone-deafness to anyway), but because almost literally every other word he used was 'mate'. He also called someone a "bloody idiot", which you don't get much round these parts.
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