Bathroom Monologue: The Newsroom Day One of Two: The Attack

“When exactly was the United States of America a moral nation? When it interred a million Asians? When it only went to war against the Nazis because it had been bombed? Or perhaps it was in our golden days, when it was slaughtering natives and receiving shipments of blacks to pick cotton. We didn’t go to war for moral reasons. We went to war because we wanted Texas, or didn’t want Spain interfering with our interference in Cuba, and the newspapers were right there toadying. Benjamin Franklin was the first great American op-ed writer and he was such a stooge for the establishment they almost let him write the Constitution.

“This illusion! This illusion you have that the American public was ever informed. There was more than a century when the only reliable way to get a presidential candidate’s platform was if he happened to visit your town. And the Founding Fathers knew people were ignorant and never expected better from them, and so while they enshrined freedom of the press, they also institutionalized the Electoral College for Congress and a Presidency – a private crop of people who would select another private crop of people to decide everything while most of the country tried to survive the flu. Maybe, maybe the second private crop of people decided things for moral reasons, or maybe they fed into a Military Industrial Complex that Lyndon Johnson warned the entire country of live on television and still no one did anything meaningful about.

“So tell me when America knew what it was doing. Was it when we were scalping the natives for government credit? Was it when we were enslaving anyone even descended from an African? Was it when we dropped an atomic bomb on private citizens? When did we qualify as the greatest country in the world, who is the greatest country in the world now, and why on earth would we want to be that thing again?”

Mother Nature Vs. Illegal Immigration: Deporting Humanity

There is considerable debate over immigration in the U.S. Conservatives would have no illegal immigration, and are resoundingly shouted down as bigots and historically ignorant. After all, the United States of America was founded by European immigrants who settled it without permission of the locals, and often with bloodshed. If you aren’t related to Sitting Bull or Red Cloud, you should shut up about this topic.

Yet this critique misses a fundamental American point. Reconsider the indigenous peoples, those pre-American Americans, those absolutely-not-Indians. They did not start on this continent, nor even in this hemisphere. Humans evolved in Africa and spread outward over the course of millions of years. Even the Native Americans immigrated here, without permission.

Without permission from whom, you ask?

From Nature. You can tell nature didn’t want them here because as soon as it realized what was happening, it melted or tectonically shifted their land-bridges away, preventing any further immigration for centuries. As for those who remained on her shores?  What was Mother Nature’s immigration policy?

The mountain lion.

Or, consider the rattlesnake.

Or, consider the Grand Canyon, a 277-mile long drop into certain death.

Or, consider the winters so abominable they were worse than our Global Warming ones, and these natives didn’t even screw with the environment to cause them.

Nature has a long history of telling humans to get the fuck out. You think anti-Irish Immigrant sentiment was bad in the 1920’s? Consider that the incoming hunter/gatherer immigrants travelled all the way from Canada to Argentina, on foot, just looking for food. Nowadays you can barely muster the willpower to go to the fridge for another beer.

The modern disparity is because the modern world, and America in particular, has recognized that Mother Nature is an abusive drunk that should be respected. That fridge runs on power that is killing her, and uses the power to refrigerate artificial chemicals in the beer that is killing you. We have surpassed our creators by killing both them and us, and one hopes will one day fulfill the dream of deporting everyone from this mortal coil.

Bathroom Monologue: Only Middle Easterner in America

You know what's worse than being the only Middle Eastern fighter in an America? Being the other only Middle Eastern fighter, the one whose record is so unimpressive that people forget he exists.

You're great, Teth. You're strong as a bull, and you get men's shoulders to the mat quicker than anyone else in your weight class. But you got gifts from genetics, and you have great training partners and facilities and live in a nice house. The last match I had? The night before I slept on my cousin's sofa because the month before, my apartment building was shut down on suspicion of meth.

I can't afford to live in a nice place, or to fly to Las Vegas or Sarajevo whenever I want to learn a new approach to grappling. I get the same looks of suspicion on the street that you do, but I spend more time out there. When's the last time you had to walk to the arena because you couldn't afford a cab? Never mind the jokes about me driving one.

Nobody makes those jokes on commentary when you're fighting. It's all shit-talk how you're going to knock a guy out while he's still standing. Meanwhile, I'm lucky if my fight makes it to television. And sure, you're better than I am, and so you deserve to have it better. But I want you to think about this the next time an interviewer asks how it is being the only Middle Eastern fighter in America.