Hi. My name is
Mike Moore. I live in Maryland.
For the benefit of those of you out there reading this who are generally
ignorant of things, let me explain. Maryland
is a state in a country called the United States of America. Maryland is a happy,
fun, joyful place where many people of different backgrounds live and work. Maryland became the 7th state to enter the Union on April 28th, 1788. Since that time
many wonderful things have happened in Maryland,
such as in October of 1998 when milk officially became the state drink. Lots of
other stuff has happened here too, but I think you get the idea.
Let’s move
on to the United States of
America. It is a fine country where many
people of different backgrounds live and work. Sometimes, when people want to
cut down on how much they have to say or type, instead of calling it the United States of America, they just call it America. I
think I’ll call it America
from here on out. Typing is very time-consuming, and people only live so long. Sometimes
I digress. This just happens to be one of those times. Digressing is when you
mean to talk about one thing, but in the course of your discussion you discover
that there are many other fun things to talk about too. Eventually you forget
what it was exactly you had started talking about. That’s why typing
comes in handy. Instead of having to try and remember what it was you were
talking about, you can simply glance back at the words that you had been typing
before you began your digression. In this instance, I was talking about America.
America is
generally considered by its citizens to be one of the greatest and most
powerful countries in the world, but this wasn’t always the case. A long
time ago America
wasn’t even a country. It was inhabited by long-haired people who
didn’t wear many clothes. They were called hippies. Ha-ha. That’s a
joke. A joke is like a little story with a funny surprise ending. Your brain
doesn’t expect the surprise ending and becomes confused. When people are
confused they tend to laugh. That’s because they feel awkward and out of
place, and laughing helps them feel more comfortable. The jokes that work best
are the ones that make people feel awkward and out of place, though other
people might tell you different. That’s because they’re misinformed.
I’m going to talk a great deal about misinformation later. It’s one
of the two most popular forms of information. But I should get back to the
hippies.
Back before America became
a country they weren’t called hippies. Back then they were called…
come to think of it; I have no idea what they were called back then. Right now
I am doing something that is called admitting I don’t know everything. It’s
always good to admit you don’t know everything from time to time, that
way, when you’re talking out your ass about things that you know nothing
about people will take your word for it because they’ll remember the
other times when you admitted you didn’t know everything and they will
assume that if this was one of those times then you would admit it here too. Assuming
is when you make an ass out of you and my dad. At least that’s what he
used to say. That’s another joke, though possibly not as funny as the
first. But I digress… I was saying that I didn’t know what the
hippies were called back before America
was a country.
I know that today
we call them Native Americans. At least that’s what we called them the
last time I checked. We used to call them Indians until somebody pointed out
that they weren’t technically from India,
but were instead from America.
You might think that this would lead us to call them Americans, but
that’s not what happened. Calling the Native Americans just Americans
would upset a lot of people who live in America but aren’t native. That’s
why we call them Native Americans. They’re not the only Americans that
receive special designation based upon their ancestral heritage. Some people
call people whose ancestors lived in Africa,
African Americans. Some people call people whose ancestors lived in Asia, Asian Americans. People whose ancestors lived in Europe are not generally called European Americans. They
are called just plain Americans. I’m not sure why this is other than the
fact that the people whose ancestors lived in Europe are generally the ones
making up the names for the people who live in America.
Getting back to
the hippies, they lived here before anyone else. Then, in August of 1492, a man
named Christopher Columbus decided to sail around the world. Christopher
Columbus was from Europe. He thought the world
was spherical. The world is actually an ellipse, but that’s pretty close.
Columbus also
thought that the world was much smaller than it really is. This is because
Europeans back then were unaware of the existence of America. Many Europeans today would
like to pretend that they are unaware of the existence of America, but we
like to remind them by blowing things up on their side of the world from time
to time.
Columbus thought he could sail around the
world and get famous and was awfully disappointed to find all these hippies in
his way. He went back to Europe and told important people about what he found
and all of a sudden everyone with a boat was heading to America, which seemed like a great
place, aside from the hippies. Eventually the hippies were moved further and
further away from where the Europeans wanted to live and today reside mostly in
Arizona and San Francisco near the intersection of Haight
and Ashbury.
About the same
time that the hippies were being moved, a group of people called the
“British” started to take over. They were called
“British” because they were from a country named England. Generally
speaking the British believe that the things they do are much better than the
things that other people do. They believe it so much that they used to go
around the world telling people from all sorts of cultures to stop doing things
how they had been and start doing them like the British. They don’t do
that anymore. That’s the job of the Americans now.
So the British
started to colonize America
and soon there were all kinds of British people living here. The problem with
that was that the British who lived in England
kept telling the British who lived in America
what to do and the British who lived in America, being British,
didn’t much like that. So on July 4th, 1776, the British
people who lived in America
declared their independence. Eventually they formed their own government, and Maryland became a state
and I moved there. Which brings us up to date.
“People who think differently
from other people are called ‘freaks’ or ‘lunatics’ or ‘geniuses’
depending on how many other people they can convince that theirs is the right
way of thinking.” -- Michael Moore, circa 2002.