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Vice Blog

Top Ten: Reluctant Americans


They’re born in the USA, but God damn they ain’t gonna embrace it… Here are the ten least proud Americans. What fools. People, it's The Best Country Ever! Didn't you see Saving Private Ryan? 10. Native Americans

The land cries for the lost creeks and brooks of yesteryear. The buffalo have left the plains. In their place are nothing but Steak ‘n’ Shakes. A lone Brave weeps by the grave of Sitting Bull before returning to his casino. The riches of gambling provide him with little solace. He has a brand new Chevvy but it doesn’t move like a horse. His given name, Kev, is an insult to his ancestral name, Kevin.

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9. Sylvia Plath

Why leave the land of the free for the arms of a poet (and, after that, death) when there are so many thriving artistic communities for an American to enjoy? I mean, you just know they’re all about Milton in Madison, Wisconsin. And I’ve heard they do weekly readings of James Thomson’s criminally under-appreciated 19th century verse epic, The City of Dreadful Night, in London, Kentucky. That must have been where Sylvia meant to go. No wonder she got so sad.

8. House of Pain

How do you sell white-boy American rap to the world? Pretend to be an Irish thug. Irish-Americans are all about the hyphenated ancestral connections so you got a St Patrick’s Day parade load of records just waiting to fly off the shelves. “Sinn Fein/ It’s the House of Pain…” That’s right; let everyone know how Irish you are by shoehorning an obvious reference to a complicated political struggle you don’t understand into a song about owning a gun. I guess that’s what happens when your rapper is a guy called Eric and your DJ is Latvian.

7. Thomas Jefferson

Americans didn’t always despise the French. Slave-owning Independence-lover Jefferson adored them as much as Dick Cheney hates them. He was forever wandering around in perfumed wigs, living in Paris and going on about how great the revolution was. If he was alive today he’d be jerking off over a Carla Bruni nip-slip while listening to Saian Supa Crew.

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6. Ozomatli

These Womad-loving, Glastonbury World Stage-rockin’ fucks just want to have a little Latin bloc party with ya, but owning a bunch of trumpets (or trompetas as they’d call them) and knowing what cumbia means doesn’t mean what you do is music. Apparently they sound like driving down Sunset Boulevard with the windows down and your stereo off. Traffic in L.A. obviously sounds a lot worse than it does in London.

5. The cast of Frasier

Television? Sit-coms? Nothing but ugly Americanisms, my boy! What we’re part of is something much larger, a televisual play. A farce ripped from London’s West End and beamed around the planet in tasteful thirty minute segments. Friends was as coarse as the language at a baseball game, but we were making art. Let us toast our success with a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape while those guys from South Park fart into bottles of Coors Light.

4. Mohammed Ali

Float like a butterfly? More like run like a bloody coward, draft dodger. What you gotta realise Cassius, is that it’s the Nation of America not the Nation of Islam.

3. Martin Scorsese

There’s nothing he likes more than to play 'Gimme Shelter' in every single film he makes and if he could finally get those damn Hollywood bigwigs to fund his Rolling Stones project, with De Niro as Jagger and Pesci as Richards, he’d be in Italian boot-wearing heaven.

2. T.S. Eliot

You don't just walk out of the Mid-West with a bowler hat and a clipped English accent. That shit happens in Bloomsbury when you're being bullied relentlessly by obscure Attic Greek quoting Ezra Pound: “Hey Tom, wanna burger?” “No Ezra, shut up, I want coq au vin, and port”. “Wanna burger Tom? Wanna burger?” “I said NO, leave me alone. Steak and kidney pie is what I like. And ale. Now pass me The Times”. “I know you wanna burger Tom, T.S., Yankee boy…” “ALRIGHT! ALRIGHT! I wanna burger. Give it to me! Where is it? Why don’t you have it? Oh right, you never had one did you? You goddam douchebag.”

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1. Stephen Baldwin

In our post-Obama world, being an American is no longer about high-school-massacres and loving Jesus with a disturbing intensity. Rat-faced Stephen Baldwin recognised this, which is why he told Fox News he’d leave the country if Obama was voted in. But, even though the number one U.S. past time is no longer going to a Christian Theme Park with your buddies from the Ku Klux Klan, Steve is yet to move to North Korea. Get with the times man, aren’t you sick of being shunned at Hollywood drinks parties? Oh, you’re not invited to any. Well aren't you tired of being shunned by Alec then?

OSCAR RICKETT

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