A friend of mine emailed me the following piece. A pal of his is a standup comic. I've never caught the guy's act but people in the know tell me he's good. What is recorded below is supposedly an accurate account, written by the comic after the event, of an entirely improvised rant. Read it & see what you think…
GOD BLESS AMERICA
I was doing a bit of anti-war stuff at a gig recently and prefaced it by saying that I didn¹t want to imply that all Americans were war-mongering morons but that these were smart gags and like smart bombs, they sometimes do collateral damage, despite what the makers claim. Couple of gags in, I got heckled by an American. I kind of lost my temper a bit: it came out in a bit of a torrent so this isn¹t verbatim but pretty close. His heckle was "God Bless America". There was vocal objection from the crowd, but I stopped them. And then improvised this put-down.
God Bless America? Well, that depends on what you mean. If you mean God Bless the America of Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, Franklin D Roosevelt, Rosa Parkes, then yeah, God Bless America.
Frank Capra, Mark Twain. Jay Leno, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bill Hicks then God Bless America.
If you mean God Bless the magnificent idealism contained in your Declaration of Independence and your Constitution, what a testament to faith in human nature and understanding of its limits - based incidentally, as I¹m sure you know, largely on the ideas of Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu, who were French. Or cheese-eating surrender monkeys, as I believe you so wittily term them now (and we accuse you of having no sense of irony); and there you are hurling insults at the French on the relative merits of your diets. That seems pretty fucking ironic to me. If you mean God Bless that in America all men are created equal and have an equal and common right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness then, yes, God Bless It. If you mean God Bless the America of Emma Goldmann, "Bring me your poor, bring me your tired and huddled masses", then, yeah, God Bless It. Those words, of course, inscribed on another present to you from the French, unless the original statue was melted down by Oliver North into bullets for the Contras, as some rumours have it. And, by the way, is it just another rumour that the lines go on now: "Bring me your tired and huddled masses and I will make them work for minimum wage and live in appalling fear and poverty while they wait for all that wealth to trickle down"?
If you mean God Bless the America of people like Rachel Corrie, young and beautiful and with her whole life ahead of her, who chose to live and protest in the ghetto called Gaza that your government and their barbaric Israeli allies sustain while traducing and staining the memory of the Holocaust victims with their disgusting and indeed counter-productive brutality… If you mean people like Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli Defence Force bulldozer protesting for justice and liberty and fighting, without weapons, for the idea that all are equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then God Bless America. (Israeli Defence Force - there¹s another fucking irony). If you mean God Bless that America then, as I believe they say in Philadelphia, then fucking A, God Bless America.
If you're talking God Bless America about just about all the Americans that I know right across it from Georgia to Oregon and from Boston to California, from sea to shining sea, generous, delightful, newspaper-reading, democratic and caring, then God Bless America. If you're talking about all the millions who risked their lives for civil rights and gay rights and often gave them, God Bless America. If you¹re talking about the servicemen who fought and died against the Nazis, then God Bless America. Although to be unfair - you did take your time didn't you? So don't fucking give me any of that, "If it wasn't for us you'd be speaking German" cos we stuck it out for two years on our own, getting the equivalent of the twin towers nearly every day for eighteen months - and, by the way, I do speak German. And French. And Spanish and Italian. And a little bit of Swedish, Greek, Welsh, and Hungarian. And enough to be polite in Arabic and Hebrew. Just threw that in to show it's not just Americans and Germans who can be arrogant.
If you're talking about the America of Steve Earle and John Steinbeck and Maya Angelou and Lisa Simpson, then God Bless America.
But. However. That Being Said. On the Other Hand: If you say, God Bless America and you're talking about the self-serving cabal of war-mongering gangsters and religious hypocrites who run your wonderful country as an arrogant, blundering, profit-hoovering war-machine without even being elected, then fuck you and everyone else in the ring-fenced, muddy hole at the shallow end of the gene-pool you crawled out of. And, by the way, if there actually is a Supreme Being to carry out the blessing, I'll bet my last...Euro that when Dubya and his team of plundering robber barons get to the Pearly Gates then I bet you that Supreme Being shoves them off the cliff and into the lake of fire so fast He wouldn't be able to piss on them to put out the flames if He wanted to.
So Peace and Love and let me get on with my work. I'll take the First Amendment, you take the Fifth.
I suppose I could just have said, "I remember my first drink."
And then I returned to my prepared material.
I'm not at all sure what I make of all that. That it packs a punch is unquestionable. That many Salon residents would find much common ground therein, albeit uncomfortably close to cultural hearth & home, seems likely. But I'm not sure I'm comfortable with it. Is it comedy or is it rant? Does it pass the Bertold Brecht test & manage to slip us truths through our laughter? Does it pass the Lenny Bruce test & shock us into recognition through our laughter? Or does it come across simply as smug & self-congratulatory, a piece of hubristic rhetoric?
We need comedy now. The darker the times, the more acute the need. Well-judged, well-timed satire, parody, ridicule do more damage to dodgy regimes than a parcel of streamlined, analytical speeches. Or a barrage of any weapons of mass destruction that can be made ready in 45 minutes. Comedy is a weapon of very specific & selective destruction & its currency should never be devalued.
1:12:31 AM 
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