First off, the title of this post will make no sense until you read the entire thing. So get out your reading glasses, and enjoy the ride.
Second, I was recently asked to guest-post on the blog of a friend, the inestimable commenter Maxx AKA Marky Mark. However, his blog is one of such vile and offensive content that ‘just anyone’ cannot access it. Ergo, my plan to link to that post today and save myself some work has backfired. Enter copy/paste:
God save the Queen...
Thinking that perhaps the greater bulk of the Return of the Maxx readers were British, I wanted to cater to your specific tastes. So I went to some friends that are either married to or dating English men for some tips as to what would play well on the other side of the pond. And they stared at me blankly or were otherwise useless.
Thus, I interpreted it as a sign from God (or some kind of demi-god or high priestess of Great Britain, anyway) when I turned on NPR and heard Iain Martin, a columnist and blogger for the Daily Telegraph, bitching about a recent gift exchange between Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Barack Obama.
If you haven’t heard about it, let me summarize it briefly for you: It happened, and it didn’t really go so well.
America, as usual, has been caught with its pants down. But no worries: We’re used to it at this point. We’re practically honorary members of The Pussycat Dolls: onstage, half-naked, and faking it within an inch of our lives.
With respect to the gift exchange, I wasn’t there, (I had a previous engagement) but I imagine it went something like this:
“Hey. Thanks for this incredibly thoughtful ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet. What’s that? Oak from the Gannet’s sister ship, HMS Resolute, was carved to make a desk that has sat here in the Oval Office in the White House since 1880? Why, you don’t say.
I’m touched, and I hope you’re equally moved by this collection of 25 DVDs bought for you at the total last minute…errrr…ummmm….with equal care and concern. There might even be one with an anti-slave theme in here. Let me see…
Michelle!? Michelle!? Is Mandingo in here? Did we put Mandigo in…no? Do we have a copy lying around anywhere that I could throw in for Gordon, here?
What’s that, Gordon? Oh, yes, we know you have movie theatres and DVD rentals in Great Britain. I just thought you’d enjoy your own personal copy of ‘Up in Smoke’ starring Cheech and Chong. It’s American made! Oh, and ‘Junior’ with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He plays a pregnant man in that, AND he’s the governor of California now, you know. Land of opportunity!”
Classic American filmmaking right here
Again, I wasn’t there…I’m just speculating.
Nonetheless, I bear a portion of the resulting shame. Not because of any specific action on my part, but because I was raised Catholic and made to feel guilty. So in response to this international faux pas, and in an attempt to smooth rumpled feathers, I propose three likely explanations:
- He’s just damn busy
- He’s just damn rude
- He just had it too damn easy
1. It could be that the man is too busy saving the world and representing all races in a single bound to go shopping. It’s a tough job, and being a Hawaii-raised, half-black, half-white man with the middle name “Hussein,” it seems he’s got to do it.
2. Plain old rudeness is a viable option. Americans are rude. Actually, let me rephrase that. Of the 304 million Americans on the planet, 30 million of us are crazy rude. Like “Larry the Cable Guy” rude; Mel Gibson (an Australian, but he’s lived here forever, so I guess we have to claim him) rude; New Jersey rude (need I say more?); Madonna (or is she your problem now? You can have Madge as far as I’m concerned….) rude.
Anyway, the thing of it is that 30 million people are just ten percent of the population of the US, and that’s nothing. Until you compare it with the population of Great Britain – 60 million – and realize it’s half of that. So basically for every two thoughtful Brits, there is at least one insanely rude American.
I don’t make the rules. I’m just doing the math.
3. Or it could just be that he had it too easy? All that fancy Hawaii living inured Barack to the art of the personal touch? If he’d had my childhood, he would’ve given Gordon a fancy Jolly Roger bedazzled eye patch or a new glass eye. And not just any glass eye: An all-while Marilyn Manson eye or maybe an eyeball with an iris that looked like a bright blue sky filled with puffy clouds. Or maybe a Magic 8 Ball eye? It would have been startlingly personal and on-point. Gordon would have lain awake at night wondering, “How did he know!? My God, HOW DID HE KNOW!?”
My god, it was even worse than I remembered...
Well, if he’d had my aforementioned childhood, he would have known because of a little something we like to call ‘Blockhead.’ They don’t make Blockhead any more, and technically it never even really had a heyday. It’s no Life or Monopoly or Connect Four, it’s basically a poor man’s Jenga: you take turns stacking blocks of funny shaped wooden blocks on each other until the little tower collapses. It’s both stupid and nerve-wracking. Fun for the whole family!
It so happened that my mother was keeping the world’s supply of Blockhead in her closet. I don’t know how this happened, I can only imagine it involved a really amazing clearance sale, and I’m left to theorize that there were at least 50 copies in her room alone. The significance of this strange hoard?
Well, let me tell you. Every year of my life, from age five to upwards of thirteen, if I attended your birthday party, I gave you Blockhead. It doesn’t matter if your parents owned three McDonald’s franchises (sorry Allison) or if I’d given you a copy of Blockhead the year before and the year before that (sorry Jeanne). It didn’t matter if you were my best friend (sorry Shelley) or if I couldn’t stand you (sorry Jon)…you got a mother f-king game of Blockhead.
The humiliation was intense. It was a bad gift. I knew it was a bad gift, but I was at the woman’s mercy. Blockhead it was.
And so, as a result, I developed what I like to think of as a six sense. When your birthday nears, I study you. I note your likes and dislikes, I peek at your shoe size and pant length. As Christmas nears, I interview your relatives, shadow you in my car, and rummage through your medicine cabinet. And then, the big day comes, and you open a startling personal and on-point gift that I have pre-ordered months before because I know how much it would mean to you. And then perhaps you (hopefully) feel a little bit bad for giving me that really ugly iridescent vase or a copy of the Edward Scissorhands soundtrack. On tape.
And so that’s all there really is to it. It’s about shame. What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter where you come from, or where you were raised or what color your skin is or whether you have a glass eye or a glass hand or glass balls. We’re all human beings here. What does matter is how much your mother f-cked up your head and how driven you are to compensate for a childhood spent giving other people Blockhead.
And now back to our usual programming…
p.s.
(I could not resist including this crazy thing I read about Gordon Brown when researching him to try to figure out what would have been a more personal gift. This anecdote allegedly appeared in the Washington Post:
Once upon a time, there was an incident wherein Gordon’s glass eye popped out and sank to the bottom of a bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup whilst he was being interviewed. To be culturally sensitive, they tried at first to fish it out with chopsticks, but eventually they had to ask the waitress for a spoon.
The reporter compared this revealing incident to the painted glass hand of Mao Tse Tung. Apparently, Mao’s hand became a sort of relic of the state. When he shared food with the few advisors he really trusted, he would pass around the hand, full of tea, for his people to drink out of. To drink out of Mao Tse Tung’s painted glass hand was a real honor, and was said to increase one’s sexual potency twentyfold.
Ummmmmm…WTF!?)
