Or: How America Became the Human Equivalent of Gas Station Sushi

From Canada—what Americans call “America Lite with socialism”—we’re watching the most expensive psychological breakdown in history unfold in real time. And it’s spectacular.

America is destroying its cultural relevance while screaming about greatness, like a drunk guy yelling at 2 AM about his ex-wife being the problem. It’s like watching your neighbour burn down their house because smoke detectors are a liberal conspiracy. Technically their property, but we’re worried about property values and wondering if we should intervene or shop for new ones.

Here’s what happened: America became gas station sushi. Technically food, but nobody’s crossing borders for the experience, and you’ll regret it if you’re desperate enough to try.

The Psychology of Self-Sabotage (Or: How to Inherit a Ferrari and Trade It for a ’87 Pontiac)

We’re witnessing history’s most elaborate act of cultural self-immolation. They inherited a Ferrari and traded it for a rusted-out Pontiac because sports cars attract “the wrong people.”

Republicans believe that systematically eliminating everything that made America great is necessary for American greatness. They’re like a cover band that inherited the Beatles’ catalog and decided to re-record everything as polka because rock music attracts “undesirable audiences”—people with functioning eardrums.

It’s motivated reasoning on crystal meth. They’ve created a feedback loop where isolation proves authenticity and irrelevance proves moral superiority. It’s a delusion-powered perpetual motion machine, and it’s working flawlessly.

Alanis Morissette Weeps

The ironic part is that every cultural export that made America the envy of the world came from people conservatives want to deport, silence, or force into patriotic summer camps.

Jazz emerged from New Orleans brothels by Black musicians who could not eat in white restaurants. 

Blues crawled out of Mississippi Delta shacks, not Martha’s Vineyard yacht clubs. 

Rock was born when Black rhythm had unprotected musical intercourse with country music in a back alley behind a segregated diner. 

Hip-hop conquered the world from the South Bronx by kids the government had written off as human refuse.

Hollywood’s golden age was built by Jewish immigrants fleeing the authoritarian fever dreams now getting standing ovations at CPAC.

But sure, blame rap for moral decline while wondering why nobody thinks you’re cool anymore. That’s like blaming Sidney Crosby for hockey being “too Canadian,” or blaming oxygen for making fire possible.

The Great Self-Own

America is committing the most successful act of cultural vandalism in history. They’re restaurant owners who fired all the chefs, started serving Wonder Bread with mayo, then wondered why their Yelp reviews read like war crimes tribunals for the taste buds.

Marvel dominates globally not because Captain America lectures about property taxes but because weird spider-kids team up with black robot guys and daddy-issue Norse gods to save a universe resembling Earth’s peoples instead of a country club directory.

American music topped global charts not by sounding like a Cracker Barrel house band, but by evolving, absorbing influences, and pushing boundaries that made conservatives clutch their pearls like they were defusing bombs.

The master plan now? Replace all this with Kid Rock covers and slavery-was-a-job-training-program movies. Good luck selling that to global audiences who enjoy K-pop and don’t think acknowledging basic historical facts constitutes enemy propaganda designed to destroy their souls.

The Purity Mythology (Or: How to Curate a Museum by Removing Everything Worth Seeing)

Conservatives built a “real America” fantasy that systematically excludes everything making the country interesting to anyone not genetically related to them.

It’s like curating a museum of American greatness by removing all the Americans who created it, then standing in the empty building like confused security guards wondering why the tourists stopped coming.

This is cultural fundamentalism—the delusion that authenticity requires returning to fantasy pasts existing mainly in the anxiety centers of people who find complexity threatening. 

They’ve convinced themselves that American strength requires cultural anorexia. They systematically starve themselves of every nutrient that built their cultural muscle mass while wondering why they feel weak enough to be bullied by a country that invented Hawaiian pizza.

Instead of developing the emotional sophistication to navigate a world where identity is earned through engagement rather than inherited through zip codes, they chose the ultimate regression fantasy: returning to imagined cultural innocence that never existed outside Norman Rockwell paintings and Reagan campaign ads.

The Brain Malfunction That Would Impress Therapists

We’re witnessing severe institutional multiple personality disorder that would make psychiatric textbooks weep.

These people worship American innovation while destroying the conditions that made it possible. They’re arsonists who love the smell of smoke but are baffled why everything keeps combusting around them.

They’ve achieved something that would impress even the most jaded therapist. They’ve celebrated cultural dominance while attacking every source of that dominance. It’s like someone bragging about their prize-winning garden while poisoning the soil, chainsawing the trees, and salting the Earth because they’ve decided photosynthesis represents foreign interference in American plant life.

American cultural conquest happened because America became the world’s premier cultural mixing bowl. 

Rock and Roll conquered the globe not through purity but through musical bastardization. It took traditional music and let it have unprotected intercourse with amplifiers in dive bars that horrified proper society and accidentally rewired human DNA.

Now they want to ban the dive bars and wonder why their music sounds like elevator Muzak recorded in a monastery run by people who think rhythm is morally suspicious.

How the World Sees It (Spoiler: It’s Not Good)

Now, the world watches America like relatives observing someone having a psychotic break at a wedding reception. It’s part genuine concern, part morbid fascination, and growing panic about whether we should collect the good silverware before they start throwing it.

European leaders who once studied American cultural exports as master classes in soft power now observe the country like concerned family members watching Uncle Larry explain how lizard people control weather through 5G towers while stockpiling canned beans and ammunition. There’s still love, but a dawning recognition that it’s time to hide his car keys and make emergency dinner plans that don’t involve him.

America used to export Michael Jackson and change the world. Now, their biggest cultural ambassadors are Tucker Carlson and whatever passes for conservative comedy, like replacing George Carlin with a drunk guy at Applebee’s explaining why women aren’t funny.

From Canada—a country so pathologically polite we send thank-you notes to automatic doors. When your international reputation shifts from “innovative cultural powerhouse” to “that unstable relative who shows up drunk to family dinners with conspiracy theories about fluoride,” you want to reassess your global strategy.

The Global Intervention (In Progress)

The global intervention is underway, conducted with diplomatic politeness that barely conceals “we’re seriously worried about your mental health” energy.

While America screams about cultural authenticity and ideological purity, the rest of the world has started shopping elsewhere for entertainment and innovation, like embarrassed friends avoiding the crazy person at the party.

Korea mastered cultural synthesis, creating global phenomena by mixing traditional elements with contemporary innovation that make American culture look like it was assembled by Hot Topic managers suffering from chronic depression.

Britain continues producing narrative complexity that makes American television seem written by insurance adjusters having existential crises.

Even Canada—a modest country that apologizes for our successes and sends condolence cards when other countries lose hockey games—has turned multiculturalism into a competitive cultural advantage.

Meanwhile, America decided that cultural relevance requires purification, like a DJ who throws out all the good music, fires anyone with rhythm, and wonders why the dance floor empties faster than a fire drill.

The Perfect Self-Crime

We’re witnessing history’s most elaborate cultural self-immolation. A superpower so committed to ideological purity that it’s willing to torch everything that made it super.

It’s like someone who inherited the entire Marvel universe and rebooted it as a series about the spiritual benefits of tax preparation.

Or inheriting the NHL, then banning skating because it’s “too foreign” and “makes the game too fast for real Americans. “You still own the league, but good luck getting anyone to watch your version, where players debate whether the puck is geometrically suspicious and potentially communist.

Tech companies spreading their message? Built by the immigrants they want to deport.

The entertainment industry, they claim to hate, is powered by the diversity they’re trying to eliminate.

The defunded universities? Institutions that created the internet used to spread anti-education propaganda on Facebook.

It’s cultural cannibalism by people who are on nationalism’s Atkins diet. They systematically devour their strengths while wondering why they feel weaker and more irrelevant.

The Punchline

The people orchestrating this cultural demolition will spend the next decade in rage, wondering why American movies aren’t dominating international markets, why American music isn’t setting global trends, and why universities aren’t attracting the world’s brightest minds.

They’ll hold focus groups to figure out what went wrong, like arsonists puzzled about why everything catches fire.

They’ll never grasp that you can’t celebrate American exceptionalism while eliminating everything that made America exceptional. They’re like someone who inherited a Michelin-starred restaurant, fired all the chefs because they “looked foreign,” replaced the menu with gas station hot dogs, then spent years demanding to know why customers go to the place across the street that still employs people who understand what food is supposed to taste like.

A Message from Your Concerned Neighbours

From the land of socialized medicine and functional democracy, we’ll keep the porch light on. Just in case you want to remember being the neighbour people want to visit, not the one they cross streets to avoid while making concerned phone calls about your mental state.

You should hurry. Even we have limits, and we elected and re-elected a prime minister who collected blackface photos like stamps. But hey, at least he apologized and learned—skills extinct south of the border since the invention of Twitter.

Here we sit, your bemused northern neighbours, watching America decide that the secret to international love requires becoming as lovable as a DMV employee having the worst day of their career. 

You systematically destroy everything that makes you interesting while demanding people still find you fascinating, like someone who burns down the Louvre and gets angry when tourists stop visiting Paris.

It’s performance art that accidentally destroys empires and makes the Canadian Tuxedo look culturally sophisticated.

But hey, you’ll always have that one Lee Greenwood song and whatever Tucker Carlson said this week about M&Ms being too woke. Surely that cultural arsenal will maintain global relevance for centuries. Maybe add some Toby Keith and a few more conspiracy theories about too sexy cartoon characters for variety.

I’m sure the world is dying to consume more content about how acknowledging basic human dignity somehow threatens the fabric of reality.