Ze King of Biers

In case no one else noticed, Budweiser started hawking a new brand of their flavored water ironically named “American Ale”. Ironic in that American Ale hits the shelves just weeks after the ink has dried on the contract to sell the Belgians everything from the Bud girls' swimsuits to the Clydesdale's pooper scoopers. This is bigger than the Japs snatching up Rockefeller Center the last time things got rocky here. Who really cares about Rockefeller Center anyhow? Other than Manhattanites, no one sees it more than five minutes each year when the Christmas tree is fired up, and in the 30 Rock intro if they're paying attention. Forget Gatorade, this is the official drink of football we're talking about here.

About the same time the patriotic-sounding brew hit shelves, the King of Biers also found the need to start calling itself the Great American Lager. Still pitching to that nationalistic crowd. Will rednecks still drink it, or will the Great American Lager find itself pigeonholed as a Blue State libation, as fit for ridicule as a carafe of Bordeaux? Keep it cheap and I wager the marketers will slide this one right on by. If GM is ever bought out by Toyota, you can be sure they'll just play Seger's Like a Rock even louder and never let on what happened.

Not long ago we were filling our britches when a bunch of rich guys from Dubai (a redundant way of saying a bunch of guys from Dubai) wanted the contract to guard our ports. Now we'll be lucky if they don't end up owning the ports. Yes, the Great American Fire Sale is here. The banks will just be first to go. The foreign firms will move in to scoop up what bargains remain after the dust settles. I say first to go, but that's just in this wave. This is a trend that's been building a while now.

The House Republicans didn't want to throw the banks a line because in five weeks they're up for reelection and figured they'd better start tightening the purse strings like they used to in the old days. Fair enough, the deal stunk either way. And I'm still not sure which would be worse, swelling the debt another barely fathomable number, or the fire-and-brimstone/cats-and-dogs-sleeping-together mass hysteria scenario painted by its cheerleaders. But our failure to buy up those soured bank notes does reveal one thing- that we were unwilling to invest in ourselves. We didn't trust Americans to pony up on our own debt. And who could blame us?

There's nothing we like more than borderline-xenophobic rhetoric, something that looks good on a bumper between our other angry stickers. Give us someone to blame, and that overtime to pay for what used to not to need overtime to pay for is just a little easier. But now the blame game has gotten confusing. If I buy American does it help if the company is actually a subsidiary of an offshore holdings corporation with majority of shareholders based in... ah hell, blame me I can take it. None of this can fit on a bumper sticker and people are starting to wonder (too late) if maybe they should have been paying closer attention all along.

We are a nation of tough talk. But aside from our apparent willingness to send our boys and girls off to fight in every corner of the globe, our walk is somewhat lacking of late. Amid all the clamor for having to put our collective shoulders to some imaginary grindstone, along with the politically required praise for the American worker, no one will ever have the guts to say what all that really entails. An earthquake could swallow California whole the same week the Russians decided to drill in ANWR themselves and the first thing to be dismissed out of hand would be a tax hike. Such a silly notion, ever raising a tax. Better to live free and just borrow more money. That's the American way.

A wise man once wrote about the Death of the American Dream. I couldn't find the quote I was searching for, so I'll whip up my own about it instead: No one wants to call the time of death because they won't really know it's happened until they smell the rotting corpse and figure out where the flies were coming from. Authors and historians have been predicting the demise for so long now it seems inevitable, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Late night political discussions seldom end without mention of Rome. And you can't help but wonder if (or more likely when) it happens, what it will look like afterwards. No one can say, but that sound you've been hearing all month was another of its coffin's nails. Don't fret that we might lose our empire, of course we will eventually. But it doesn't have to be as bad as you think, England seems happy enough these days. Of course they drink like a nation of walking fish. My advice is to invest heavily in breweries. Though it looks like someone already thought of that.

The piper is calling, can you hear him? Try to ignore him if you can. Try to cling to guns and Bibles or universal healthcare and gay rights. Either way he's going to collect, and he doesn't care who you blame so long as you keep working until the day you die.

Sorry this one took such a hairpin for the dark side, but life can't always be shits and giggles. My deepest apologies to anyone tricked into thinking we'd actually be talking about beer tonight. Also apologies to The Onion for swiping their Capitol image. It was late and I swear it won't happen again.