AND ON MY DEATHBED I SHALL CALL OUT 'AMERICA'!

'Happy' 250th, from your Wonkette!

Probably 1976. Ya girl and ya other girl.

Editrix’s note: ZiggyWiggy invites you to a MATINEE of Jaws at 4 p.m. Eastern, we changed the time on you since we announced it. Available for free with ads on OKRU; with subscription on Peacock and AMC+; $3.99 in the usual places.

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Good morning, friends and lovers. I’m plugged into our little solar generator because there was wind and rain last night and DTE I guess forgot to upgrade our grid. I’m pretty sure there was Joe Biden money to invest into that, unless Joe Manchin or the Supreme Court kiboshed it, I don’t remember and I’m not looking it up. We might have power by tonight or Monday, they think. It’s certainly better than being in Venezuela, which we invaded, or Cuba, which we blockaded, or Iran, which we blew the fuck up. Because we were in a fight, a person in my family who’d claimed that of course he’d voted for Kamala finally admitted — boasted — that he’d voted for whoever Jill Stein was this time. In Michigan. Again. For the “principle” of being anti-genocide. Oh bullshit. It wasn’t a principle, voting to give ultimate power to the guy who’d promised to make Gaza “glass.” It was spite. Congratulations, you arrested your hero Nicolas Maduro. Congratulations, you murdered all those schoolgirls in Iran.

We bought ribeyes and lobster in honor of Troy Nehls’s hip-hop bbq, because it sounded legit delicious. They should still be fine!

I don’t remember much of 1976, obviously, having been an adorable li’l peanut of three. And yet somehow I did the math and I’ve been alive 20 percent of our nation’s history? “The last 20 percent of our nation’s history” starts with Nixon? And Commie Mom up there, at 83 she’s been alive for a third of it?

What a dumb tiny baby of a country, only three times older than an old lady and less than five times older than a juicy gorgeous 53-year-old spring chicken.

This is the prettiest picture I have EVER taken, and it was two months ago.

For America’s 300th, I’ll (presumably!) be dead or a talking head in a jar, and my daughter Donna will be 61 and my granddaughter Lu will be 59. The country will be … well, it will almost certainly still exist! I can’t pretend to even have an idea of an inkling of an imagination on what it might look like. My futurism skills called Kamala Harris with a Reagan-whomping-styley 49 states.

Ten years ago, Shy’s dad was dying, of lung cancer, which my mom has now. As we stood around his hospital bed wishing him Godspeed and killing his remaining time with him, I remembered this dumb fucking thing I had just read (lost to the sands of time and our awful search function and broken Google) where some dumb fucking idiot, I forget, was like, “And when I am on my deathbed, I shall call out ‘AMERICA’!” “MARK!” I shouted in all caps to my father-in-law, so he could hear me through the meds, “MARK, ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT AMERICA?” He laughed, which hurt him, but I thought it was worth it!

I will not be thinking about America on my deathbed, unless it is because we never fixed it and I regret leaving it that way to my surely elderly daughter and grand. AMERICA GODDAMN, I might think. We might though. We might fix it. It could happen!

A horrible thing happened the other day that I am loathe to tell you about but I also can’t not. You may have seen the clickbait headline, because it was so ridiculous, and so petty, and look what our world and Detroit have come to: A young man was killed over a bag of chips. And everybody laughed and made jokes about what kind of chips. And then it turned out that young man had been killed because he had offered a man’s young daughter the bag of chips. And everybody sneered about what he must really have been after.

The young man was the custodian at my girls’ school. And he was lovely. He was 24 and had worked there for five years, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. He took classes on the weekend to better his future. He tied kids’ shoes. He mopped up vomit. And when they asked for snacks, he gave them snacks. I worked there with him. A second job for me on top of Wonkette. He was chill, and kind. He watched out for the kids, if they were fighting, or if they were sad, or if they needed someone to walk them to the nurse’s office. He was the helper you look for when Mr. Rogers tells you look for the helper. And a parent — one of our parents — killed him, with a loaded weapon on the school grounds, because he offered his daughter a bag of chips.

We took the girls to the school last night to release balloons for Mr. Burns. His mother was brave and beautiful while she talked about her beautiful boy. And of course she was younger than I am, with her 24-year-old son, who was just shy of one-tenth as old as our terrible little baby nation.

We adore you, Mr. Burns.

To all the others I adore, and it is all of you, I hope you have ribeyes and lobster, or an Impossible Burger. I hope you have friends to drink and bitch with, if you haven’t done all your lifetime’s drinking already. I hope you’re okay. I hope we’re all okay. And when we’re not I hope we have loved ones to help carry the load. If you don’t have anyone else? You have us.

And I have one last favor to ask you! In the past year, Wonkette’s lost a lot of readers, both paid and free, and we continue to lose one percent of you every month. Please don’t send us money if you can’t. But please do go to the homepage and choose a story to send to a friend you think will like us. If you’re a Jeff Tiedrich or a The Fucking News that we link to often, consider returning the love and sending some readers our way. Wonkette should be around for 50 more years, and forever.

And on Wonkette’s deathbed, AMERICA, it will shout, just kidding, that guy whoever it was is a fucking pud.

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