cracks knuckles

pours more coffee

Would you like to see my "traditional" St. Patrick's Day feast? Here it is. Fuck yeah, "corned beef" and cotija. with fuckin' mayonnaise. 'cuz look: the irish didn't eat cow. Cow was too expensive. You ate cow when the cow was dead, and you invited over everyone you knew because holy shit look at all this cow. Then the potato famine happened and almost everyone you knew was dead or moved and here you are, hated and spit on and despised for trying to earn a dollar but oh my fucking god, the Jews... have cow. And they have cow cheaply. And they have preserved cow, fat stacks of it just sitting there, bounteous quantities of cow, so when you're done sleeping ten to a room and actually have a key to a door you can lock you're goddamn right you're going to have a feast. You're going to celebrate having made it, having crossed an ocean without losing your identity, you're going to rally all the things you remember as good from the old country in the new country, and you're going to improvise with whatever is available, and you are sure as shit going to boil a fucking pastrami and call it tradition.

The prevarication around tiramisu is fucking hilarious. The edit war is truly something else (" tiramisu --> tiramisù= please respect the original italian spelling= WHEN IT IS ONE WORD, IT WANTS AN ACCENT ON THE FINAL U; not so when it is written as 2 separate words. Otherwise, it is CULTURAL APPROPRIATION & TAMPERING WITH our Italian culture. Just as if you started spelling Pizza with just one "z", or spaghetti with just one "t" and omitting the "h".). But go back to the beginning and it was some Australian explaining dessert.

I got into a fight with an Olive Garden back in like 1995 about Tiramisu. I asked one of the servers what kind of cheese went into Tiramisu. They told me there was no cheese in tiramisu. I asked the manager. He assured me that they didn't make tiramisu with cheese. I assured him that they defrosted tiramisu with cheese so we could both be right and he got real mad. So I spent some time on the fledgling internet looking up Tiramisu and it was acknowledged back then that it came out of the NY restaurant scene of the '80s which makes perfect sense. Imagine Trump saying it. "Tiramisu." You'll never hear it any other way.

Now? "it is CULTURAL APPROPRIATION & TAMPERING WITH our Italian culture." Look. "Italian" was "Tuscan" until 1861, much like "Italy" was "Hapsburg Empire." Contrary to tradition, the only European countries older than the United States are like Spain and England. All the rest of it was various shifting empires and fiefdoms. But fuck, man, America sits on the ashes of genocide. Italians have lived in Italy for hundreds if not thousands of years, they just weren't Italian. Errbody who lived around here 200 years ago? Yeah man we erased the shit out of their culture.

So I'm going to pretend my culture has always been here, except when it wasn't here, then it was somewhere older, therefore wherever they came from has a longer tradition. And I'm going to use that tradition to tell you why I have the right to do whatever the fuck I wanna do because I always have, and "always" is whatever the fuck I say it is.

Italy is currently embracing Fascism Mk. II so no wonder they've decided pizza was invented by the pope. Back in the '80s? You made fun of your friends for thinking they'd get pizza in Italy because everybody knew it was mongrel American food. "Traditional" italian food was anything you've never fucking eaten before and then you promptly pointed out that "Italian food" is wholly reliant on the introduction of noodles by Marco Polo and the introduction of tomatoes by Christopher Columbus. Everything was new back then and progress was the watchword. Now? Now everything is old which is why you don't get the rights to control your womb; historically speaking, your womb has always been controlled read your fucking bible.

Whenever you don't like something, reach for an old book, thump on it and say "the book doesn't like it either." Some dipshit will go "ackkkkshully" because he's read the book but you can paint him up as an intellectual egghead look where they got us fuckin' Adam and Steve do you believe that shit.

And all this

Is an elaborate exposition

On the simple fact that if you're selfish

"The past" is whatever made you happy as a child

and

"the future" is whatever other people are doing that makes you mad.

Traditions have always been and shall always be the method by which old people enforce their cultural mores on young people. That's all they fucking are. That's all they'll ever fucking be. America's framing of its own history is whatever the 'boomers think: WWII is ancient history because it was before they were born. The '50s were a time of innocence because they were too young to understand McCarthy. The '60s were a time of idealism because they were teenagers impressing each other in the back seats of their ramblers by talking about Che Guevara. The '70s were a time of disillusionment because they had to get jobs. The '80s were a time of wild economic success because they voted themselves massive tax breaks. And fuckin' hell they ate tiramisu (say it with me with your tiny hands) at that restaurant on the upper east side so of course tiramisu has existed since god was a kid.

please respect the original italian spelling=

to b_b's point, In God We Trust and Under God were the Knights of Columbus virtue signaling that they weren't godless Communists just because they were Catholic. The whole of the 20th century culture was given over to performative "we're not communist" virtue signaling and we will live with it until the last fucking boomer dies.

This is why I'm an enthusiastic member of the "maskless COVID and opiates" party.