On the Fourth Of July...

Dear Iraqi People,

I've been reading in the news that you've been somewhat resistant to the American troops in your country. As I'm running for King of the World, and as I am proud to be a U.S. citizen by birth, I thought I would write you all a letter on this most awesome of American holidays to let you know that we Americans are good people, that we welcome you into our society, and that you should just chill the heck out with this blowing stuff up business.

Today is the Fourth of July, which is cool because we actually have a holiday called the Fourth of July and we celebrate it on Independence Day, which is the first Monday of July, also known to our Spanish speaking amigos as the Cinco de Mayo. On this day we celebrate the fact that our Founding Father, George Washington, finally got the Pilgrims all sorted out and got them to sign the Constitution so that the hearing impaired people could understand it. There were a lot of hearing impaired people back then because of the fact that they'd just invented fireworks, which are really loud. You can tell that they were all deaf because at one point they rang the liberty bell so hard it cracked. (I don't think they had come up with that "close captioning" for television yet, which is why getting the document done in sign language was such a big deal).

Once George Washington got the Pilgrims to settle down and eat turkey instead of Indians and then got them to sign the constitution, he went out and turned his attention to the British, who were over here taxing us but not representing us. He beat them in the Battle of the Bulge, the Battle of Trenchtown and the most famous battle of the war, Bunker Hill. (It's a little known factoid that the battle was actually fought on Hillshire Farm). Once he beat them, the British, famous for their singing groups like Beethoven, The Spice Girls and Beatles, always sang Yankee Doodle to our soldiers. Yankee Doodle is a song about making a macaroni salad, which is why we eat a lot on July 4th and why it's called "Cinco de Mayo" in Spanish, because of the Mayonaise we put in the macaroni salad.

On July 4th we also eat a lot of hot dogs, which you lovely Iraqi people will love when you adopt our ways! Many of your Middle Eastern chums who have come to America already have found great jobs working in our convenience stores, and those stores almost always do a booming business in selling hot dogs to Americans who are on the go! See? Our cultures are incredibly compatible: one of our greatest Americans, Ben Franklin, invented the hot dog AND the convenience store so that your people can become part of the American fabric by staffing these stores AND selling this most patriotic of food!

At the end of every Fourth of July, before we're too tipsy from all the great Budweiser (another Franklin invention I believe), we either drag the family to the town's fireworks display or, in states that allow us to, we light our own fireworks displays. Now, having seen on the news how partial you people are to explosions, I think you'll relate to this holiday of ours.

See, I dragged my family to the town's awesome fireworks display after spending a fantastic day eating hot dogs and drinking beer. It occurred to me during the fireworks that this really is a pretty special place, and that there are an awful lot of our people over in your country who really just want to come home and have a great day like I had. The sooner you stop blowing each other up and the sooner you form your own government, the sooner our people can come home, so please hurry. Just think, your new government will be able to create cool holidays like ours did, all those years ago.

Sincerely,
The Village Idiot