As American as Bread

People are always forgetting that we're a nation of immigrants. We immigrated here, killed the current population and drove them off their land (which is why we're a nation of immigrants, not a nation of natives), and built our new European society here. Justice dictates that people from other countries should now come to America, kill us and drive us (the neo-natives) from our lands, and establish their society. It's only fair.

When we got here, we had come from all different cultures and backgrounds, by which I mean we were both from northern and southern England, and to bridge these inseparable gaps we had to make up some kind of American culture, which is where we get the idea of the "American dream." The American Dream is to get rich and die fat while trampling on those less-fortunate than us. It's not much, but it passed for a culture, and it was good enough to start the Revolutionary War, in which we decided that we'd rather kill British soldiers than pay taxes. After the war, we ran out of British soldiers to kill, so we started paying taxes again.

But not everyone in the world has the same privileges we do. People from other nations wallow is squalid poverty, casting their large brown eyes to heaven and praying to their various gods for the right to vote, the right to choose for themselves whether they want to pay taxes or kill British soldiers. Unfortunately, the United States, having pinky-sworn with their buddy England that they'd stop killing soldiers, invented the Border Control, which walks around in Texas and makes sure we don't have to share our right to avoid paying taxes with Latin Americans.

So this leads to the question: What do those poor, innocent people begging for a shot at the British have to do just to get into our little club?

The answer comes from American culinary history.

The sandwich, invented by the Earl of Sandwich in the 18th century, is an American creation. By American, of course, I mean it was invented by an Englishman in England. (The English were Americans before Americans were!) Mr. of Sandwich was a gambler who wanted to live out his lifelong dream of eating his food while playing cards. He had the ingenious idea of putting his food between two pieces of bread, and thus an American legend was born. In England.

When people talk about "American food," they almost unanimously are referring to hot dogs and hamburgers, though. The hot dog, as you know, was originally called a Frankfurter (or "someone from Frankfurt," I think) because of the cannibalistic eating habits of the Germans. Americans adapted the food, called it the "red hot," while maintaining the cannibalistic integrity of the snack. Soon after its birth, however, the red hot was wrapped in hot dog buns (the origin of the term "hot dog" is interesting, but irrelevant), and another food joined the Pantheon of American foods.

Hamburgers come from Hamburg, New York, a city which had recently been imported from Germany. Some Americans, desperate for more meat product to sell as they worked toward their American Dream, created a beef patty flavored with... well, don't ask. But they created it, and no doubt people looked at their beef patty quite skeptically until the destiny-clad moment in which one of the enterprising businessmen put the abomination between two units of bread.

Noteably, those crispy yellow taco shells are an American innovation as well; proper Mexican tacos are what we'd call soft tacos, because having the food sit on top of the bread product is disorienting, and it frightens Americans. We prefer our foreign threats to be contained--flanked, you could say--by some solid American grain product.

What immigrants need to realize is that Americans are not yet ready to abandon our psychological issues that tell us that bread mitigates the threat of any situation. We must hope that this dangerous knowledge never falls into the hands of bank robbers or swine-flu carriers, of course, because they could strategically use bread to spread chaos and havoc. However, if you find Americans don't like you very much, try just wearing two giant slices of bread. You'll be amazed! Watch as they begin talking to you about baseball and tip their cowboy hats and do all those other things that Americans don't really do!

Welcome to America.