September 11th has become America's grotesque take on Independence Day. Instead of celebrating freedom and our victory in a war that threw off the yolk of an empire, 9/11 has become a ghoulish annual observance that marks the day everything really started to suck in this country.

Sure, American soil had been struck by terrorist attacks prior to the assault on the World Trade Center, but the confluence of some pretty insidious political leadership and the sheer scale of the attack made 9/11/01 into the first of many horrible dominoes to fall in the past decade. Many people in our country have come to see that day as the moment when our own politicians went from being necessary evils to being downright bastards, while others allowed the attack to turn them into full-fledged parodies of American culture. I'm usually biased to the former, but gall dern it today is 9/11 so I'ma gonna channel both sides of the equation as I take on Richard "The Dick" Coughlan and his bitchy assessment of our wild, weird nation.

Right off the bat I'll admit that I understand Coughlan's schtick. He's a British guy who hates stuff. Okay, I can accept that. Why? Because I'm a halfway intelligent grown-up with a sense of humor, aka an endangered species on the Internet. In this video, The Dick lazes about his hotel room on his last day in America and complains about how awful his experience has been.

Coughlan's main focus is on our nation's food. Correction, his main focus is on our nation's crude facsimiles of food. Whichever nitwit hosted him in the States decided to bring Coughlan to McDonald's for his first US meal. That's right, frickin' Mickey D's, as if the Golden Arch isn't some kind of corporate fungus that has spread all over the world by now. Just because Brits consume less McDonald's per capita than Americans doesn't mean they've never experienced it. Of course, that doesn't stop Coughlan from pretending to be the reasonable foreigner who has only heard of the place in legends.

I know it's in vogue right now, especially on the Internet, to hate on America. Hardy-har, we're all morbidly obese and wear fanny packs and listen to brainless country music while everybody in every other nation on the planet lives a slim, enlightened existence surrounded by paragons of human achievement. But, look, we Americans know our fast food is conceptually disgusting. We're also willing to admit that, on some level, it's also pretty freaking delicious. Our country has been around for less than 300 years but the human desire for sugar, fat and salt is millions of years old.

So, sure, America has some really awful stuff about it. I complain about it regularly. But gosh darn it, it's 9/11 and we ought to be celebrating the ridiculous and awesome things about this country. So, here are some of my favorite stupid-ass things about America:

1. Our food defies reason. A couple centuries ago some prick in Texas took a substandard cut of cow, beat it until it was a mushy mass of pink, covered it in flour and fried it into oblivion. And it was delectable. Chicken fried freaking steak.
2. We regularly spend more than the GDP of small European nations just to entertain people for two hours.
3. Our whiskey will kick your teeth in and get you into a knife fight.
4. Our refusal to learn other languages combined with centuries of pre-American imperialism and modern economic dominance has made English increasingly standard around the world. Which is hilarious.
5. Las Vegas. The entire damn city.

Happy 9/11, 'Merkans!