‘We’re Havin’ Donkey Dick’: This Is What America Sounds Like

A friend of mine was mortified as a young boy when he was invited to eat over at a friend’s house and asked the father what was for dinner and the father bellowed, “We’re havin’ donkey dick!” (“Polish sausage” would have sufficed.)

More subtle: A few years ago, a business owner friend, Scott, introduced me to one of his employees. When I turned and introduced that employee to a third person by saying he “works for Scott,” Scott corrected me quickly. “He works with us,” Scott said. Was Scott being a euphemistic hypocrite for wanting to speak of an employee as a colleague rather than a subordinate? I didn’t think so.

It matters, how you talk about the people around you, especially when you have more muscle than they.

The specter of the leader of a superpower going on about how we’re going to be looking out for number one from now on is as unnecessary as it is repulsive. (“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”)

The rest of the world is already aware that the United States has its own interests at heart, and has been for a very long time.

In the summer of 1993, my fiancée and I, then 24 years old, backpacked across Europe. We were naively shocked by the amount of anti-American sentiment we heard among fellow travelers from other nations: Youth “hostiles” was more like it.

Canadians were always pointing out the Canadian-flag patches on their backpacks, placed there, they snottily said, so they wouldn’t be confused with Americans. (Meanwhile, I remember feeling embarrassed, asking the young info-desk worker at the Munich train station for directions to Dachau, the site of her ancestors’ shame.)

Young travelers of all stripes complained about how imperialistic the U.S. was, what bullies we were. As the son of a soldier who helped liberate Europe from the Nazis, my bewilderment turned to defensive anger. It’s not easy being responsible for world peace, I suggested, and how would Belgium like to try it? (Last night I slept to a radio broadcast of D-Day coverage, waking up intermittently and feeling good about my country.)

President Clinton had just been elected in what seemed to us then as a contentious election. In Dublin, we were told by an otherwise friendly Trinity College grad student/tour guide that our political arguments in the U.S. meant nothing to Europeans, who saw a Republican-led or a Democratic-led America as the same boorish buffoon. “Over here,” he said, “we can’t tell the difference between Bush and Clinton.”

One assumes the lad, who would be about 55 at this point, can detect a difference now. (Though I heard a similar argument last summer from a fever-brained Dutch lad over a pool table, in Barcelona.)

I covered the 2016 Republican National Convention. I wrote then about an exchange I had with a guy outside Cleveland’s QuickenLoans Arena, carrying an “America First” sign. I asked, “If America’s first, who will be second?” He shouted happily, “The rest of the world!”

Of course, many Americans see it that way, and always have. And that’s the way the rest of the world sees us, and always has: as a bunch of parochial, atavistic, ignorant goons who don’t know how to visit the neighbor’s house or host a neighbor at our home without eating all the donkey dick in sight, wiping our mouths on our sleeves and farting at the table.

Well, at least we’re no longer putting on airs.