prompt: pop, title: for external use only in misc. flash fiction

Having a national symbol is a wonderful thing, in concept. Something inspiring and unifying to rally around. In practice, it usually comes up short as any country is too varied and fractious for any one notion to sum up tidily, but God knows they try. America’s used the bald eagle, on and off, under the belief they were powerfully-noble and self-sufficient. Nevermind that bald eagles are opportunistic carrion-feeders prone to stealing their kills. Nevermind that American logging interests nearly exterminated that specific species in a pursuit of profits over everything. Maybe they were being darkly ironic, understanding how a poacher with a self-destruction streak might represent a land built upon genocides and slavery. Maybe the double-meaning was intended as a hint for folk paying attention. Maybe not. History has the tendency to lose irony in the perpetual whitewash of popular academia.

We have toyed with Liberty’s statue as our mascot but it never seems to stick. Maybe New York City has claimed the iconography of The Statue too strongly to also represent the country-entire, even though the whole thing’s in what’s rightfully New Jersey, but New York took it for its own through legal finagling. A carrion-feeder just like that bird. Maybe there are just too many bigots for a woman to be allowed that status, let alone a Frenchwoman. Braggadocios snakes waiting to get trampled, bison hunted to near-extinction, same as the eagle. They all failed, however, either victim to the underlying paradoxes of the American experience or because they simply couldn’t apply broadly to all its fractured body-politics. But our perfect representation isn’t any statue or beast. Consider, instead, the humble “Q-Tip”. The cotton swabs for ear-excavations. “Oh,” you might say, “Q-Tips are perfectly American as we can use them so many ways! Cosmetics, glue, little cleaning tasks. Our adaptable American spirit!” But if you said that, you would be wrong.

The Q-Tip says right on the box “Don’t Jam Them in Your Ears, Idiot, You’ll Pop an Eardrum!” and yet 99% of the time, they’re only used as such. That good-good scratch you can only get by shoving a lollipop into an auditory canal. The deep internal massage that will ruin you but make you stupidly happy anyway. Because that is what America really is: a box with a label that says how we’re supposed to use it, as a way of pretending we aren’t all doing the dumb thing we are obviously doing. Hypocrisy as simple legal cover while still doing something dumber-than-hell.

Doing the exact opposite of what we’re saying while maintaining a false narrative, that’s the real American way. That’s our true shared symbol. We’re all just wearing shirts that say “I Don’t Do Stupid Things” while doing stupid things, letting the lies serve as plausible deniability. We are a nation of self-inflicted stab-wounds. Might as well own it. Put it on the money and flag. We jam them right on in there and bleed-out for brief dumb pleasures. It’s sorta-kinda-really who we are.