7 Reasons Why We Are Totally Screwed

I am admittedly something of a news junkie, although in recent months, I’ve slacked off a bit. Recently I found myself jonesing once again for some good ol’ fashioned keeping up with world affairs. What a stupid idea that was. After about a week of delving into news blogs and watching nothing but PBS, I am so ready to stop evolving and let the Golden Age of Dolphins begin.

So what are these seven things that I’m talking about? If you’re reading this and aren’t an extraterrestrial, you live on one of them. I’m talking about the seven geopolitical continents of the Planet Earth.

1. North America

Canada’s way too vanilla to speak of, and the only time they come up in the news is because of various copyright laws or cheap medicine for old people. Besides, I’ve never been there, so all I know about it is that they make nice people and mooses and maple syrup, and also some of them are Frenchish. So instead I’m going to look at things here at home. The United States are so weird it’s not even funny. I have a big, complicated love-hate relationship with this country that is difficult for anyone else to comprehend, unless you are an American, which means you know exactly what I’m talking about. We’ve got all the money and power and guns and artery-clogging food in the world, and nobody here seems to know what the fuck we’re doing these days. I don’t. The people in Washington don’t. We’ve got an election coming up and we don’t even know what’s up with that. What we do know is that the world hates us. We’re just too socially retarded to do anything about it, so in the meantime, we’re just going to keep exporting our most horrendous television shows and spreading our Orwellian corporations around like syphilis.

The irony is that while everybody hates us, they seem to adopt our fashion sense and our slang. We’re like the popular girls at school. Bitchy, yes, but you still try to hang out with them for reasons that only your raging adolescent hormones can rationalize.

2. South America

I could talk about the various appalling political bullshit in South America, but as I am not an expert on the topic, I will instead tell you why I will never go to this region of the Southern Hemisphere, no matter how kick ass Carnaval or Machu Picchu may be. Are you ready for it?

The motherfucking human bot fly.

Bot flies are the worst thing on the face of the planet, beating out meth addiction, gamma ray bursts, and young-Earth creationists. See, bot flies, devious little antichrists that they are, somehow use mosquitoes to spread their eggs around. This means eggs going into your bloodstream. This means larvae attaching themselves any damn place they please. And then they grow. And then – oh sweet merciful Zeus – they hatch. This takes a couple weeks. If you never want to eat anything again, ask me sometime about the friend of a friend who came home with one of these bastards in his toe. Ask me how he got it out. Really, ask me. I need to share the pain with somebody. There are a bevy of gruesome home remedies for these monstrosities, which leads me to conclude that everyone in South America has bot flies all the time.

“Avoid loud deep sounds as this causes the larva to vibrate and bury deeper into the flesh.” Reading things like that is what makes people atheists.

And do please take note of the fact that these are the human bot flies, which means that there is a whole species evolved just for using us kindly folks as larvae incubators. On the interwebs, there exists a photograph of a preserved human brain with a horrifying fat wormy thing in the middle of it. I will spare you this picture, as it will cause me nightmares for the remainder of my life. Speaking of my life, it will be very long, because I am not going to South America where the bot flies live.

It doesn’t stop there, either. Tapeworms. Angry angry amoebae. A cornucopia of very hungry protozoae. I typically love our buggy little friends, but seriously, parasites can burn in hell.

3. Europe

Ahh, Europe. Home of historical ruins, funny cheeses, and a sense of cool that is always ten years late. Teasing about neon Speedos and bad phonetic English singing aside, there’s not a lot of bad things to say about Europe these days. Western Europe seems to have its business together pretty well. The few places I’ve visited thereabouts I’ve totally loved, even though I always feel a little violated by having to spend the equivalent of eight US dollars on an effing cup of coffee. Eastern Europe needs a fair bit of work as far as safe drinking water and not marrying off their thirteen-year-old daughters goes, but there really are worse places to be, and that whole EU thing seems to be helping them along nicely.

Though I am generalizing a bit here, many Europeans also seem to be a lot healthier than those of us here across the pond, and I don’t just mean because they can’t make proper cheeseburgers to save their lives. (Brits, take note: burgers do not have breadcrumbs and egg in them. That’s meatloaf. We would’ve explained that to you sooner, but we were too busy throwing a tea party in Boston. Hey-o!). For the most part, the culture around alcohol is a lot smarter, seeing as how they actually let their kids have a humble cup of wine with dinner, instead of thinking at the magic age of twenty-one they’ll instantly have the good sense not to hammer down a pack of Natty Ice and six shots of Jager before falling asleep in their own vomit. Sure, they smoke like chimneys, but they ironically exercise beforehand, and they’re all about the green energy. Gun ranges are out, art museums are in (and free!). Everybody goes to college, and even the pot-smoking Dutch speak about seven languages each and can talk your head off about world politics with such informed clarity that it could make you weep with envy.

Yes, with the exception of a few little habitual racist squabbles here and there, Europe seems to be doing ok. This means that fairly soon, they’re going to become so smug that we’re going to have to bomb them just on principle.

4. Australia

Australians are the world’s coolest convicts, and everybody knows it. However, everything in Australia will either poison or eat you or both. Seriously, all Australian wildlife is poisonous. I think Aussies themselves can spit venom a distance of ten feet. If they’re not poisonous, then they’re either (a) not from Australia, or (b) covered in spines. Or claws. Everything has claws, even the fluffy ones. Yes indeed, the cuddly things are just lying to you about how cute they are. Koalas? They can ruin your face, and sources confirm that they are meaner than crocodiles. Kangaroos? They apparently can box, which is unsettling, almost as unsettling as having womb pockets on their tummies. Wombats? I’m sure they can kill you too, we just haven’t heard about it yet because no one has come back from a wombat attack alive. Yes, Australia is the disarmingly charming breeding ground for the meanest things Mother Nature can cook up. It’s only a matter of time before they grow wings and kill us all in a blood frenzy of fuzzy, adorable death.

Australia: Australian for AAAAH GOD MY FACE IT’S ON MY FACE.

5. Africa

Most non-African people are total idiots when it comes to Africa. First of all, we all seem to think that the entire ginormous continent of Africa (which can fit both China and Western Europe in it easily) is one giant savanna filled with starving children and bare-breasted women with odd piercings. Ok, noobs. Please guess where the city pictured above is located.

If you said anything other than Africa, you are fail, namely because this is the section entitled “Africa”, but also because that’s the capital of Nigeria.

Yes, there are some HUGE humanitarian issues in Africa, but to equate them all to the same place and problem is downright insulting. And on those humanitarian issues, most Westerners are notoriously dumb. True, there are some people over there who get it and are doing some righteously good work.  But a lot of what you get is along the lines of “OMG they keep killing endangered antelopes and and why can’t they just learn to farm and respect their planet and stop killing their neighbors?” Dunno. Maybe it’s because up until about twenty-five years ago, a bunch of self-righteous white people had been raping their countries for a century or two, saying things like “OMG you can’t hunt antelopes for food, instead we’re going to trophy hunt them into extinction, and OMG your traditional farms are wrong so we’re going to build ones like in Europe, only oops, you have a seasonal rainfall system, and farming designed for temperate zones will cause your animals to overgraze and suck the soul out of your arable land, thereby making your farmland unusable for decades to come, oh and also we’re going to draw completely arbitrary borders around your lands so that we’ll mix together communities that have been at war forever, LOL.”

So you’ve got a bunch of demoralized, impoverished, totally shafted people who understandably don’t trust folks of European stock, living in lands where you can’t even grow dirt anymore, right alongside their ancestral blood enemies. Mix that with a bunch of (mostly) painfully naive celebrity activists who haven’t bothered to learn about the underlying social and political injustices. This should end well.

6. Asia

Southeast Asia keeps getting pwned by tsunamis and earthquakes, India is a nation of totally gorgeous telemarketers that make one of my favorite cuisines in the known universe, and Japan is populated entirely by robots who love tentacle porn. But let’s focus on the place that’s been pissing off the entire world lately – China. Yes, China has been a complete bastard to the Tibetan people since the 1950’s, and the friendly Buddhists in question are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. China, predictably, is being stupid about it and doing things like trying to deny that protests were going on even though YouTube clearly showed us that, um, yes, people are protesting. So now they’re doing fun things like censoring the internet even more than usual and arresting everyone. Yes, everyone. I’m fairly certain everybody in China is under arrest right now.

However, one of the stupider results of this is the Olympics, which for reasons I don’t understand is not being hugely boycotted. Because societal injustices be damned, we’ve got to know who’s the best in the high-jump! The human race is entirely devoid of logic when it comes to our priorities.

Also, according to political maps, the Middle East is part of Asia, and god knows that’s an awesome place to be right now. Reading about the astronomical mess that is the Iraq War is probably the most frustrating thing you can do. Seriously, does anybody know what the hell is going on over there? Does anyone in charge know? Did they ever? I already know the answer to those rhetorical questions, and it just made me smash my face into the desk.

7. Antarctica

Oh, shit.