General

Hot Dogs Are as American as Heart Attacks

Jul 22, 2008, 3:15 PM UTC

America, I don’t even know who you are anymore. At one point, you were proud to die just like your forefathers and foremothers: face down in the living room, stone dead from the heart attack you richly deserved after years of eating delicious fatty roasts and doubling up on three-martini lunches. The only other acceptable manner of dying was cancer, and if and only if you got it after a lifetime of smoking and riding a horse simultaneously, or perhaps from staring directly at one too many nuclear tests. â†µâ†µAnd now you’re too good for this? You must be. Only a nation happily hammering away at the very foundations it stands on would accept a vegetarian substitute for hot dogs at baseball games, and then dare to call it American. â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥“I said, ‘How more American can you get?’ ” McCloy says of her Denver radio experience. “This is a nation of immigrants, this is a nation of diversity, this is a nation of opportunity, this is a nation of saying ‘yes’ to everybody. How are you threatened by a couple of people to your left at a baseball game choosing to eat something other than what you’re eating?”â†µâ†µ

How are we threatened? Because since time immemorial, baseball has remained unchanged. First, I do nothing for four hours but drink beer, yell at an umpire randomly, and clap along to such organ classics as “The Chicken Dance” and “DUH-duh duh duh DUH duh duh duh DUH.” Then, in a drunken stupor, I order a tube of meat stuffed with all of the odious chunks normally only consumed by Anthony Bourdain and the nation of France, but redeemed by the fact that it has been stuffed into a tube made of the animal’s intestinal lining. This sounds disgusting to an extreme, but with mustard, it can be transcendent and acceptable to family and friends. â†µâ†µThen, stunned by the 5000 milligrams of nitrates and traces of rat poison in the hot dog, I fall asleep in the sixth inning and wake only when the PA plays “Song 2” to wake everyone else up at the end of the game. Rinse, wash, repeat, and if I’m lucky I die sometime in the next 30-50 years of a massive heart attack or the skin cancer I cultivated passed out drunk in the sun. â†µ

â†µâ†µIf I’m eating Veggie dogs? I might actually die of old age, Ms. McCloy, and I can’t have that. Vikings don’t wait to go to Valhalla. They run charging right at it, ma’am, as I intend to do one fatal meat bullet at a time. â†µ

â†µâ†µIn summary: Commies. All of you. Every last @#$(@&! one of you. â†µ

â†µâ†µSincerely,
â†µSpencer Hall, Meat-adoring Death Fiend â†µ

â†µ

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

See More: