Dinosaur Costumes
My uncle stopped buying American peanuts. My aunt swore off McDonald’s. A friend gave up a certain genre of entertainment—the specifics don’t matter. These were small acts of spite, which felt like the only honest response to 2016. Trump happened, and America became optional, something you could simply boycott like a bad coffee brand.
The thing that made it sting is that America obviously had other modes. Liberals, feminists, YouTube, all the creative chaos sitting next to the cruelty. But knowing something in theory is different from actually living with it. When a place keeps choosing its worst version, I started wondering if that’s not just what it is, and everything else is the exception.
John Oliver, whose job is spending forty minutes every week explaining what’s broken about America, decided to make a different argument. He said people should appreciate America for what it does right. And his examples were beautiful in their absurdity: YouTube. Dinosaur costumes. A bed that looks like the Batmobile. The fact that somewhere in the American brain, someone imagined a Batmobile bed, made it real, and sold it to strangers.
And it works. You can’t hate a country that invented that. You can try—it feels noble—but then the dinosaur costume shows up and you’re standing there holding your principles and grinning anyway.
Maybe Oliver’s actual point is that you can’t judge a whole place by its worst politicians. America makes both monsters and art, builds Batmobile beds and concentration camps. You can hate the second without being able to quite hate the first. The absurdity is part of the real thing, as real as the cruelty.
I can’t hate America either. I tried during those years, and it felt right. But it was always going to be an act. Too much of what I care about came from there—culture, design, the permission to be strange.
Maybe that’s America’s real superpower: it does something unforgivable, and then it invents something so utterly weird that you have to forgive it anyway. My uncle can keep his peanut boycott. I think we’re all stuck with some version of love for the place, whether we admit it or not.