Watching the 4th of July on YouTube

YouTube is America, America is YouTube. At least, there’s no vaster depository for sitcom clips, country music videos, pop culture detritus, and amateur American filmography than the glorious black hole that is YouTube. So, this Fourth of July, I peered into it. Just to see how America celebrates its birth online, on its premier video-sharing platform. That’s right, mothers, we made YouTube. Youku? Please. Just a cheap knockoff.

This is how it’s done. This is how America digitally celebrates its independence—with infomercials for right-wing rituals, bizarre overdubbed Star Trek mashups, and pointlessly time-consuming model-building.

So the flag, the great striped icon you’ll see flapping around above people puking at barbecues, is a good place to start. You will be surprised to discover that lots of people really, really love the American flag. There are numerous tributes on YouTube to that inanimate piece of cloth that adorns the corners of public school classrooms and government buildings. The one I’ve selected above begins by featuring a clip of baseball player Rick Monday rescuing one such piece of fabric from hippie flag-burners who’d stormed the ballpark in the middle of a 4th of July baseball game.

The rest is a screed against “so-called patriots” who don’t even fold the flag the right way.

I don’t know what the hell this is, or why it exists. I take that back; I do know why it exists, and that’s because YouTube exists. I don’t know why a random extra has been overdubbed to sing about 4th of July to the tune of Blitzkrieg Bop with along Spock and the original Star Trek cast, but I learned to stop asking questions about such things a long time ago.

This is certainly the creepiest entry. This guy, who has named an unaccredited, ultraconservative online university after himself, has children reciting little aphorisms he wrote about freedom and liberty around a picnic table. Then, he employs an array of symbolic knickknacks to represent America: they drink tea for the Tea Party and eat salty pretzels that stand for the tears shed by the wives of patriots who died in the Revolutionary War. It’s like a Fox News seder. Start 1:40 in or so to skip to the weird.

This video has nearly half a million views. That is all.

This kept popping up while I was searching for “the 4th of July” in YouTube, so I’m including it. I think the beginning segment, the excruciating minute and a half before the excruciating song begins, is supposed to celebrate diversity and America’s greatness. Then it cuts to David Lee Roth in assless chaps.

This is kind of a perfect summation of American YouTubery—guy undertakes project involving lots of tiny pieces that’s long and boring, uses neat-o effects to speed it up, savvily bases the whole thing around a ubiquitous event for maximum exposure/SEO.

Happy 4th of July, indeed.

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