The Eagle Has Landed by JeFF Stumpo

So the thing you need to know about Americans
Is that we’re taught by popular media
That when a bald eagle opens its mouth
It sounds like a heavy metal guitar riff
And a hair band singer screaming
But actually the noise they use for bald eagles
In all the commercials and movies and things
Is a red tailed hawk
Because bald eagles sound like
There’s a seagull nearby throwing its voice
And the other thing you need to know
Is that Benjamin Franklin
Wanted our national bird to be the turkey
But obviously that didn’t happen
Probably because nobody could tell
Whether Ben was working on some complex metaphor
Like Declaration of Independence level shit
Or if he was just trolling everybody
Because you should also know
That Benjamin Franklin fucked with everybody
A lot
And he wasn’t actually an inventor
Or much of a scientist
He was just really good at branding
Also he went to France as a diplomat
And spent much of his time
I shit you not
Playing chess in the bathtub with a noblewoman
And/or porking French babes
While wearing a coonskin cap
I’m serious, y’all, he loved wearing that thing
And not the tricorn you see in the Disney mouse cartoon
And while we’re at it
Ben ran a printing press
And the printing press was not invented by Gutenberg
The Chinese invented the printing press
Like, centuries before that
Gutenberg invented movable type
So that you didn’t have to carve an entire page
Into a single block of wood or metal
You could take apart the first page of the Bible
And reassemble the letters to make the second page
Or whatever
I’m working up to some sort of complex metaphor here
Declaration of Independence level shit
Where Franklin and the other Founding Fathers
And a healthy dose of Abigail Adams
Keeping John from going off the fucking deep end
“Remember the ladies” and all that
Spoiler alert: they forgot the ladies
Anyways, so Adams and Jefferson and Franklin
Are all, hey, here’s these systems of government
From Rome and Greece and the Iroquois Nation
Let’s gumbo the fuck outta this stuff
And then call indigenous peoples savages
To keep street cred with the Old World
And gumbo is mostly a Louisiana thing
Which was French territory around this time
Until Jefferson completely undermines Congress
And cuts the Louisiana Purchase
What I’m saying is that give or take
A couple hundred years
Thomas Jefferson is responsible for turducken
This is the least of his sins, y’all
I’m just saying
Some people wrap a chicken in a duck in a turkey
And some people wrap themselves in the flag
I guaran-fucking-tee you Benjamin Franklin
Would have flipped his shit for turducken
He would have proposed that as the national bird
What is more American than that
A bird in a bird in a bird
We’re three times the country
America is a shit-ton of countries
Wearing each other as hats
Ben Franklin in his coonskin cap
Pounding away
Like he’s got a heavy metal soundtrack
Its in our national DNA to put each other over the barrel
Every year we give thanks
By stuffing a turkey
You’re welcome for ruining dinner
Somebody is going to tell me this is too extreme
That there’s gotta be an America between
Porn star Ben-jammin Franklin
And whatever serious shit they taught you in school
Fine, fine
Just remember that sometimes compromise looks like
Halfway between two extremes
And sometimes it looks like
3/5 of a person
I’m just saying
That it was illegal to kill bald eagles
Before it was illegal to kill Native Americans
I’m just saying that wrapped up in all the insanity
You just find smaller madnesses
I’m just saying
That I’ve been rearranging these words all week
And hoping they say something different this time

JeFF Stumpo has been a lot of things – part-time professor, slam poet, bookstore owner – but these days he’s mostly the prologue to his daughter’s novel.