I hate America and other adventures in the rag trade

I know that Ariana Grande's declaration that she hates America should offend me greatly, but since I'd never heard of her before she said that she hated America I would say that she has accomplished the purpose of her saying she hated America in the first place: I have now heard of her. I still have no idea what she does, but then I don’t get out much. I gather that she is some kind of entertainer, which actually covers a lot of ground—entertainers these days run the gamut from opera singers to baseball players to presidential candidates to porn stars, that she is fairly young, and that I am probably not her target demographic. She may even, for all I know, stand nude on her head atop the Army—Navy recruiting station in Times Square and spit nickels at the gawking crowds of tourists in the street below. Nickel spitting was very big in the 1920’s, but fashions come and go, and so nickel spitting went the way of Prohibition, the Charleston, and the bee’s knees.  This is unfortunate, I think; when I was a boy, you could still see nickel spitters from the Twenties plying their art at street fairs and carnivals, but they had no followers, no novices eager to learn the arcane intricacies of the art, and so nickel spitting had died out by the end of the first Bush presidency. I wish it hadn’t; nickel spitting was fun to watch. There are few arts that provide as much artistic fulfillment to the artist and financial rewards to the audience as nickel spitting does. But I digress.

In any case, the fact that Ariana Grande hates America is, for me, one of life's great irrelevancies, right up there with knowing that aglets are those plastic tips at the end of your shoelaces. The word may or may not have something to do with Texas A&M and that university’s football team, the Aggies, but probably does not; cowboy boots do not have shoelaces so the connection to Texas seems tenuous at best, and it does not seem likely that the university would name a girl’s team the Aglets. That sort of name smacks of sexism and there is nothing that a modern American university wants to avoid more than anything else nowadays than someone accusing it of an –ism.  –Isms are very bad, you see, and lead to upset stomachs and probably gas as well and therefore best avoided in the first place, if at all possible.