Report: White people still not certain what Cinco de Mayo is really about

WASHINGTON — Americans will drink tequila and eat guacamole today to celebrate a holiday a new report says few Caucasians completely understand.

“Even halfway through the research, it became pretty clear that white people have little-to-no clue about the reason Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo,” said Juan Tavares, president of The Mexican Coalition for Understanding — the organization that commissioned the study. “Most non-Mexicans only thought it was a festival centered either around tequila or seven-layer dip. Piñatas were also frequently mentioned.”

Many Americans who ventured an actual guess as to the celebration’s origins thought it was Mexico’s Independence Day, which is actually on September 16. But, the Cinco de Mayo holiday actually commemorates the over-matched Mexican army’s defeat of powerful French forces on May 5, 1862 in the Battle of Puebla.

In fact, the holiday is primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla and sporadically throughout the rest of the country.

“I know it has something to do with Mexico, that’s why I’m buying the three T’s — tortillas, Tecate and tequila — but that’s all I really know,” Steve Wilson said.

Wilson, a 25-year-old TV salesman at the Silver Springs Best Buy, is planning a fiesta with his girlfriend and an overwhelmingly white collection of their friends. It was unclear whether there would be a piñata, but Wilson said, for sure, he would be taking tomorrow off with a “huge ass tequila hangover.”

According to Tavares, this is a pretty typical gringo celebration of Cinco de Mayo. Most white people get together at what they call a fiesta, buy some brightly colored paper plates, wear sombreros, drink tequila — to excess — drunkenly swing at piñatas and eat chips, salsa, guacamole, he added.

Although it is the most visible sign of the gringo’s misunderstanding of Cinco de Mayo, it certainly isn’t the only one.

“I love Cinco de Mayo, but I’ve always kind of wondered why it was on May 5th every year,” Wilson said.

General Motors gets a little more specific

Yesterday was sad. GM announced it plans on cutting 21,000 jobs and four brands in an attempt dredge some profitability out of the murky waters of near-bankruptcy. Soon, we’ll also be sorrowfully waving bye-bye to Pontiac, Saturn, Saab and Hummer.

This really marks the end for those dedicated few still waiting for the release of a new Pontiac Aztek. And, with the phase-out of Hummer, experts are estimating that it will now be 143 percent harder to automatically identify a douchebag.

“Without Hummers, douchebags may be forced to drive ‘normal people’ cars — hiding themselves from the untrained eye,” said David Baker, the head of the automotive division of The Douche Institute — a not-for-profit that works to educate the public about how to identify and avoid a douchebag. “But the period of blending in won’t be long. You can never underestimate the doucheyness of these douchebags. The Hummer may be gone, but they’ll find another vehicle to turn into a lighthouse for douchebags and humongous fucking tools everywhere.”

The loss of the Saab brand also pangs my heart a bit. Where are the pretentious going to put their “You must be Categorically Impaired” bumper stickers? Or their “Fair Trade or NO Trade” stickers? What will become of all the unstuck “Gore/Leibermann 2000” and “My other car is a compost-and-hummus-burning motorized unicycle” bumper stickers? I guess they’ll all have to be framed and hung over the stacks of Morrissey, Radiohead and Dave Matthews Band CDs, or encased in the glass coffee tables that hold America’s stacks of McSweeney’s Quarterlies.

Reality TV stars get married, for real. We think.

The gays are getting married in Iowa. Well, that probably effectively eliminates the Hawkeye State from getting a spot on the Glenn Beck Comedy Extravaganza Tour — you know, the one that will make Carlos Mencia look like Richard fucking Pryor, by comparison. OK, maybe not Pryor. But George Lopez.

Frankly, I’m happy for those same-sex couples getting hitched in Iowa. And, maybe that will soften the rest of the often-frigid Midwest to the idea that same-sex couples deserve to have the same rights as straight couples.

After all, if Spencer and Heidi — from The Hills’ fame — are allowed to get married, gay and lesbian couples definitely should be able to.

I’m much more comfortable with the idea of millions of loving same-sex couples finally getting to honor their feelings in the same way straight couples have been allowed to for hundreds of years than the thought of a blond-white-goateed Willem-Dafoe knockoff marrying a skeleton with breast implants. Here’s an idea: let’s ban fake-reality-TV-star marriage.

If you think a man marrying another man is trampling on the sacred institution of marriage, but don’t think a wedding between two hologram-thin caricatures of the decline of humanity — not to mention a divorce rate hovering around 50 percent, nationally — has any affect on the bonds of matrimony, you probably already have your Glenn Beck standup tickets.

The whole Spencer and Heidi thing could just be scripted. The rest of their fucking lives seem to be. Instead of following the fake-celebrity-marriage bullshit as it plays out on the covers of check-stand publications, why not watch some real-life love stories finally get the socially legitimate ending the protagonists have been seeing in the movies since the invention of the medium?

Oh God! I just had this horrible thought: what if these Hills “stars” multiply? They’ll spit out a dozen new reality TV personalities that will work in packs to lower the collective IQ of the country another 50 points. We’ll barely have the brainpower to run all of our basic functions. I’d much rather my kid be a homosexual than a reality TV star.



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