America might be the shining city on the top of the hill, where speech is free and the soda refills are infinite, but it does have its fair share of peculiarities that are reflected in the acrimonious issues that divide the nation, like abortion, gun control, gender theory, and whether Diet Coke is better than Coke Zero. The inanity was perfectly captured in an SNL skit titled Washington’s Dream, in which America’s founding father explains that the real reason Americans needed freedom from the British was not to ensure liberty, but to implement their own measurement system and grammar.
Jean-Paul Sartre once said: “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you,” and America, with its freedom from Britain and other colonial powers, developed its own peculiarities, one of which is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a night where the press and the White House ostensibly bury their differences over a few shots. Normally, those shots are jokes, like Obama’s anger translator or Reagan dialling in after an assassination attempt, but this year they came from the barrel of a deranged gunman who had managed to waltz past security.
