America Changes Name!
DATELINE: MAY 11, 2016
Country was concerned about being conflated by a crappy beer
Well, that was fast.
The words “United States of America” have defined this country for more than two centuries, and are embedded into the Constitution, millions of lines of law and court precedent, hundreds of national institutions, and the very consciousness of the nation. The concept seemed indestructible, immovable, permanent in a way that few things in this world are.
Until yesterday, anyway.
After the beer giant Budweiser (NYSE: ADR) announced that they would be renaming their eponymous flagship beer to “America,” the immovable object was moved with surprising alacrity.
“There are many things that people associate with the name ‘America,’” President Obama stated in his speech after signing the constitutional amendment into law. "Some of them are good: the American Dream, the hard-working American people, American values.
"Some of our enemies, and even some of our closest allies, associate the name of America with hatred, with intolerance, with tragedies both in recent history, as well horrors dating back to when the first Europeans set foot on this continent. America has endured the latter because who we are, what that name represents to us, represents a willingness to be better, to rise above any darkness in our past and to make the name ‘America’ a beacon to this world by being the best at whatever we do!
“Sadly, yesterday, we found out just how far that willingness goes. I would like to thank the House and the Senate for moving so quickly on this crucial matter; my historian tells me that this is the first Constitutional Amendment to pass both the House and the Senate by unanimous consent. There are some things that we just cannot share a name with in good conscience, and it took extraordinary effort to make sure that this atrocity could not stand. Welcome, my friends, to the United States of Washingtonia!”
With the passing of legislature in all fifty states taking only a matter of a few hours, the Thirty-Fourth Amendment passed into law in an unprecedented timeframe for any law, much less one so-far reaching. Alaska and Nevada are both claiming that they represent the crucial state that put the act over the 38 state threshold needed to ratify the amendment.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both suspended their presidential campaigns for the day in order to update their materials with the new name; Sanders continued his campaign, stating only, “We did the right thing today, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
Budweiser could not be reached for comment.
