I am speaking, of course, of the recent French ban on anorexic models and the Chinese prohibition against strippers at funerals.
If you are a bone-thin runway model here in the US, you do not have to worry about the heavy hand of government interference preventing you from looking like a starving refugee for the purpose of gainful employment. Our Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, gave us the Constitutional right to eat or not eat whatever we want. As Americans, we can proudly court diabetes by sinking several double cheeseburgers into our guts at every meal and washing them down with a couple of thick, creamy milkshakes. Or we can take one bite out of an onion ring, exclaim "I'm full!" and then go secretly into the rest room to vomit it up.
Either way, we are exercising our American right to have a profoundly disturbing relationship with food. We are also probably courting an intervention, since minding other people's business and, indeed, videoing it as a possible pilot for another reality TV show, is also a treasured part of our proud national tradition.
So let the French ship their runway models here. And if we have to modify that statue they gave us to have inscribed at its base "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and also any young women who think they can survive on one stalk of celery per day," well, that's a small price to pay to demonstrate our pride in living in this greatest nation on earth.
As an aside here, I hope you all took notice of Mama June's coming out of the closet of nominal heterosexuality last week by revealing that she is bisexual. And I hope you also noticed every hetero guy and every practicing lesbian from one of our shining seas to the other shrug their shoulders and say silently to themselves "Who cares?" when they heard this news.
Because that's our right.
That we Americans don't customarily have strippers at our funerals is no reason for us not to sneer at the Chinese for announcing a ban on ecdysiasts at theirs. In fact, we should seize the opportunity to rectify our trade imbalance with that nation of greedy Communists by offering to bury dead Chinese here, where if you want to have slinky young women gyrate undressed around a pole in a celebration of your recently completed life, no local, state or federal law prohibits it.
Eventually, enough Americans may approve of this practice that we will adopt it for our own funerals, and no one will be considered properly memorialized until a Lap Dance for the Dead is completed.
And we will think, as we stare lustfully at some spectacularly over-endowed and oversexed young performer distracting us from our loss, with tears in our goggled eyes, not only that God should have mercy on the soul of the departed, but that He should also bless America.
Even though it's obvious He has already.