By Tom Wheadon
managing feature
Meet John America Smith. Yes, America is his middle name.
In 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a 12 year old John Smith was already waiting there with an American flag and an apple pie. Four years later, Smith and his pet bald eagle (named George Washington) went back in time and slapped Joseph Stalin in the face, screaming “this is what capitalism feels like.”
When he turned 18 in 1975, Smith signed up for the military. He was deployed to Vietnam (where the US was on its last legs.) During his short stay there he defended a small village using only a baseball and a copy of the constitution, converted over 5000 Viet Cong just by singing the Star-Spangled Banner and helped spread Christianity to a devout Buddhist region. Many experts say that America would have won the war if Smith had been deployed just a year earlier.
Upon returning to the US in 1980, John Smith won the Olympics. Yes, he won the whole thing. This is even more impressive considering America didn’t even take part that year. Not long after this, Smith started a business and became a billionaire; later using his money to start a charity called Feed the World. And that’s exactly what he did. He literately stopped world hunger.
Smith stayed out of the spotlight for a while, (popular rumours suggest he was acting as President Ronald Reagan’s personal adviser) but he resurfaced in 1990 when he was seen tearing down the Berlin wall with his bare hands.
As you can probably see, John America Smith is a pretty amazing guy. Back in 2000, he decided to run to be the President of the United States, believing he had the knowledge, raw patriotism and qualifications to lead the country. However, his bid for the White House didn’t end the way he anticipated.
You see, Smith had one little problem: his political ideology. He couldn’t be defined by a single word; he was neither a Republican nor Democrat; conservative or liberal, Cameron or Eric. No, he had thought about every economic and social issue separately, and reached his own (but informed) conclusions. Because of this, he was able to see things from both sides of the political spectrum, and could remove himself from bipartisan bickering because he didn’t belong to a party.
This may sound like a good quality, but he was shunned by both the right and left for this, forcing him to run as an independent, or third party candidate. And with that, his hopes and dreams died. No major media outlet gave him a considerable amount of time, he was excluded from presidential debates, and he was perceived as a wasted vote.
But like a true American, Smith did not give up. He decided to run again in 2008, when America was caught up in the idea of change. However, despite his superior intellect, Smith had gotten the wrong idea. He thought change meant, well, change. A step away from two competing rigid ideologies, and a step towards a system where politicians didn’t pledge their allegiance to a party, but instead, to America and its people.
Two weeks ago, Smith died of a heart attack after watching a GOP debate. Due to his unparalleled contributions to this country, there is currently a petition online to name America’s future moon base (vote Gingrich 2012) Smithtown in his honor.
What a guy. What a guy.
