The time IHOP changed its name to IHOB for like two weeks
Was it stupid? Yes. Was it as stupid as eleven states fighting for four years to maintain the right to own human beings? That’s a big no. So let’s name a cross-country highway after Darren Rebelez, then-president of the International House of Pancakes, just like we named the Jefferson Davis Highway to honor the president of the Confederate States of America.
Fyre Festival
Fyre Festival was a fake music festival put together by a bunch of stupid douchebags in 2017, and the actions of its “CEO,” Billy McFarland, were reprehensible. They were nowhere near as reprehensible, however, as the actions of Henry L. Benning, a Confederate general whose name still stands on Fort Benning, also known as the United States Army Infantry School. Benning was a plantation owner who argued that Georgia should secede from the Union and create a “slavocracy” as early as 1849. He also once complained that abolition would lead to “black governors, black legislators, black juries, black everything” and asked, “Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?” Since we’ve put (and kept) Benning’s name on the Army’s Infantry School, it stands to reason we should at least name a couple of community colleges after ass-faced fraudster Billy McFarland!
The Unicorn Frappuccino
The rainbow tie-dye sugar orgy masquerading as an iced “beverage” from Starbucks was a social media trend a few years back, and it was—objectively speaking—incredibly stupid. Still, the Unicorn Frappuccino didn’t actively work to maintain a slave trade that brought more than 300,000 African people to the United States. In that respect, the Unicorn Frappuccino is very different from Wade Hampton III, a Confederate general from South Carolina who is currently honored with a statue in the United States Capitol Building. Hampton’s “accomplishments” include working tirelessly to restore white rule after Reconstruction and becoming governor of South Carolina with the help of the Red Shirts, a white supremacist paramilitary group who suppressed black voting with extensive violence. So let’s give the Unicorn Frappuccino three Venti-sized statues in the Capitol and maybe also a fresco or two—after all, Hampton has a statue there and he sucks way harder than a stupid Instagram trend.
The movie Gigli
One thing pretty much everyone can agree on is that Gigli was stupid. It was very, extremely, incredibly stupid. Even so, Gigli has nothing on Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan whose 25-foot-tall statue still looms over I-65 outside Nashville to this day. Among many other heinous acts, Forrest is known for the Fort Pillow Massacre of 1864, in which he and his troops massacred primarily black Union soldiers who had already surrendered at Fort Pillow in what was called at the time “one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history.” So since Forrest still has a big highway statue in Tennessee, we should probably build a full temple on that road to the movie Gigli, with several dozen sculptures of the original Bennifer and a shrine to writer/director Martin Brest.
The Cinnamon Challenge
The Cinnamon Challenge happened when the internet collectively decided it was good and fun for people to film themselves trying to eat a spoonful of cinnamon and upload the video to YouTube. And while people later learned that the cinnamon challenge carried substantial health risks and was therefore actually incredibly stupid, it doesn’t hold a candle to the state of Mississippi, which knew very well the human toll of slavery, and yet still joined the Confederacy on January 9th, 1861 because it considered itself “thoroughly identified with the position of slavery,” going so far as to call it “the greatest material interest of the world.” Mississippi continues to honor that “position” to this day by putting the Confederate battle flag—in full—on its own state flag. As a result, it only seems fair that we commemorate the way-less-bad Cinnamon Challenge by placing a pair of crossed cinnamon sticks in the upper left quadrant of the state flag of all 50 states and probably on the American flag as well.
Basically, as long as we’ve named streets in Southern towns after racist Confederate idols, we should probably be naming entire Southern towns after flossing.