All Hail Gritty, Chaos-God of America

I spoke a little bit about the American Mythos in my article about the Star-Spangled Banner and why the song sucks. Long story short, the United States functions by its own strange cultish mythology; praise be to Uncle Sam, the Statue of Liberty, the primordial boy band that resides inside of Mount Rushmore, and the sweet stars and stripes of the ol’ American Flag. And sometimes I think the symbol-worship goes a bit too far; for instance, some people get all worked up when a sportsperson doesn’t stand up to sing the overrated song at the piece of cloth. And sometimes, I appreciate these figures. I, for one, very much enjoyed when the Statue of Liberty came to life in Ghostbusters II and beat up the ghosts or whatever. (I haven’t seen the movie in quite some time.)

So, that being said, I’d be remiss if I said that the United States doesn’t have a culture. It does. We absolutely do evoke names of historic figures like they’re saints or petty deities. The right wing hails to Reagan and Nixon and Body Double of a Russian Potato Farmer Donald Trump, people who emit staunch strongman patrio-nationalist vigor. The left wing, in turn, has peacekeepers and peanut farmers and social activists who are seen for their strengths and, typically, have their faults forgiven or forgotten. And obviously there are other characters in this modern American mythology, stemming from mascots of the brands that neo-capitalist America hails to: Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, Wendy the Sassy Twitter Troll, et cetera. But there’s one figure who’s risen to prominence that I view as sort of a trickster god. Every good mythology has one, and up until now, we’ve been lacking. I’m talking about Gritty.

Gritty’s sort of been existing in the undercurrents of American culture since his debut a little over two years ago. He is the mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers. He looks like a weird orange hobo in a Flyers jersey, and the internet ate him up. He had meme potential, and the memelords took advantage. John Oliver went so far as to compare him to Frat Boy turned Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, stating that Gritty, like Brett, had no right to be wherever he was. But I think Mr. Oliver’s assignment of Gritty to a beacon of terror and despair was misguided. Here’s why.

We are smack-dab in the middle of a very important presidential election, and the way things are going, this race could be called by the results from the Great(ish) City of Philadelphia. Obviously, this is troubling for a number of reasons, first and foremost that it is, in fact, Philadelphia. It is a city that can’t decide whether it’s happy-rioting or angry-rioting, can’t decide whether they love or hate their sports teams, can’t decide an awful lot of things. But here they are, turning up in droves, ready to elect the new leader of I guess what’s called the Free World. And emblazoned on battle flags and jerseys is our God of Chaos. Gritty is there. At the changing of the ages, Gritty is there.

Gritty is a trash can fire that tips over and spreads for a city block. You can see in his eyes that he is an entity of chaos, a fire of rebirth, and maybe that’s what we need right now in this chapter of American history. Our mythology is problematic, and that’s why statues have been getting torn down. We are waking up to the realization that the aspects of our history that we value should not be valued, and as a result, our mythos has been called into question. Mount Rushmore was carved into a stolen Native American sacred site. Christopher Columbus did genocide. George Washington owned slaves, and Alexander Hamilton trafficked them. And some people will cite that “times were different back then,” but if times were different, doesn’t that mean that these people we idolize don’t share our values? What do we learn from them if their ideas are so far behind ours? A great weight needs to be shrugged off our shoulders. The mythos needs to be modernized. At the helm? Gritty.

It’s almost poetic that the changing of eras is decided by the city that Gritty haunts. Maybe he was meant to be at the forefront of the final battle of this election season. By being present at such a historic moment, Gritty can rocket from weird countercultural meme to a figure in the American Mythos, and I look forward to that. Gritty is, after all is said and done, a cleansing flame. I believe he can illuminate for all of us a greater America, help replace statues of enslavers with liberators, nationalism with humanity, and unpleasant chaos with the pleasant kind of chaos: abrupt positive change.

Epilogue: Right before I submitted this article for review, the state of Pennsylvania was called in favor of Joe Biden. Election Night 2020 was such a despairing moment in American history for a lot of people, where it seemed like Donald Trump would win the election. But this whole week, there has been an uneasy hope that the Democrats would pull through. This is a historic moment. Many figures are going to rise to prominence as a result of that: 46th President of the United States Joe Biden, the first ever African-American, Southeast-Asian, and female Vice President Kamala Harris, and others. But they would not be where they are without the millions of voters who turned up to bring about positive change in this country. I hope Gritty can become the face of that moment.