(Re)Introduction to the Nation of Todd
April 1, 2025
About fourteen years ago a blog appeared on the internet entitled The After Party. It never got much attention, or gained many followers, and it didn’t last long. We at Nation of Todd were the creators of that blog, and while we regret forsaking it for our subsequent upward mobility, we were and still are proud of its content, and are surprised it still exists. We can say without reservation that we were not in any way responsible for the synonymous sitcom and movie that have come out during the intervening years. We’re sure that both of those projects have some cultural merit, though we’re not personally capable of pointing it out, or willing to waste our time searching for it. That said, let’s not dwell on the past, and let’s not quibble over who has the rights to any future use of that title or phrase. The After Party was yesterday’s jam, and while we would like to resurrect it in some form, we’re probably not capable of reanimating it with the same life that it once had. Its life was our life, and our life has changed. When we used to say, “What the Fuck America? Grow up!” we never expected that it would happen, not to America, and not to ourselves. And while no case can be made that America has in fact matured, one might be made for the Nation of Todd.
Unfortunately for us, this case can only be made negatively, by which we mean, our maturity can only be measured by how far we’ve sunk into the very morass of American identity we’d sought to avoid. Like we’ve said before, we are one of you, we are American, and while this experiment is principally a project of excoriation, it is also one of self-abuse. Nation of Todd was an attempt to gain some distance from its progenitor, to remake the idea of a self and a nation in a way that coincided with the idiosyncratic, the peculiar way in which an individual experienced the world. Which all sounds pretty idealistic to us now that we have a mortgage, a car payment, and a 401(k). It’s been years since we’ve petitioned the United Nations for recognition as a harassed nation state, or sent the IRS a manifesto proclaiming their unsolicited shakedown letters as terrorist threats against our national sovereignty. You see, back then, we had nothing. Our nation was pure, and whole, and self-righteous. We would have been happy to warm our hands at the fire as America burned. Not like we harbored any post-apocalyptic fantasies of domination or retribution; we were just tired (and frankly are still tired) of being conflated with the petty and cruel impulses of our American government. Why do they do the things they do? And what good does it do us? Well, we may have some answers to those questions now that we’re older and wiser. Regrettably, we are no longer in a position to deny our complicity, or our benefit from some of the abhorrent details of this system’s inner workings. We may not be the sausage makers, per se, and may not agree with their processes, but we’re far too invested to deny that we’re the sausage.
So, with that, we welcome you to, The Sausage Party.
We promise we’re not going to call it that.