Excerpt from America, You Sexy Bitch, by Meghan McCain & Michael Ian Black

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

Meghan: As much as I consider myself a Republican and feel in almost every way intellectually and culturally tied to both the Republican Party as an organization and its many shadings of conservative theory, on paper I am in many ways “culturally liberal.” I was born into a wealthy, famous family. I went to an Ivy League school and majored in art history, which means I know a lot about pretentious artists and art critics. I’m a writer and television commentator employed by “the liberal network” MSNBC. I am a huge supporter of and fighter for gay marriage and LGBT rights in this country. I’m unmarried and not completely convinced that the idea of marriage isn’t outdated. I am almost twenty-eight and I do not have children, and I think abstinence-only education is delusional and dangerous. I live in the heart of the West Village in New York City. I consider myself a God-fearing Christian, but I’m also a big believer in karma and sometimes get a feeling like I may have had past lives.

All of that being said, Jesus and I came to an understanding of each other a long time ago and my relationship with him is one of acceptance. My God isn’t Rick Santorum’s God, and my God loves everyone for exactly who they are. My God does not make mistakes. This list can go on and on . . . which is why I have always hated labels and stereotypes about people, especially when it comes to Americans and what exactly it means to be a “real American” or come from “real America.” Because if you adhere to all the stereotypical terms that make someone a “real American,” you will find that, in many ways, I am falling desperately short.

Michael: My feelings of detachment from America changed when I dropped out of school to become Raphael, the silent and brooding Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. In the early nineties, the Ninja Turtles were the shit. Kids loved them, there were a couple movies out, and some enterprising capitalists thought the time was ripe for a touring stage show, kind of like a Turtles on Ice thing without the ice.

Some friends of mine heard they needed a couple people to do local promotional appearances for the show at hospitals, radio stations, and Pizza Huts, the show’s sponsor. It sounded like an easy way to make a few bucks, so we auditioned for the job. After we tried on the costume and shouted “Cowabunga!” a few times, the guy in charge of hiring said, “Great. We need you in Milwaukee on Tuesday.”

Milwaukee? No, we were college students. I had just started my junior year. I couldn’t drop out of university to dance around in a vinyl turtle costume. We laughed about it on the subway home until my buddy Ben started musing out loud about how great it would be to actually get paid to see the country. Now, like any self-respecting proto elitist, I’d read my share of Kerouac, so I had certainly heard the beck and call of the open road. I wanted to see America. I wanted to make money. I wanted a change. The more I thought about it, the more appealing the idea became. By the time we got off the subway, Ben and I had agreed to chuck everything, strap on our twenty-five-pound turtleheads, and seek adventure on the highways and byways of the American heartland. If our mothers said we could.

To my surprise, mine did, with the caveat that I had to return to school and get my degree. I swore up and down that I would.

I did not.

For four months, I crisscrossed the country with Ben in a smelly dark-blue Chevy Astro minivan crowded with luggage and two large coffin cases containing Ninja Turtle costumes. And it was then—on the road, staying at cheap motels, attempting (and failing) to seduce MILFs, and eating more Pizza Hut than a human body should—that I fell in love with America.

Some highlights from that trip: I remember standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon and marveling at how something so weird could also be so big. Another time I was staying at a hotel in Kansas in the middle of the winter, floating in an indoor pool while looking out the half-fogged windows towards a factory in the distance, a giant plume of flame shooting from one of its smokestacks. I remember being on the Mexican border, dressed as Raphael, standing on top of an ice cream shop performing in front of thousands of kids on the ground below; walking the parade route at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, tears streaming down my eyes because the entire weight of the head was resting on the bridge of my nose. I remember standing on top of our van in the middle of the woods somewhere with our hands over our hearts singing “The Star Spangled Banner” and meaning it. But mostly I remember all the people we met: all the good-hearted Americans across the country. Everywhere we stopped, the people of this country were kind and gracious and welcoming. On that trip, pretending to be a turtle granted superpowers due to radioactive sewage, I discovered what it means to love America.

Meghan: I have had a love affair with the Republican Party and its doctrines that began the first day I stepped foot on my father’s presidential campaign. The majority of my twenties, and I expect the rest of my life, will be spent fighting for the soul of the Republican Party to be more accepting and big-tent oriented. I believe my life’s purpose is to change things within the Republican Party, so that at some point it is not considered so controversial to live the kind of life I live and believe in smaller government at the same time. I have been handed a front-row seat to Republican politics, and as I have grown into the person that I am today, I have always felt a great responsibility to pass on my knowledge about politics, share my experiences, and try and bring a fresh perspective on a political party that unfortunately has not always been so warm and welcoming to new ideas. Republican politics is my entire life, and I love it. It is the blood that pumps through my veins. My mother was pregnant with me at the 1984 Reagan convention. Republican politics is quite literally the only world I have ever known and the only world I ever want to know. It is what gets me up in the morning and motivates what I do every single day. I continue to be exhilarated by the process and find joy in my life attempting to help inspire a new way of thinking within Republican Party politics.

I love America on a visceral level that is complicated to explain. I have a great passion for America and what it means to be an American. I love every single thing about being an American, the good and the bad, and I would fight until my last breath to defend all the ideals this country stands for. I even love everything about our crazy political process and the people it produces. And yet, one of the more exhausting parts of my political ideology is that because I have never completely toed the Republican party line. Many hardcore conservatives accuse me of not being a real Republican and have referred to me as a RINO: Republican in name only. Somehow this name is given to anyone who thinks gay people should have the right to marry, or diverge on social issues from the extreme right wing of the party. In the subtle subtext of conservative talk radio and right-wing extremists, apparently this makes me less of a “real” American and not “pure enough” to be considered a legitimate member of the Republican Party in some people’s eyes. As a direct result of my personal experiences with this kind of name calling, I have never been a big fan of labeling people so linearly. Yes, Michael is an East Coast liberal-pacifist-socialist-elitist snob-comedian who has never shot a gun, wants to give away health care, open up the borders, and loves Obama—but that doesn’t make him any less of an American than I am. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping I find out during our trip.

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MEGHAN MCCAIN writes a weekly column for the Daily Beast and is the author of Dirty Sexy Politics. Her new book with Michael Ian Black, is America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom. She lives in New York City.