Politics & Power Quote by John Waters

John Waters takes a petty, almost municipal annoyance - no mail on a Monday - and uses it as a pry bar against the whole machinery of “official” reverence. The genius is how he scales the complaint. He starts with the banal consumer inconvenience (the mailbox as a sacred American ritual), then swerves into cultural critique: holidays aren’t just days off, they’re state-approved stories. Calling Columbus Day a “fake holiday” isn’t historically precise; it’s psychologically precise. Waters is attacking the way institutions launder myth into tradition, then dare you to act grateful for it.

The line “If he hadn’t, somebody else would have” is classic Waters: reductive on purpose, a drag-queen deflation of heroic narrative. He’s not trying to adjudicate 1492 so much as puncture the logic of Great Man history, where conquest becomes “discovery” and complexity gets converted into a parade. “Big deal” is the punchline and the thesis, a two-word refusal to genuflect.

Context matters: Waters built a career celebrating bad taste as a moral stance, using vulgarity and deadpan to expose what polite culture hides. Here, the target is civic piety. The subtext isn’t just anti-Columbus; it’s anti-credentialing - the idea that legitimacy comes from being enshrined on a calendar. By yoking colonial myth to interrupted mail service, he makes reverence look like bureaucracy with better PR.