User:The Baker St. Irregular/MySubPage
This is my article about Pie Day. It is currently a work in progress.
Pie Day[edit | edit source]
Pie Day is the greatest day of the week. Situated between Thursday and Saturday, its only purpose is to provide a formal opportunity to make, serve, and consume large amounts of pie.
History of Pie Day[edit | edit source]
The origins of Pie Day are somewhat conflicted. American children are taught that Pie Day had its roots in the French Revolution. Poor, grubby French peasants, in a symbolic act of rebellion against the Crown, would band together once a week, after a day of back-breaking toil (or in some cases, a day of homeless wandering and getting run over by aristocrats in their fancy, fancy carriages), and eat delicious pie.
This was a dangerous thing for them to do, since pie was outlawed for consumption by peasants by order of Marie Antoinette. They ate their pies, knowing full well they could go to the chopping block for it, or worse, Belgium. Additionally, they also knew it was far less illegal for them to eat cake, an equally delicious dessert that the Queen actually encouraged them to eat. But they were French. Do you think they were going to listen to reason?
As romantic a tribute to freedom and the fight for democracy the story of the pie-eating Frenchies may be, it is, unfortunately, not true. Just like George Washington and the cherry tree, Betsy Ross and the flag, Uncle Sam, and the Spanish-American War, it was a myth devised to propagate a specific American value or ideal. And in the case of Pie Day, it is the immortal patriotic ideal that every American can devote a weekday to pie and pie alone.
History of Pie Day for Realz[edit | edit source]
It was the 1950s. America had beaten the ever-loving fuck out of the Nazis and bombed their way out of an otherwise devastating Pacific campaign. The swagger the country gained from WWII had propelled it into an era of liking Ike
, suburban houses, shiny cars, segregation, diners, and overall really swell, hunky-dory times. But always overhead was the grim specter of communism.
Eisenhower and his administration knew they had to do something to fight those filthy, godless commies. They were not content on duck-and-cover being the only thing to protect American children from the Red Menace. The answer lied in pie, for nothing is more anti-communist than a fresh-baked pie made by a properly-subjugated American housewife. So in 1954, Congress decreed that the weekday Friday was to be officially known as Pie Day from that moment henceforth.
Pie Day was an immediate sensation. Disgruntled husbands were glad to return home after a week of mundane drone work to a fresh pie made by their tireless wives. Tireless wives were A-OK with it since making the pies barely interfered with their drinking habits and kitten huffing. Children were filled with glee, a stronger sense of patriotism, and later in their lives, heart disease.
Not only did the day present a fantastic way to satiate the masses, it also carried out its political uses effectively. The House Un-American Activities Committee used the pie statistics compiled from Pie Days to track suspected pinkos. The logic was simple: Communism strictly prohibited pie, so therefore, communists would not eat, buy, or make pie. Any organizations or outstanding individuals that were suspiciously below the pie quota standard were put on a pie black list and eventually brought before the committee. Senator Joseph McCarthy wasted no time using Pie Day suspicions as an excuse to get all up in people's grills.
“I have here in my hand a list of 205 names that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still not eating pie.”
In order to cover up the political pretenses of Pie Day, the media was encouraged to spread the fable of the French pie-eating revolutionaries to the American public. The cute anecdote's theme of the peasants' fight for liberty appealed to the gullible citizens. More importantly, however, it acted as a symbol of good will between America and France, which was presented along with financial help, military advisers, and CIA agents to the French colonies on Indochina. Too bad that investment would eventually go bad.
Trouble With Pie Day[edit | edit source]
The wave of governmental dominion brought on with the help of Pie Day was not to last. In the middle of a cold war, a real war just happened to break out... The Vietnam War. Hippies, fat from their childhood Pie Day pie but high on wacky weed, protested vehemently against the war along side the issue of the government's misuse of Pie Day to combat communism. (Any idiot could have seen through the thinly-veiled lies of Pie Day fifteen or so years prior to that, so it's a wonder nobody discovered it sooner.) Although it was a common agreement that pie was a tasty treat, it was not to be abused by The Man, even if a whole day was legally dedicated to it. The protesters boycotted all forms of pie (and bathing) in order to prove their points to whoever gave a crap. They accused the government of poisonings, mind control, and bad mojo via pies. They suspected that the military was using pies to bomb North Vietnamese villages and setting up deadly ambushes using extremely large pies containing four-and-twenty Marines. Somehow, the issue became so involved that it split from the war protests in order to
Eventually, the Pie Day issue became so involved that it split away from the war protests and gained its own following.