America Isn't Ready For A Eurovision-Style Contest

America is at a breaking point. The country's so divided on political, economic, and social issues that protests are continually breaking out, and weekend warriors are literally trying to cause a second Civil War. But if you really break these United States into the most abstract pieces possible, nothing will get the job done with more flair than a Eurovision-style Song Contest.

Starting in 2021, the U.S. will begin hosting its interstate version of Eurovision, boringly named American Song Contest. And right there's your first problem, America. How can a contest that doesn't have the weird balls to call itself Americavision ever think to capture the winning spirit that is the six-hour LSD trip of watching six Russian grandmothers shuffle around some Tetris blocks to the sound of pumping techno?

Eurovision is weird and wonderful, both regressive and progressive. It's the kind of contest that can be won by an Israeli trans woman singing to a preset on a Cassio children's keyboard …

But also, just a few years later, a Finnish heavy metal band cosplaying as background demons from Hellraiser.

Weren't those crushing traditions and colorful clown costumes that the American pilgrims fled from just so they could wear boring belt buckles on their hats and burn women for wearing the color purple? Do you honestly think that Nebraska, with its eighty-odd years of heritage, can field a contestant with the same ancient cultural camp as Romania sending a vampire stripper to sing a Europop love song?

Not that any sensible state would want to win Americavision anyway. Just ask Ireland how expensive it is to host the continental equivalent of Liberace's 50th birthday bash several years in a row -- an economic albatross so heavy they send puppet turkeys to sing for them just to make sure they'd never have to do it again.

Of course, it's not musical talent or outrageous outfits decide the winner of Eurovision: it's geopolitics. American Song Contest producer Ben Silver, who's been trying to get on the American ABBA train for twenty years now, claims his interstate talent show will be good for "uniting a fractured America." Clearly, he doesn't understand the real Game of Thrones nature. The Eurovision Song Contest may date back only 65 years, but its rivalries hark back to a time that every European country's name for syphilis was another European country.

Voting blocs are formed, high scores are reserved for the countries that import most of your cheese, and old grievances are frequently aired out. One moment, you'll be tapping your feet to a bunch of Portugueses teens dressed like peacocks for no discernable reason. Suddenly, you're listening to a chorus of druids laying down a diss track to Turkey about the Armenian genocide.

Eurovision is weird and kitsch and silly, but it's also deadly serious. It's a yearly political summit with more sequins and a terrible soundtrack. So unless you want to introduce a new mini layer of political strife in the less-than-united states, one where Ohio bitterly gives Georgia six points despite their contestant belting a twelve-minute country song about Sherman's March to the Sea, maybe you want to keep holding off on that drama.

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Top Image: Eurovision Song Contest