In my old neighborhood of Central Square in Cambridge, MA, there's a falafel joint that used to be a White Castle. While some might wring their hands at the notion of a bastion of the oldest burger chain in the US being supplanted by cuisine from the Middle East, I embrace this as a manifestation of the Great American Melting Pot that made America... uhmmm... Great. And Melty.

It's in this same spirit of a White Castle location being the site of transformation and enrichment through the American immigrant experience that I embrace and rejoice in the recent assignment of actor Kal Penn --
Kumar himself from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay -- to the Obama administration's Office of Public Liaison. As associate director there, according to The LA Times, he'll be doing "outreach to young people, arts professionals and the Asian American community."

Why is this so cool? Because Harold and Kumar are the most patriotic buds in pop culture since Willie and Joe, the two loveable lug GIs created by cartoonist Bill Mauldin for Stars and Stripes.

Yeah, on their most basic level, the Harold & Kumar movies are stoner comedies, Cheech and Chong flicks for the new millennium. But there's really something sublime bubbling bong-toke-like just under the surface of these two flicks, and that's a deep and abiding love for the promise of America. If it's not a new kind of patriotism, then maybe it's a new rhetoric of patriotism. Albeit one with lots of fart, shit, piss, blowjob, dick and pube jokes. But it's really a beautiful vision -- one uniquely suited for this time, and this administration.

Both Harold & Kumar movies (and alas, now that Penn has taken this job in DC, it looks like there won't be a third one) present an ideal of American patriotism which is defined by inclusion and diversity. In the Harold-&-Kumar-verse, it's unpatriotic and un-American to be an exclusionary dick.

Harold & Kumar writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, in creating their stoner diptych, put their heroes through a series of encounters that glorify diversity and inclusiveness and expose the profound douchebagery of exclusion and prejudice.

Right off the bat in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (even typing these words makes me crave a giant bag of Slyders) we're shown racial adversity as experienced by the film's unlikely heroes at the hands of Billy (Ethan Embry) and J.D. (Robert Tinkler). These two shining examples of jerks dead-bird-drop a pile of extra work on the desk of Harold (played by John Cho, who'll be part of another multi-ethnic and multi-species celebration of diversity when he takes over as Mr. Sulu in Star Trek).

Sure, no matter the ethnicity of the guy who gets loaded with somebody else's work at quitting time on a Friday night, douchebagery is afoot.
But it's depicted as a specifically un-American, specifically racist form of douchebagery when J.D. makes a crack about how he gets all "his" work done by passing it off to Asian guys. "Those Asian guys love crunching numbers! You probably just made his weekend!"

It's this bullshit stereotyping that Hurwitz and Schlossberg wanted to bash with their Harold and Kumar characters. "The high school we went to had a lot of Indian and Asian kids," Schlossberg told The New York Times. "Typically, in movies, these guys are the foreign-exchange students and martial-arts guys. We thought there's something wrong here. We wanted our movie to feel and look like the real world."

Looking over my notes taken during a night of watching both Harold & Kumar movies, I realize that I could burn through a lot of words recapping all the racist, exclusionary fucktards who get in Harold and Kumar's way in the first movie alone as they go in quest of White Castle burgers.

From the pack of drooling extreme sports punks who shout to Harold, as they steal his parking spot, "This is America! Learn to drive!" to the racial-profiling cops of Muckleburg, New Jersey: "What's with that name? Koooo-mar? With, like, three o's and shit? What happened to good old-fashioned American names like Dave and Jim?".

These dicks are foiled by the nice folks who are part of this multi-ethnic and accepting vision of America, like the hideously deformed, pus-leaking, gospel-singin' Freakshow (Law & Order's Christopher Meloni) and his hot wife Liane (Watchmen's Malin Akerman) to the sort of Yoda-like Tarik (Gary Anthony Williams), who says, "Look at me. I'm fat, Black, can't dance, and I have two gay fathers. People have been messing with me my whole life. I learned a long time ago there's no sense getting all riled up every time a bunch of idiots give you a hard time. In the end, the universe tends to unfold as it should. Plus, I have a really large penis. That keeps me happy!"

The thematic zenith of the tokin' (and Tolkien-esque?) epic that is the two Harold & Kumar movies is embodied in a speech made by Kumar as he tries to talk Harold into hang-gliding the last couple hundred yards to White Castle. It's a speech that could be dismissed as just a goofy comedy climax pep-talk, like the one John Belushi made at the in Animal House ("Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!" etc...), if it didn't dovetail so beautifully with the message of the rest of the movie:

That speech is sincere. It's a real expression of patriotism on the part of writers Hurwitz and Schlossberg. It really wasn't just about the burgers. Kumar's dad did come to America and realize the American Dream. He became a doctor. Sure, there's friction between Kumar and his dad. But in their quests for personal fulfillment, be it through burgers or an MD, they've both attained something beautiful. And Harold only grows a pair of balls and stands up to Billy and J.D. after he's gotten his slice of the American Dream and washed it down with Cherry Cokes.

***

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was released on July 30, 2004, just one day after the historic Democratic national Convention at which Barack Obama first exploded into the nation's awareness with his totally kickass speech. Consider the notes that both Obama and Kumar hit:

Source


And while you're at it, compare the jerkweed Jersey cop's comment "What happened to good old-fashioned American names like 'Dave' and 'Jim?'" to Obama's statement that "My parents... would give me an African name, Barack, or 'blessed,' believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success."

(Then compare these comments to those from Texas State Representative and Asshole Fuckface honoree Betty Brown who said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are "easier for Americans to deal with.")

Harold, Kumar and Obama's 2004 vision of America is empowering, so much so that by the start of 2008's Guantanamo Bay, Harold, nourished spiritually and physically by his American Dream White Castle munchie run, says as he settles in for the plane ride, "It's like I'm a whole new Harold! Better! Faster! Stronger!" This new improved Harold stood up to the bullying tactics of J.D. and Billy -- and Rob Corddry's Bill of Rights ass-wiping bugfuck Secretary Fox in Guantanamo -- to get his Hollywood ending with the girl of his dreams -- how American is that!

Sure, Kal Penn has a lot more qualifications to take up this new job besides just having played Kumar (though his experience bonding over a doobie with the film's affable George W. has got to help him make friends across the isle right?). He campaigned for Obama, he's been taking graduate courses in International Studies online through Stanford, and he's taught two courses, "Images of Asian Americans in the Media" and "Contemporary American Teen Films," at U Penn (source). But it's the unique combination of the patriotism of Harold & Kumar and the opportunity, diversity and promise that Obama's presidency embodies that makes his new appointment as inspirational and American as apple pie -- served in a falafel place that used to be a White Castle.


Michael Marano 2009.

Horror writer, pop culture commentator and Public Radio film critic Michael Marano previously wrote "Ten Lessons Spider-Man Can Teach Our First Nerd President", and has a new fiction collection in the works about the crazy shit he lived through in the 1980s entitled Stories from the Plague Years.