Scumbag America

About

Scumbag America is an advice animal image macro series that utilizes Scumbag Steve's hat placed atop a map of the continental United States with captions that are used to point out hypocrisies in American politics or culture.

Origin

On July 22nd, 2011, Redditor x2sean1x submitted an image to the now-defunct /r/reddit.com subreddit titled Scumbag America^[3] with the caption "Starts space program uniting the world / Shuts down program to fund wars" in response to NASA's final space shuttle launch earlier that month.^[4] The post gained 16,151 upvotes, 653 comments and 1,805 points overall prior to being archived.

Precursor

On May 2nd, 2011, a Scumbag Steve image macro titled "Scumbag America" was submitted to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[1] subreddit with the caption "Osama dead / Stay in Afghanistan another 10 years" (shown below, left) suggesting that the United States would continue their war despite the objective being met. On July 15th, another Scumbag America was submitted to /r/pics^[2], placing the Scumbag Hat on an eagle with an American flag juxtaposed across its face (shown below, right) with the caption, "Raises minimum wage / Lowers value of dollar bill." Neither of these posts received more than 2 points overall.

Spread

On November 8th, 2011, Buzzfeed^[9] named Scumbag America one of the best Scumbag Steve spin-off series. The same month, a Scumbag America image macro was featured on We Know Memes.^[10] In February 2012,HypeHumor^[11] featured a compilation of Scumbag America images. Days later, a Quora^[12] post inquiring about the most shared images in the series was posted, resulting in a handful of responses. In March 2012, a Facebook fan page^[13] for the series was created, gaining 34 likes as of July 2013. Also in 2012, Scumbag America instances were discussed on message boards including the League of Legends community^[14] and Happier Abroad^[16] as well as humor sites including Memecenter^[15] and FunnyJunk.^[17]

Notable Examples

As of July 2013, more than 960 Scumbag America instances have been submitted to Meme Generator^[5] and an additional 3,400 can be found on Quickmeme.^[6] Other instances have been shared on the /r/AdviceAnimals subreddit^[7] and Tumblr.^[8]

Search Interest

External References