Fuck the Metric System

The year was 1976, and communist cold war spies had infiltrated the U.S. government. Their mission? To convert America's God-fearing system of Imperial weights and measures to a devious red contraption known at the metric system. Did they succeed? What the fuck's the metric system? Think for a second and I believe you'll realize those two questions cancel each other out.

The metric system failed because the American people spoke in one voice, clear and proud, when they said "Wha? Hey, fuck the metric system!"

The system was developed in the late 1500's, after writer Simon Stevin skylarked that it would be trippy if you could divide everything by ten. Thomas Jefferson read Stevin's book while in college and the author's stoned musings inspired him to propose a decimal currency system for the U.S. in 1792, the first of its kind. France then converted to the metric system in 1795, which effectively ended the U.S. conversion to metric units. After the French started doing it, metric just didn't seem cool any more.

In 1812 Napoleon suspended use of the metric system in France, because he didn't like the thought of only being a meter and a half tall. It was reinstated in 1840 after Napoleon fell from power and his enemies loved the idea of him being remembered as that short.

Over the years the definition of the meter has changed several times. Jefferson thought it should be one ten millionth the length from the earth's equator to the North Pole, which made everybody nod and say that sounded like a good idea. Several years later they thought about it and realized they had absolutely no way of knowing how long that was, and that Jefferson must have been fucking with them. And sure enough he had already split town with his secretary and all of the money from their metric-conversion coffers.

France had been working from the assumption that Jefferson knew what he was talking about, so when they got word of his jape France had to redefine the meter. Somebody found a stick he liked while walking in the woods that afternoon and this became the new definition of the meter, which stood for over a hundred years. In 1960, the meter was redefined by scientists as "1 650 763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton 86 atom," a gag definition proposed by one of Jefferson's descendants and taken as gospel truth by lazy scientists who didn't want to figure that crap out. Finally in 1980 the current definition was set, where you hold your arms about yea far apart and that's a meter. Except in Canada, where it's the length traveled by light in a vacuum during one 299,792,458th of a second. Canadian scientists are always hot-dogging like that.

Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 a year late in 1976, which stipulated that it would probably be a good idea to switch to the metric system some time. No target dates were set, and over the next seven years America made a half-assed effort at going metric, changing roadsides haphazardly and scaring schoolchildren into thinking they'd have to relearn all the stuff they'd just learned about footstools and midgets being called "pint-sized." This continued until 1982, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Fuck the Metric System bill into law, which disbanded the U.S. Metric Board and ran its members out of town on a rail.

In the twenty-one years since, the metric system has slowly crept up on Americans, seeping into our daily lives like the smell of your next-door neighbor's Jacuzzi, sneaking ludicrous numbers and little symbols onto cereal boxes and shampoo bottles in the dead of night. The American people have steadfastly refused its advances, wary of falling victim to the metric conspiracy the way every other country on the face of the earth has, excepting those strongholds of enlightenment, Liberia and Myanmar. Some mock Americans for our slavish dedication to a system of weights and measures few understand or can calculate, blinded by their own anal need to know things like how many feet are in a mile or cups in a gallon.

But if they want to go all metric and live someplace where it's only 32 degrees in the summer, let 'em freeze their metric asses off. 30 degrees in July? Fuck that, that's cold. You can have your Celsius scale.

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