"Hold My Beer" Videos Are an American Cultural Treasure

Every country worldwide has its own share of antics-prone individuals, but only in the United States has a single phrase that always precedes a Looney Tunesian stunt become a cultural touchstone. Somewhere, sometime, a man (as it nearly always is) faced a challenge—probably in an attempt to one-up someone else—and announced his entry into the pantheon by uttering the now-immortal words: "Hold my beer, and watch this!"

Spend enough time in the rural United States, especially on a lazy summer Saturday with the smell of exhaust fumes in the air, and you're liable to hear the words that have moved mountains. Hilarious as it can be, the phrase is rooted in the soul of America: that no barrier—whether it be settling the West or trying to jump a truck over a pool—is insurmountable.

It may seem silly to think about the fabric of the United States while watching a guy flip his Raptor, but it's completely valid. America is based firmly on the idea that nobody—not some tax-wielding king, nor gravity—can tell you no. And as soon as you prove that you can do something, it's time to try to do it again, but more so.

How one takes a $50,000 truck and gets it stuck on a jetty, then has it yanked off with a boulder stuck under the front differential, is beyond me. But it doesn't matter, because it's a free country. We boldly trailblazed our way into splitting the atom, and if a guy wants to crash his truck into rocks, he can damn well do that too. Philosophically, it's the same thing.

But it's not all clownassery. The "hold my beer" mentality is largely about the triumph of the human spirit over any challenge we're goaded into taking on. The innate drive that powered Neil Armstrong is in all of us. Sometimes it just takes the form of showing our friends that, hell yes, this Jeep can drive over/through that ravine.

At the same time, it's so much more than that. The "hold my beer" lifestyle isn't just about getting drunk and doing stupid shit. It's about those insane epiphanies that strike when you're out shooting the shit with your buddies, and then acting on them. "What if I drove my truck through this mud?" leads to "What if I made my truck bigger so I can drive through deeper mud?" until you spend a large majority of your time driving while looking out of two holes in the windshield you scraped off with your hand. (If you're wondering, I am speaking from experience.)

The "hold my beer" phenomenon is such a big deal that songs have been written about it. I like this one because it sounds like credit music from Caddyshack 2.

I admit that the "hold my beer" world is just as saturated with people misspelling Camaro and crashing their cars into the sides of hillocks as you'd expect. But even then, if we didn't take risks, we'd never reach the heights that we have.

At the end of the day, you're a tax-paying, democracy-loving citizen, and if you desire to pop wheelies in your UTV with the entire family on board, you damn well should be able to.

@derektmead