Archive for August 23rd, 2009
Fires in Greece got us thinking about that "What's your nationality?" crap again
If you are a regular reader, you know that one of our pet peeves around here is the very Chicago query of “What’s your nationality?”, “What’s your ethnicity?”, and, most strangely phrased, “Where are your people from?”.
We find all variations of the question to be both obnoxious and offensive…and frankly tell guys so (and it’s always guys) when they ask one of us this (because none of us are blond-haired-blue-eyed-Aberzombies). Our nationality is American, jackasses, because none of us here are immigrants, none of us are the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or even great-great-grandchildren of immigrants, and none of us have an allegiance to any country in the world besides the U.S. of A.
Got that?
Yesterday, while we were volunteering at a car wash for a charity, and we were soaked in dirty, awful water and the wind kicked up and we honestly thought we were going to freeze to death in August, we had to deal with a loudmouth, Chicago jackass straight out of central casting who was obsessed with that “nationality question” stuff again. We just hate these people. We gave our whole day to wash cars to raise money for a local charity, and that’s what this guy was doing to, so we couldn’t go for his throat the way we would if he’d pulled the nationality stuff at Sidetracks or Roscoes or somewhere. When this happens in bars, we just flat-out call the questioner a RAAAACIST! Since it’s all Loony Libs and Lefties who pull this, upon being told how RAAACIST! it is to ask a stranger “Where are your people from?”, these clowns usually high-tail it out of the bar, and out of our lives, right quick.
But, the situation’s more delicate when we’re at work, or working a charity event. As much as we want to, we just can’t get away with calling these fools on their RAAACISM! whithout starting a big scene when we’re trying to do a job. So, we had to endure the very tiresome back and forth Chicagoans LOVE to get into about ethnicity and “nationality”…where they are all mixes of Irish and Polish and Italian and whatever the fudge and totally ignore the fact that they were all born in this country, America, and that their parents were all born in this country, America, and at least some of their grandparents were born in this country, America.
Flashing back to freshman year political science, “country” and “nation” are indeed two different things in the case of the United States. We are the greatest country on the face of the world, but we are not a homogenous “nation” of one kind of people, the way countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa are, for the most part (give or take recent immigration). Remembering back to that college class, a nation is a set of people with physical, cultural, emotional, and other traits in common historically…and a country is a political entity with defined borders and a structure that governs over what could be many “nations” of people, all living in the geographically-defined purview of that “country”. The United States of America not only includes the descendents of the European settlers, but of everyone who has come to these shores over the years, on top of the Native American nations that were here originally. So, it’s much more complicated here than it is on other continents.
But we never, in all our lives, had people come up to strangers and ask “What’s your nationality?” before we moved to Chicago. At least one of us is asked this once a day, somewhere. And it is never, ever acceptable to these questioners to answer “American” when pushed on this nationality crap. They just are so obsessed in Chicago with relatives they never met, and whose names they don’t even know, who lived in Europe many years ago…in countries these clods know relatively little about.
One “nationality expert” we know is also someone who was born here, whose parents were born here, and whose grandparents were all born here. Yet, she claims her nationality is “Polish”. She, of course, has no idea who the Prime Minister or President of Poland are. She has no idea if Warsaw or Krakow is the capital of Poland. She even thought Poland was a willing Axis nation in World War II. Being “Polish” to this girl means eating sausages at the Chicago street fairs, dancing badly to polka music at weddings, and making a big deal about Paczki Day (supposedly the Polish Mardi Gras, that no one in Poland knows about, where jelly donuts are made to use up all the sweets before Lent…the only problem is that actual Polish people, those who live in Poland, have never heard of Paczki Day. When pressed, they realize “Paczki Day” is no different than the St. Patrick’s Day corned-beef-and-hash-a-pa-looza held every March in cities like Chicago, when people in Dublin have never eaten corned beef and hash in their lives. It’s all an American invention, Epcot Center style, to create some touristy, colorful, ethnic-seeming treats for idiots to revel in while completely ignoring their own wonderful country for a day).
If any of these nationality experts spent any real time in Europe, they would realize it is not a magical place to be so obsessed with. If Europe was so wonderful, then the people who live there would not still be trying to move HERE. Labor strikes cripple France as regularly as arthritis. Garbage piles up on Italian streets so high it reaches second stories because the sanitation workers periodically just don’t feel like working, and the government is so disorganized it can’t stop them. Socialized medicine in England means people wait for months to get operations (if they are lucky, and if the government decides that person is indeed worth saving and deserves to live). We won’t even get into how bad things are in Poland, still, 19 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The reason Americans invents so many cute and colorful ways to celebrate other “nationalities” is because the reality in those distant lands is entirely uncelebratory.
So, as much as we hate the nationality experts, we are fascinated with what makes them keep looking backwards across the ocean to places that don’t give a damn about them (and where locals, like in Poland, think Americans are stupid for Paczki Day and all that made-up fuss). And we appreciate the irony in this, because we are fascinated by the motivations driving people who are fascinated by where ancestors of ours lived 500 years ago. It is a circle of pointless fascination, the eye of which is firmly entrenched here in Chicago.
But, today, seeing stories about Athens wrecked by intense wildfires, we realize just how little we care about what happens to Europe. As kids, we were all excited to go to Europe for the first time, or to hit Japan in high school, or to travel to Africa in college, or wherever. If you haven’t traveled much, and you never were able to afford many vacations, you romanticize places like Paris or London or Rome or Tokyo or wherever, because honestly you don’t know any better. You also romanticize people like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, making them into fairy tales they weren’t either, because all you can do is read about them in books and then fill in the blanks with your imagination to make them superhuman and unrealistically perfect. If you had ever met Washington in person, you would have been floored by what we imagine was probably halitosis so bad it could strip paint from the walls. Lincoln would have stunk too, we bet, since deorderant sure wasn’t around at the time, and the man favored wool suits, even in summer. Do the math on that.
Europe stinks, too, literally and figuratively in many ways.
There are all those garbage strikes that we mentioned before, but there’s also the post-WWII guilt trip Europeans have been on, where they’ve been disastrously overaccommodating to Muslim extremists who abuse Europe’s lax asylum laws…turning London into a veritable Londonistan where Shari’a law has now taken hold…or reducing the Netherlands to a place where the Dutch live in fear of actually being Dutch, and doing what they’ve always done, because the new Muslim arrivals of the last 20 years see almost everything Western as an affront to the Koran…and then behead those they see as responsible.
Europe, to us, is a continental collection of such fools.
Looking back to Europe for our “nationality” is like looking in Lincoln Park Zoo for our ancestors…because, technically, we’re primates…and technically we’re related to those chimps, apes, gibbons, spider monkeys, and whatever…but we sure don’t like thinking about it. Not after we walk into the Primate House at the zoo and are greeted by the overpowering stench of so many flung feces, so many rotten apples, so much urine-stained concrete from those cages. Watching those apes swing about on old tires, fight over bits of peanut shell, and eat insects off each other makes us wish the Creationists out there were right, and that we didn’t really spring from these saps swinging up in those artifical vines.
But, Darwin is right…and “nationality experts” are technically right in that people living on this continent, who aren’t Native American purebloods, can only trace their American roots to 1492, at best (lest you count the Viking settlers up in what’s now New England, or are Asian and lay claim to Dynastic Chinese legendary expeditions predating Columbus).
But, saying you’re “German” is technically ridiculous, too, because “Germany” didn’t exist until the 1800s…when so many fiefdoms, princedoms, and kingdoms merged into the gestalt German empire. The countries that are now Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, etc., didn’t exist until the 1900s: before that they were either part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Russian Empire, or the German Empire.
How far back do “nationality experts” want to go? Can’t we say, “my nationality is the Roman Empire” because, technically, if you go back far enough all the countries labeled above were part of Trans-Alpine Gaul or some other Roman provice back in the day.
Go back far enough and we’re all Africans, if you want to get really technical. So, what’s needed is a specific date and time for when nationality experts need us to ID the birthplace of specific ancestors (on specific sides of the family tree) to determine what “nationality” we all are based on what country controlled that particular piece of dirt at that moment in time.
As Athens burns, we’re not hopping on a plane to save the Acropolis because thousands of years ago some distant relative of ours worshipped Pallas Athena there. But, if Athens, Georgia was set a fire, or Cleveland was being attacked by giant spiders or zombies, or Pittsburgh was under assault by aliens, you bet your ass we’d come a-running. You do not mess with Cleveland on our watch. You do not invade any American city without our blood boiling and revving us up to help. When Katrina hit in 2005, some of us here took leave of absences from work and volunteered with the Red Cross working 16 hours a day, double-shifts, packing donations to send down to Louisiana.
Because we LOVE THIS COUNTRY. We LOVE AMERICA. We are AMERICANS, and dammit if that’s not our NATIONALITY. This is where our hearts are. This is where our blood, sweat, and tears go. This is where the bones of ancestors going back hundreds of years are.
Europe had its chance…and just as Poles over there can’t recognize or wrap their heads around Paczki Day…or how the actual Irish laugh at St. Patrick’s Day here in the US…we look back at Europe and smell a rotten, naive, stinky place we’re glad every day our ancestors were smart enough to leave.
Sarah Palin tosses around Facebook pages like ninja throwing stars
Great Merciful Zeus, you need to read this…it contains a line we so wish we’d thought of…that Sarah Palin’s throwing around Facebook pages like ninja throwing stars.
And, unlike us, she’s not being snarky or taking cheap shots at Oprah or HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy while doing it (not that we’ll ever stop)…but Palin’s being devastatingly sharp, to the point, and critical while still retaining her personal charm.
Got. to. love. it.
Here in Boystown, the Loony Left continues to berate Palin…but, like the article above says, if she’s so stupid and so irrelevant and such a joke…then how on Earth is she having such a profound impact on Obamacare by just posting her thoughts on Facebook?
Riddle us that.
Sunday Open Thread, August 23rd 2009
Well, we’re calling it unofficially Fall here in Boystown. Not only have we seen the first leaves on the ground this week, but at various places they’ve had the tiki torches and overhead heaters lit to keep people warm as they enjoy the last days of al fresco dining before we’re submerged in another Midwestern Ice Age through May. We have a feeling it’s going to be a brutal, brutal winter, after such a cold summer. Curse you, Global Warming, and the heat wave you didn’t actually cause!
And, it must be said, we dread with much sadness the OFFICIAL start of Fall when the last of the shirtless runners disappears from the Lakeshore paths, like some gorgeous, exotic creature falling from the endangered species list and into zoological oblivion. When the last frat guy with something to prove (and a body that just won’t quit…and can’t, apparently, be contained by tee shirts of any kind) finally dons something above the waist, we know the sunny, beautiful, enchanting Jeckyl side of our schizophrenic city has been replaced by the bitter, brutal, beastly Hyde.
Today, we’re going to hit the Lincoln Park Zoo, wander down the Lakeshore path to Millennium Park, get what will probably be our very last Rainbow Cone of the summer, and do something touristy on this sunny Sunday like ride the Ferris Wheel at Navy Pier or maybe take a Segway architectural tour.
One of the things we try to do on this site is not just talk about politics and other current affairs issues, but to give you a taste of the Chicago we know and love, the awesome city we live in. Too often, we think all of us get caught up in the Hyde side of this town: the corruption, the graft, the disaster that will be the 2016 Olympics, and whatever else Mayor Daley is up to. But, man alive, don’t think for a moment we don’t relish everything this town has to offer on that sunnier side of the street. The things that are good here are GREAT, while the things that are bad are TERRIBLE. Maybe you can’t have one extreme without the other in a city that is running at such a high level of play.
What do you like to do in your own home town on what could be one of the last nice, sunny, relatively warm Sundays of the year? We’d love to hear some more fun, free suggestions for what people with families, in particular, can do for a memorable Sunday afternoon that everyone can enjoy.
Let’s keep it positive and light in this thread — and come up with some really fun ideas for activities…if you are in Chicago, like us, we especially want to hear from you since we’ll probably take you up on a suggestion or two today.
