Archive for August 14th, 2010
More "Nationality Expertism" on display in Chicago
We’ve actually decided to make “Nationality Expertism” a chapter in the HillBuzz book, cohesively collecting everything we’ve learned about this subject since moving to Chicago in 2005 or so.
For the uninitiated, a “Nationality Expert” is an ass here in Chicago who comes up to one of us in a bar or other social situation and asks some combination of:
* What are you?
* What nationality are you?
* What ethnicity are you?
* Where is your family from?
* Etc.
This only happens to K., Sebastian, and sometimes Joaquin, because they have dark hair (and Joaquin’s mother was a Mexican, so he’s sort of George P. Bush in appearance). It’s never, ever asked of Robby, who is blond and as apple-pie and checkered tablecloths as leftovers from a Tommy Hilfiger photo shoot. Panda’s gaysian, and people just leave it at that, and instead as him “Who are you wearing? Where did you get that hat? How do you do that dance move? How can you get away with saying things like that?”.
“Nationality Expertism” only happens in Chicago, though there was a freak instance of this once back in 2007 when K. did a fundraiser for a little art gallery in Palm Beach, Florida and the ass working the registration table asked him this. Turns out, she grew up in Schaumburg, which is a suburb of, you guessed it, Chicago.
Back in Cleveland, people ask you “Where did you go to high school?” because they want to find out how much money your parents had when you were growing up. If you answered one of the private schools, then they could be friends with you, because you would have come from some money. If you said a public school, they’d make a face and then move on to someone “better” to talk to at the cocktail party.
In New York, Philly, Atlanta, and San Antonio, we’ve found people ask “Where did you go to college?” for the above result. If it’s not a top 50 school, you can forget the friendship. This seems to be a way that jackasses weed out “undesirables”.
In Chicago, it’s all about race for these tools…even when someone is clearly white. There appears to be the “good white”, which is someone who is “from” Great Britain, Ireland, or elsewhere in the British Isles. There’s also “fancy white”, which is someone “from” France, Switzerland, Benilux, the Scandinavian socialist paradises, or scrappy and exotic Iceland (Ooooh! Do you know Bjork?). This means there is “bad white”, or at least, “swarthy white”, and that’s a white person who is “from” anywhere Mediterranian that’s not Italy, or any where that has an -ia at the end of it (like Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Transylvania, but not Austria, which is more or less a “fancy white”).
As we’ve stated repeatedly, we think this “Nationality Expert” garbage is racist dreck.
We’re all “from” America. Scratch that. We’re FROM America, no quotation marks, because this is where we are from. If you want more specifics, Mr. Census, K. and Bast are from Cleveland. Robby’s from Mineral City. Joaquin’s from San Antonio. Panda’s from a little bit of everywhere, because his parents moved him around every two years or so because of his dad Tico’s work.
If you want to hit on any of us in a bar, without being an ass, why not ask us something about ourselves?
Like these questions:
* What was your Halloween costume last year?
* What’s the last movie you saw in an actual theater?
* Screw movies, what’s the last live theater you saw in an actual theater?
* Are you afraid of puppets?
* Have you ever been to any of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Chicago?
* Have you ever been to Christopher Lloyd’s house?
* Did he know you were there at the time?
* How long does it take a restraining order to expire anyway?
* Did you know your name and phone number are written all over the walls in the bathroom, like hundreds of times?
Those are all great first-meet questions.
None of them are racist, unless you have a thing against puppets (if so, sit next to us).
Every so often, someone we have known for a while asks K., Bast, or Joaquin the “Nationality Question” and the rest of us just sit back and watch the fun. This is a different outcome than a first-meet person asking it, because if you are already our friend we’re not going to stop being friends with you over something like this — but you will get admonished for being assy, depending on how far you push this garbage.
Last night, our friend Spence and his manager/photographer was out at Sidetracks, and K. and Panda stopped to say hey. Spence is Chicago’s #1 Laura Branigan impersonator. He’s also America’s ONLY Laura Branigan impersonator, that any of us know of. He does other characters too, like Bonnie Tyler and Jayne Child, and pretty much every other female singer from the 80s we like that most everyone under 25 has never heard of (sacrilage!). “I’m sort of a niche market,” Spence explains, “but I work all the time, even if sometimes I get paid in leftovers from the buffet”. Thank God Fran Eaton from Illinois Review isn’t attending these events, or poor Spence wouldn’t be paid at all.
We’ve known Spence for four years now, and K. and Panda have booked him for various events they’ve produced around town, so he’s a casual friend, but no one who’s ever been to Buzzquarters (Spence, alas, is an Obama cultist, which keeps him at the periphery of our little universe). K. actually went up to Spence to ask him to send us his new press kit, because a friend of K.’s is going to be having an event and K.’s talking her into an 80s theme, which would be perfect for some Gloria, Solitaire, and Self-Control action.
Out of the blue, Spence said, “I’ve always wanted to ask you this, but what nationality are you?”.
“American,” K. replied. “The best damn country that ever was or will be”.
“No, lookit your hair, eyes, and eyebrows, you have such dark features, you look Jewish. Or maybe Muslim. You look like you are from the Middle East”.
“And you’re way too old to be dressing up like Laura Branigan. Those aren’t crows’ feet anymore, baby, they’re full on emu at this point, and there isn’t enough botulism in the whole world that’s going to fix that”.
“Wow, kitty’s got claws tonight,” Spence jabbed back, “I just said that I thought you were Jewish this whole time or from somewhere in the Middle East because your hair is so dark. What’s wrong with that?”
Clearly, we love Israel almost as much as we love America, so there’s nothing wrong with being Jewish. But, when you are an American, and you were raised Roman Catholic, being called Jewish by some idiot in a bar is frustrating — because it’s not who you are, and some fool is trying to force this alternate racial identity on you.
For years, Robby’s sister Ann-Louise never understood why K. was bothered by people doing things like this. Ann-Louise has blonde hair, which she pays for at the salon. No one left alive knows what her real hair color is, but it’s cartoon yellow most days, so she never gets asked the “Nationality Question” garbage.
Well, a few years back Ann-Louise got a small part in one of those schlocky horror movies she does and the role required her to be raven-haired, so she walked around in Miami for four months of shooting with very dark hair. It’s the only thing that changed about her, except for the tan she got working in Florida.
So, almost on day one, the Miami locals started talking to her in Spanish exclusively. They just assumed she was some sort of Latina. Mexian men, in particular, got very aggressive with her, and there was one instance where a group of them wouldn’t leave her alone as she tried to get into her car, saying all sorts of clearly suggestive things to her (that she did not understand), and taking her silence in return as tacit encouragement to proceed their “courting”.
About midway through shooting her part, she told K. she finally understood why he hated this “Nationality Expert” garbage and why he didn’t like it when random strangers came up to him and asked if he was Jewish or Middle Eastern.
“These morons see dark hair and dark eyes, and maybe it’s because public schools are so bad, but they just think that’s license to come up to you and accuse you of being things that you are not. I have no idea why any of this matters to these clowns, but it’s so 1936 Stuttgart to walk up to someone and ask him if he’s Jewish, or to just point and say that he is. It’s so weird”.
It’s actually one of the things, besides being gay, that’s a wedge between K. and his family — all of whom are light-brown or blond-haired, and none of whom have particularly enjoyed having a dark-haired, dark-eyed, “f*ckng faggot” (to borrow IL GOP Chair Pat Brady’s term) in the family. “Must have been switched at birth” was the classic Cleveland comedy styling on this issue.
Spence is a nice person, and he’s a great Laura Branigan, but he’s an idiot.
He just kept at the “Nationality Expert” stuff until K. finally had to tell him that he was being offensive. Spence never graduated any college, from what we know, but he started on this litany of how the color of K.’s eyes meant he was part this, but the shape of his ears meant he was part that (Romulan, evidently), and the way his eyebrows raise wholly under their own power when he talks means he must be related to Groucho Marx somehow.
It was beyond absurd: like going to Granny Clampitt and having her doktor your illness away, using tricks and tips she learned from possums.
Chicago is a city chock-full of these self-edumacated, “learned”, armchair “Nationality Experts”.
About a week ago, Sebastian went out on another of those dates his friend the matchmaker sets him up on, because the lot of us are convinced it’s time he stops dating actor/model/barntenders/musicians and start meeting professional guys who are closer to all of us on the political spectrum too. So, the matchmaker sends him out with investment bankers, suite and tie somethings or another, or pharmaceutical reps…and while disaster doesn’t necessarily ensue, Bast will typically end up with whomever the new barback is on Halsted (insisting all the while he had nothing to do with it, and that “it just happened” because they asked him out, and he was powerless to say no).
The last guy the matchmaker sent him out with was nice enough, until he showed his “Nationality Expert” credentials and proved himself to be even more aggressive and in your face than Spence was with K.
What’s baffling to us is that these asses never realize they’re making their “Nationality Subject” uncomfortable with the interrogation. When this guy asked Bast the whole “Where’s your family from? No, before that. Where were they from before that too. What about before that, and then before that next batch, and before that too?” and Bast just kept saying he’s American, and his family is from America, and that if someone asked an Australian or a Canadian or a Mexican where they are from, and they said Australia, Canada, and Mexico respectively (and that would be an acceptable answer), this would be the end of it, the clown didn’t see he should back down with this crap already.
Instead, he took his hand out and clicked off all the things he “was”: Hungarian, British, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, whatever. Never once mentioning “American”.
“So, you don’t live here then?,” Bast asked.
“No, I live in Chicago.”
“But, you weren’t born here?”
“Nope, born and raised in Chicago.”
“But, you’re not a Chicagoan, or an American. You are all those random things you needed your fingers to count. And you have pasta sauce all over your fingers, FYI. And you seem to have more ingredients in you than the sauce, yet here you are, oblivous to living in the greatest country in the world”.
Bast then went in for the kill and asked the clown if he knew the leaders of the countries he listed off, the ones he is “from”. He didn’t know any of them.
“Well, if you are a quarter Irish, you should at least be able to come up with some of the letters in the Irish prime minister’s name. Care to buy a vowel, or even tell me if it’s a man or a woman? Someone who needs to take his right paw out to click off all the things he “is” should know who’s running part of where he’s “from”, right?”.
To save the evening and end on a good note, Bast kept trying to use whatever opportunities the nationality questioning presented to segue into something about food, art, or music…but Nationality Expert wasn’t having any of it.
Our friend Althea once said we should answer this garbage by saying: “What nationality am I? I’m black. That makes me a big ole’ n*gger. Got a problem with that, honky?”. Because Althea thinks hitting these Liberals back with that is hilarious, and they’ll never ask someone this again. “Oh, then call them a racist because that will keep them up at night, and if you really want to get them, shout to other tables that there’s a racist in the room, but just make sure they paid the check first”.
It’s clear that the public school system is behind this here in Chicago, because that’s a common thread with all these clowns: they are all products of CPS, where evidently it is taught that being “American” is bad, and that everyone needs to be a mutt of some kind, comprised of all these quarters, fifths, sixths, and eleventy-eths of various European and exotic things.
It reminds us a lot of the story we were all taught in Catholic school about Peter being pressed to deny Christ three times before the cock crowed. Here K. and Bast (and Joaquin, to a much, much lesser extent) are, forever being pressed to deny their country…like Peter denied Christ.
“What are you?”
“American”.
BAM!
“What are you?”
“American”.
BAM! Unacceptable! You must be something foreign!
“What are you?”
“American”.
BAM! Not possible. For Liberalism’s cult to thrive we must divide people into as many separate compartments and boxes as possible. We must dilute the concept of an American identity and instead harken to nonsensical allegiances to failed European states, of which the Cult of Liberalism so greatly admires. You are not American. You are what we want you to be. You are what we say you are. You are Toby, not Kunta Kintae.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Oh, we so totally went there. We invoked some Alex Haley up in here. Take that “Nationality Experts”.
Must be the soul in all of us that Althea keeps wanting us to bring to the table.
Every Democrat in America must be tied to the Ground Zero Victory Mosque
Last night something happened we were deeply hoping for, but never thought — not in a million years — the current “president” would be stupid enough to do. We knew he could never resist supporting the Ground Zero Victory Mosque when asked about it directly, but we assumed reporters would be smart enough to never ask him a question that would open a window for him to let more of his anti-American, West-hating true nature shine through.
So, the fact that the current “president”, and leader of the Democrat Party, has come out in favor of building a symbol of Muslim conquest and Islamization on the soil where so many thousands of Americans were murdered by Muslims nine years ago is a great benefit to all of us who spend our days and nights resisting the Left.
This is the sort of thing that will shock a great many Americans out of whatever transe they remain in, and force them to see that Democrats do not belong in office, and that Democrats largely hate this country and apparently want to destroy it.
The other night at Sidetracks, during Market Days, we ran into our friend Phillip (a theater critic in New York). Market Days is a sort of Homecoming here in Boystown, and people we see rarely during the year make guest appearances for the largest street festival in the Midwest. Phillip is a New Yorker, an ultra-liberal, a dyed-in-the-wool-Democrat, and a man who enjoys saying terrible things about Sarah Palin and just about any other conservative woman you can think of. Phillip lived about ten blocks from the World Trade Center, however. He knew people who were murdered by Muslims on 9/11. Saying he knew people “who died on 9/11″ is ridiculous, though that’s the way the Lamestream Media usually couches this. Many people around the world died on 9/11/01 of natural causes: heart attacks, strokes, old age, you name it.
Over 3,000 Americans were murdered by Muslims in a certain part of New York City almost nine years ago. MURDERED. BY MUSLIMS. Not “killed”. They didn’t “die”. They didn’t become “living impaired”. They were MURDERED BY MUSLIMS.
That’s an irrefutable fact.
And Phillip, of all people, is even LOUDER and more vocal about this than US. If you can even possibly believe this.
He RAILED against Democrats for backing the Ground Zero Victory Mosque. He was so enraged, so red-faced, and was spitting so much when he talked, gesticulating so wildly, that at one point one of the security guys in the bar walked by and asked if everything was okay. He thought a fight was breaking out.
Now, Phillip is an Obama cultist, and we doubt he’s ever going to change in that regard, because Obama is a part-black man, and Phillip will never say a word of criticism about any black person. His Broadway reviews are largely jokes as a result of this, because anyone with above-normal levels of melanin in their skin gets a standing ovation from Phillip for managing to put their shoes on the right feet and not vomit all over themselves upon hitting the stage. He was taught to do this in “journalism school”, where any critique of blacks was seen as contributing to holding black people down, “when there are too few black leads on Broadway”. So Phillip freely admits to always praising anyone black in a cast because he wants to see more black peformers “get a chance”, and giving a negative review to anyone black would “discourage producers from hiring black actors”.
Welcome to the cult of Liberalism.
This partly explains why Phillip is forever gung-ho for Obama, no matter what the “president” does. He just can’t, because of his Liberal religion, ever criticize someone with that skin color, no matter what happens. OJ was innocent. Michael Jackson was just misunderstood. Oprah’s not really all that fat or crazy.
The other part of it was revealed in something Phillip said about his father, in a jab he was trying to take at us for coming out as conservatives and embracing so many conservative candidates.
Phillip was talking about how ignorant he thinks his father is, and how in the 70s his dad would watch “All In the Family” (which Phillip called, “The Archie Bunker Show”, which is kind of like us calling “Wicked” “That Musical With the Green Lady” instead, but whatever)and would sit there shouting “Yah! You tell ‘em, Arch. You tell ‘em. That’s right”, to everything Bunker said. Phillip scolded his father and told him that Bunker was a caricature, meant to be ridiculed, and that actor Carol O’Connor was portraying a prototypical bigot.
“But he’s right about everything,” Phillip’s dad would say.
“No, you are wrong about everything and you’re a bigot, too, dad,” Phillip would hector.
“You’re crazy. Go get me a beer so I can finish watching my show”.
Phillip was trying to portray how ignorant conservatives are, and how people like his dad don’t even know when they’ve become a laughingstock — but all we could think of was how much Phillip was describing the Democrat Party as it currently exists.
The reason Democrats have no problem with Islam building a Victory Mosque at Ground Zero is because Democrats hate America as much as Muslims do. They’ll hide behind statements like, “this is their religious freedom to build wherever they want”, but what they really feel is much darker and anti-American. The reason they have no problem with Muslims building a monument of conquest on ground that’s stained with the blood of people we personally know — people who were murdered by Muslims — is because Democrats enjoy seeing Americans humbled, prostrate, broken, and made dhimmi before Islam.
Democrats hate women and gays as much as Muslims do.
Just look at Phillip — a gay man — who thinks nothing on Earth is funnier than misogynistic jokes about conservative women. One of the videos Sidetracks showed during Market Days was during a round of comedy sketches where they played an America’s Funniest Home Video-esque clip that showed an elderly woman being raped by a very large golden retriever. The person holding the camera was heard giggling, and the video clip went on for about a minute, during which the dog managed to knock the woman to the ground, mount her, as she screamed for someone to help her. It was beyond sick. But, Phillip and the majority of gay men in the bar HOWLED with laughter. “Take that, Grandma!” their laughter said. Just sick.
Somewhere else in another solidly Democrat enclave, we’re sure there’s a video playing of a gay man being humiliated in some way, and black Democrats are howling with laughter. In another corner of the Demverse, Jews are being ridiculed while the college-educated, professorial elite clap loudly.
This is part of the extreme sickness of the cult of Liberalism. We see it every day. Democrats are beyond help.
It’s why the embrace Islam so readily — because a lot of the evil things Muslims think and do Liberals do as well…with the caveat that whatever protected group they personally belong to should never be on the receiving end of the hatred and venom that Liberalism fosters and spews.
The only reason Phillip has a problem with the Victory Mosque is because he lost friends in that attack, and because he personally spent a lot of time in those buildings, so he realized he, too, could have been murdered by Muslims nine years ago.
And that scares him.
He’s no fool, and has studied history enough to know that “Cordoba” is code for conquest, like the monument of Islamic victory Muslims erected in Spain at Cordoba to symbolize their conquest of Europe…with a monstrous mosque built upon dirt stained with the blood of those who resisted the caliphate.
While Phillip doesn’t go so far as to speak out against Islam, or Democrats’ support of the Islamization of this country, he does take the stand and ask “Why do they have to build a mosque THERE? I’ve been living in New York for 15 years, and there are plenty of places to build this ELSEWHERE. There are plenty of mosques in New York already. They do not need to build this THERE”.
If someone like Phillip is impacted by this, and has this sort of reaction, then Democrats are in really deep trouble now.
Every last one of them, coast to coast, must be confronted in every election with this Victory Mosque. They must go on record either supporting it, as the current “president” does, or being against it. If against it, they must be presssed on what they will do to stop this monstrosity from being built.
More importantly, every Democrat DONOR out there needs to be hectored with this. They need to be asked point blank why they are giving money to the party that is backing the construction of an Islamic Victory Mosque at Ground Zero in the spirit of the Cordoba conquest monument in Spain.
Every last one of them must be tied to this project — because if the DNC and the White House are backing this Victory Mosque, and these rich people are funding the DNC, then they should bear responsibility as well.
Watch Democrats put a stop to this madness lickety-split the moment they realize how horrified their donors will be if they are accused of supporting this horror.
That is the way to stop this project, people.
Get to the Donors. Make the Donors sweat. Have the Donors put pressure on the elected Democrats. Watch all sorts of bureaucratic magic happen to keep the Victory Mosque from ever being built.
Liberals like Phillip are canaries in the Leftist coal mine: if even committed cultists like him are riled up about something, then it’s the perfect opportunity to turn the rest of the country against a political party that has proven itself to be anti-American, anti-Western, anti-United States exceptionalism, and pro-Islam.
