Posts Tagged ‘American is my nationality
"Nationality Expertism" rears its head again in Boystown
If you have been reading us for a while, you know how we feel about “Nationality Experts”: these are amateur genealogists, ethnologists, anthropologists, racists, whatever you want to call them who live in Chicago and think “What’s your nationality?” is an acceptable question to ask a stranger in a bar.
Our nationality is American. None of us here are the children, grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren of immigrants. All of our grandparents were born in this country. All of our great-grandparents were born in this country. We have no emotional connection to any country other than the United States. We have relatives and friends in many different European countries, but when you ask where our families are “from”, the answer is “Ohio”, “Pennsylvania”, “Texas”, etc.
But, for some reason, in Chicago there’s an obsession with white and Hispanic men to know your “nationality” before they decide whether they want to ask you out or not. There are literally millions of things you can ask a stranger upon first meeting him. There are also about five things someone can say to one of us that immediately makes us shut down and not want have anything whatsoever to do with that person. This “nationality” garbage is the primo date-quasher in our books.
This nonsense happened again last night, with a guy one of us actually really liked. His name is Jim, a French teacher in Chicago Public Schools. He is smart, funny, had the dark hair and eyes one of us goes for, held an interesting conversation about both France and how well Ron Huberman was doing as Chief of the school system (Huberman is the first openly gay man to run the city’s schools, and is also Mayor Daley’s chosen successor for when Daley retires).
But, then he had to do the “What’s your nationality?” thing. We answered, “American”, like we always do. Then he did the thing that really vexes us and pushed it, saying, “No, where is your family from?”, and we did the “America. My family is from America” thing we do. The frustration bubbled up in us and we ended the conversation, told Jim it was nice meeting him, and wished him a happy birthday (as he told us it was next Tuesday). We started to walk away and he realized he did something wrong — but didn’t know exactly what — so he said, “It’s just that I’m really interesting in people’s nationalities…”
Honestly, cute as he was, there’s no way in Hell we are wasting any more of our lives talking to these racists.
What does it matter where relatives of yours lived 300 or 3,000 or even 30 years ago? If you were born in this country, you are an American. If you studied hard, worked your fingers to the bone, and passed your citizenship test, you are an American. If you have no loyalty to any other country and would happily lay down your life for the United States if this great nation ever needed you, then you are an American.
No public school French teacher has the right to define you as anything else if that’s how you define yourself.
In days past, we used to get into it with these clowns about how stupid it was to ask that nationality stuff. We’d go on about how they should ask questions about who a person is, what they like to do, what they think about the news, what books they read, etc. instead of asking where dead relatives of theirs are buried overseas. But, life is too, too short to spend any of it on these liberal fools.
One thing we did realize last night — and this realization is the only reason we bring this stuff up again here — is that it is STRICTLY a Chicago phenomenon. After the business with Jim happened, we all decamped to another part of Sidetracks and talked about it, mentally going through a list of all the guys who have asked one of us “The Nationality Question” over the five years we’ve lived in this city. Here’s what we found:
* Only white males and Hispanic men have asked “The Nationality Question”
* No black person has ever tried to define us this way, no Asian either
* Only white men who were raised in Chicago or its suburbs ask this
* For Hispanics, it’s mainly Mexicans who ask this; people from Puerto Rico, Argentina, Guatemala, etc. don’t ask it
* Guys who grew up poor or working class are more likely to ask this than guys who grew up with professional, well-off parents
* Liberals ask this sort of thing, but conservatives don’t; Democrats ask it, Republicans don’t
It’s a total class thing unique to Chicago. What it feels like is that these guys grew up in families where the “Italians” wouldn’t let their kids play with the “Irish” or the “Puerto Ricans” or whatever, so they were constantly asking kids what nationality they were to see if they could be friends on the playground. If you answer wrong, you can’t be my friend. As adults, these guys now keep the nationality question alive in the first three things they say to a stranger…now using it to determine if the person is dateable instead of just friendable.
As we’ve said before, we’ve never encountered this in any other city we’ve lived in. Just Chicago. And, it seems, just from guys who grew up in Chicago.
The one caveat is that we did get this from an obnoxious, random woman in Ft. Meyers, Florida once. She was the receptionist at an art gallery one of us worked a charity benefit at. Right in the middle of an unrelated conversation, she just blurted out, “What’s your nationality?” and didn’t settle for the American answer there either. Turns out she, too, was originally from the midwest but we don’t think it was Chicagoland.
She, so far, is the only female to have ever pulled this.
The correct answer to intrusive question "What's your nationality?" should be "American"
Dear HillBuzz,
Back in a peach and yellow totally 80s kitchen in Cleveland, my mother helped a much smaller version of me bake hundreds of mini German chocolate cupcakes and slather them with gruesome-looking but entirely delicious roasted coconut and pecan frosting. This was technically my first foray into catering (and I’m sure my football-loving father was just as proud as whenever he’d catch me surreptitiously watching “that girls’ show” Jem or wanting the She-ra doll action figure to complete my Masters of the Universe set), having planned these treats as refreshments for my booth in the school’s 6th grade “Nationality Report” presentation, where students tasked with creating narratives about their “nationality” used poster board and crayolas to inadequately represent the complexities of overseas cultures almost entirely alien to them by reducing centuries of history to badly-drawn castles and truly ugly lederhosen-clad caricatures (and then calling it a day).
Like all things in Catholic school, the nuns meant well when they conceived the inaugural “Nationality Day”, which included not only presentations during the two lunch periods for all students K-8, but a command performance at night for parents to attend (and all were dutifully thrilled, of course, to miss Family Ties, The A-Team, or Magnum PI that evening, in a world where people still didn’t know how to program their VCRs, to come down to the Immaculate Conception School for an amateur trade show on globalism).
Contrary to popular belief, Nuns aren’t any better at predicting disaster than the civilian population (and are probably much worse at prognostication than the average groundhog, horse, or shelter mutt, all of whom can supposedly detect imminent catastrophe using marvelous superpowered sixth senses when anecdote requires). Back when I was in grade school, they still wore the medieval habits and other bride of Christ regalia, and all of them took great pride in not owning TVs, watching movies, reading magazines, listening to the radio, or learning about anything that happened after Vatican II (because, really, what was the point when the school year only had so many days and no one really wanted to talk about Jimmy Carter or his stale peanuts anyway). So, it was no surprise whatsoever, really, that “Nationality Day” bombed so spectacularly with both students and parents – but it remains amazing, to me at least, that what happened on some random day in Cleveland still echoes in my life here in Chicago today.
For whatever reason, my classmate Erika Kuester, who the nuns expected to report on Germany, or possibly Austria, Switzerland, or MAYBE in a real nail-biter, Luxembourg (with a Germanic name like Erika Kuester, after all), set up Old Glory in her Nationality Day booth, tacked a colorful map of all 50 states to her poster board, and sliced up four Baker’s Square apple pies into Dixie-cup portions, prepped for her presentation: “I am an American”.
AMERICAN was her featured nationality, and that’s what she wanted to talk about. America was the nation she wrote her report on. Red, white, and blue were the crayons she used on her poster board. In her heart, she sang My Country ‘Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty.
The rest of my sixth grade class was midway through setting up our slipshod displays on Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Ireland, China, Mexico, Germany and Italy, with various foodstuffs and knickknacks assembled (with varying success), none of which gave more than an Epcot Center approximation of any foreign country — but there was Erika, whose parents were actual immigrants from what was then East Germany, declaring herself to be 100% American.
The nuns were apoplectic, of course, in the way normally reserved for music listed on hard-to-read mimeographed sheets that Mrs. Smoley in the school office sent home to parents once a month, informing them of which particular bands the school believed were tools of Satan (that week) and which specific songs could be played backwards with great difficulty to reveal insidious haikus I have never, to this day, been able to ungarble. In Catholic school, as good as our education was (and I remain very grateful for it, and the sacrifices my parents made to send me to private school), critical thinking and old-fashioned moxie were generally lumped in with other tools of the Devil, musical or otherwise. The nuns were sphinxes that asked their questions knowing all the answers, firm in their belief that nothing could or should ever deviate from their well-attended plans. Bells rang like crazy all day keeping everyone on schedule and everything in just the right place. Rulers were used to measure the lengths of girls’ skirts and smack the backs of boys’ hands to maintain ordered consistency.
But, then Erika Kuester unexpectedly became the Norma Ray of the cafeteria set, holding up her I AM AN AMERICAN sign for all to see, unexpectedly rallying many of us to her side.
Because, standing in front of my truly hideous depiction of Schloss Neuschwanstein, cuckoo clocks, and Checkpoint Charlie, I looked at the hundreds of tiny German chocolate cakes spread across my table and realized the one or two times a year I ever ate anything “German”, even if it was “German” only in name like these cakes, it was never as satisfying as a nice plate of piping hot, store-bought, Baker’s Square “American” apple pie.
I’ve been to Europe many times through the years, with many of those vacations to Germany, Austria, Andorra, Liechtenstein, and other random places relatives of mine lived many hundreds and thousands of years ago, back when those places were all called The Holy Roman Empire, Trans-Alpine Gaul, Abracadabracaptovia, or whatever. As a kid, I thought about those places only when nuns told me to, and as a grown man I typically only revisit them when people in Chicago bars come up to me, at random, and ask, “What’s your nationality?”.
This only happens to me in Chicago.
It never happened in Cleveland; it doesn’t happen in New York, Washington, San Francisco, or other cities I like; it never happened on the campaign trail in any of the farflung and obscure places I was sent to canvass for Hillary Clinton or McCain/Palin in 2008. It’s a uniquely Chicago thing, like putting cucumbers and tomatoes on hotdogs and turning “pizza” into a 27-pound angioplasty technician’s job security dream.
“What’s your nationality?”
“What nationality are you?”
“Where are your parents from?”
“Where did your grandparents come from?”
The jarring, out-of-the-blue, yet pointed and laser-focused interrogatory in that unsettled me the first dozen or so times I heard that in Chicago. At first, I didn’t know how to respond, and thought it was a joke. Why on Earth would anyone ask me what my nationality was?
What on Earth did they need that information for?
Were they from the government?
Were they conducting a survey?
If I answered incorrectly, would they not want to speak to me anymore?
Would the next words out of Sargent Schultz’ mouth switch to the imperative with, “PAPERS PLEASE!”.
I have now lived in Chicago for four years, and have probably been asked “What’s your nationality?” by no less than 300 guys, mainly at Sidetrack’s while minding my own business watching videos, nursing Pilsners, and pretending not to evesdrop on the conversations around me for material for columns like these. I went through various stages of response until I found one that’s been universally effective. The experimentation went through stages, just like my door-to-door or telephone spiels during the campaign, where I refined what worked and eliminated responses that failed to get my point across.
At first, I asked these people why they needed to know what my nationality was, but that was mainly an invitation for them to exhibit more of their personal brand of stupidity, of which I certainly wanted no trade shows.
“Why do you need to know what my nationality is?”
“Well, I can’t figure out what you are. You have dark hair and dark eyes, but you are pale, so you aren’t Arab, but you aren’t Italian either, so then I thought you might be Hispanic, but you’re drinking a Czech beer and not a Corona, so you can’t be Hispanic, so I don’t know what you are so I asked.”
There are moments in life where I truly wish I was kidding, and this is one of them. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people I’ve met in Chicago who insist on labeling absolutely everyone and everything they encounter in life. They pass judgment with all the frequency and unpleasantness of Oprah on chili day at Harpo Studios wordlessly, but never silently, passing her own “judgment” on chef’s efforts that day (typically in packed elevators, from what I have heard, with men, women, and children clawing at the wood paneled walls, grasping for breathe, green to the gills and unable to even call for help in the wake of Oprah’s chili-induced “judgment”).
It all stinks.
I don’t have the boy next door, apple pie, all-American, Abercrombie look. Growing up, my three fallback Halloween costumes were always Dracula, James Bond, or Superman (and still have the red speedo and tights hanging in the closet in case of costum-related emergencies). I’ve got dark hair and eyes, a fondness for evening wear and/or capes, and generically foreign features that throw back to somewhere between the Roman conquest of Alpine Europe and the eventual merging of all the little post-Holy post-Roman post-Empire kingdoms into the Kaiser’s Germany that didn’t quite exist by the time my direct ancestors were all long gone…and firmly established in the U-S-of-A.
So, asking me what’s my nationality and demanding a Europe-based specific answer is like demanding to know where my great-great-great-great grandfather was baptized, where he went to grade school, what his favorite color was, and how many frogs he saw in the entirety of his life. A lifetime could be wasted trying to discover the answers to all of those questions, but it would be completely pointless and serve positively no purpose today. Why would anyone care?
But, liberals obsessed with labels do care.
Challenging this inane questioning resulted in only more questions, forcing me to spend time talking to people I already didn’t like (because of said nationality obsessions) without a clearly defined exit strategy for the conversation.
I wondered why these people were coming up and talking to me: were they interested in me and wanted to get to know me or ask me out, or did these guys just object to a generically-foreign looking person in their midst whom they couldn’t label effectively?
RAAAAACISTS!
Was the “nationality question” just the second-worst pickup line ever (after, in Boystown, direct and pointed questions about the length of certain parts of the male anatomy (which start with “p” and end in “enis”) that are more frequently asked at Sidetrack’s than you could ever possibly imagine), meant as a way to start a conversation — or was it RAAAAAAACISM! from liberal gay Democrats who go out of their way to shop at Whole Foods for all things foreign and exotic, so essentially that’s what they try to do at Sidetrack’s too, in the men department?
“What’s your nationality?” has a subtext to it, in my experience of, “I have walked over to speak to you because I am the kind of guy who buys acai berry, pomegranate, and dragon fruit whatever because I want people to know how liberal, progressive, and international-thinking I am. Plus, I love and support the rain forest, wherever that is. I have identified you as a potentially exotic and/or foreign person and would like to be seen talking to you because this proves I do not ONLY speak to blonde twinks from Iowa, which comprise most of my friends and the hastily-scribbled on the backs of napkins phone numbers littered under my bed. So, in talking to you and in confirming that you are, in fact, ethnic in some way, I am increasing my liberal cred while showing all of my friends how cool I am for willingly speaking to that dark-haired, possibly Italian or Hispanic or Arab or Jewish or whatever person my liberal arts education taught me to, so rudely, label capricously”.
I’m not a mind-reader (obviously, since I’m not a nun and thus have no magical powers), so I can’t ever know what really went through guys’ heads in the seconds before the asked me “the nationality question”, but the above is my best guess based on repeated anecdotal evidence.
And, as this kept happening, and I kept getting into arguments with these guys over how rude it is to come up and ask someone this question, I eventually just started f***ing with them instead of letting this nonsense bother me.
“What’s your nationality?”
“Oh, I’m Japanese.”
Didn’t expect that one, did they?
“Oh, uh, you don’t look Japanese.”
“Really, I look like all my family in Kyoto. Have you been to Kyoto and do you know everyone there? If you did, you would know everyone there looks just like me. We’re all Japanese, we really think so. Now, you, however, you are clearly Botswanan. Dumella ma. Yes, I believe your family is from Gaborone, clearly. Northwestern Gaborone, to be precise, by the telephone booth. I know this from watching the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and I believe you look like someone I saw in a scene in the market place who was holding a toy truck. That could have been your cousin. WAS that your cousin? It was certainly a very nice toy truck, ma”.
The clearly non-Botswanan in front of me wouldn’t know quite what to do, but would ultimately slink away when I’d just go back to watching the video screens, purposefully closing the conversation, wondering whatever happend to that lovely toy truck.
I’ve been Japanese, Icelandic, Andorran, Zanzibarian, black, Native American, Swiss, Romulan, and Trans-Alpine-Gaullic in various run-ins with what I call “The Nationality Police”. After answering their idiocy with whatever I can think of from the World Almanac off the top of my head, I always then asked these guys if they were *fill in the blank*, picking something ridiculous to assume they were nationality-wise. Tall blonde skinny man? Well, he must be from Samoa! Short black man? A viking! Red-headed muscle pup? Camerooooooooooon! Or Djibuti, because, really, who DOESN’T love working some Djibuti into an increasingly awkward conversation with people you never want to talk to again (and we all know there can never be enough Djibuti at Sidetrack’s).
Then, I just got tired of doing all of this after a few months, and instead wanted to find the easiest way to shut the Nationality Police down and clearly indicate that I wanted no further conversation with this person.
I employed a wonderful trick I learned from Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign: whenever she was asked a question she didn’t want to answer, she would just talk about something else entirely. If someone didn’t ask a question, but instead made an awkward or absurd comment, Clinton would just say, “Well, thank you for your opinon,” before moving on to the next person in the audience or the next hand to shake on the rope line.
“What’s your nationality?”
“Oh, I come here all the time on the weekends. I like Showtunes night, but audience request night is cool too. They have great VJs here. Sometimes the Pilsners are skunky, but what can you do with imports? If I drank American beer, I’d never have that problem, so it serves me right.”
“No, I asked what your nationality was. You look Greek to me. My family is Greek, so I thought you were Greek.”
“Well, thank you for your opinion. Now, if you will excuse me, I see my friend across the room. Have a blessed day.”
As I employed this strategy, something became very clear: people almost always said, “Oh, I thought you were *blank* because my family is *blank*”. So, whatever they were, they wanted me to be too. I never once ran into a case of, “You aren’t Arab, is you? I HATES me some Arabs. Is you one? CAUSE I HATES ‘EM”. There were probably pretty people who thought ugly things like that, but they were smart enough not to become Nationality Police and confront me about whatever it was they thought I was, which I wasn’t, that was upsetting them from across the room. But, people who wanted to put a label on me that they in some way applied to themselves always used this as their opener in the bars.
I remain fascinated by that, because everyone in Sidetrack’s wears several labels by being in there: Abercrombie, of course, and Calvin Klein and Donna Karan, but also LGBTQ, Chicagoan, drunkard, friend of Dorothy, and AMERICAN, all to some extent. Why do some guys need to add more labels to people? And all of this, of course, is in addition to the labels they’ll add by asking what someone does for a living (which is one step removed from asking how much money they make), where they live, or, yes, how big certain things are (welcome to Boystown!).
The “nationality question” became the kiss of death for any prospective date. It rounded out the Fatal Five things I know make a guy absolutely wrong for me, actually instantly establishing itself at the top of that heap:
(1) Asked “What’s your nationality?”
(2) Drinks frilly, complicated, high-maintenance drinks
(3) Doesn’t get my jokes
(4) Asked how big my *fill in the blank* is
(5) Asked what I did for a living in the first half hour of talking to me
Guys whose drinks take longer to say than “Pilsner” or “MGD” are not for me. As the bartending skill required to keep them tanked at Sidetrack’s increases, so does the amount of energy they’ll drain from me in a dating situation. If you need a bartending book to take care of one of these guys, they might make great friends, but they are not having breakfast with me in the morning. No thanks, Mr. Sex-on-the-Beach. I don’t need any of your endless crabbing.
Obviously, I am who I am, so I’m also not going to relate well to someone who needs me to explain whatever I’m talking about constantly either. You get me or you don’t; you think I’m funny or you just stare at me blankly. You appreciate my snark, or you go all crazy in comments. But, it’s not a fun date with all that much staring going on, so I’ll pass on Mr. Doesn’t Think I’m Funny.
And, really, there’s just not a single appropriate instance in which someone can or should ask how large a male body part is, unless it’s Lloyd’s of London calling to insure it, so (4) above is an obvious disqualifier. Because you just have to find that part out on your own, if you play your cards right, mister.
Some of you might object to (5) being on the Fatal Five list, because most people do ask this question, but I’ve found that guys I end up liking don’t get around to this cliche until later in the evening, if at all the first day I know them. That means they have other things to talk about, other interests, and have an unconventional way of thinking that I’ve found matches well with me. Hence, any talk of work, money, or status draws a line in the sand in the first 30 minutes of knowing him, after which he can most certainly still be a friend, but won’t be anything more.
I’ll be 33 in June, and wish I’d discovered the Fatal Five 20 years ago and spared myself a lot of Davids in the process (his nationality: Scotch-Irish-Anglo, his favorite drink: Sea Breeze, he never got my jokes and asked how big it is, but didn’t ask about work or money the first night I met him, now that I think about it).
With the concept of the Fatal Five firm in my mind, I realized the Nationality Police were people I really didn’t even want to be friends with, and really didn’t want to talk to, but I did want to start learning more about WHY they found it so important to ask me about my nationality when there are literally trillions of questions people can ask each other, no matter what nationality they are.
What’s your favorite episode of Punky Brewster?
What animal at the zoo are you upset the most about always hiding under rocks or bushes so you can’t ever see it, no matter how many times you go there or what time of day you visit?
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
So many questions, so many opportunities not to talk about people’s nationality.
One night during a Showtunes Sunday, a guy I actually really liked and was enjoying talking to for about 10 minutes pulled out his Nationality Expert credentials and asked me Fatal Five Question Number One, and that time I thought to answer his question with one of my own:
“What’s your nationality?”
“I have a better question for you. Why do you ask someone that? What’s the pathology behind asking someone what his nationality is? Are you a racist? If I answer that question wrong, with a nationality you don’t like, will you not talk to me anymore, or even worse, try to hurt me in some way? Is your pathology racially motivated, and if so, why?”
THAT was a ridiculously effective comeback for creating a Nationality-Police hole in the wall where this guy fled with great haste after muttering “I’m sorry, sorry to offend you, uh, I’m really a good guy…I’m just…sorry, there’s nothing pathologically wrong with me…I’m not a racist…sorry”. Calling a gay liberal Democrat a RAAAAACIST! or implying there is something pathologically wrong with him is MARVELOUSLY effective at getting him to not only leave you alone for the rest of the night (or forever) but also makes him race home to, presumably, call either his therapist or his Grace (straight female sidekick with low self-esteem waiting by the phone to hear about his latest exploits in Boystown, still hoping on some level this is all just a wedding-of-her-dreams-delaying phase). I thank Dr. Utopia’s supporters and his campaign for the race-baiting trick: calling people RAAAAACISTS! who weren’t worked so well for him, I knew it would work for me too, and I just love it.
But, all snark aside, it actually is pretty racist to come up to someone and demand to know what nationality he is. And it is legitimate to wonder whether or not there is a “wrong” answer to that question. Favorite color? Favorite movie? What books are you reading? Do you know where my pants are? All valid, informative, and sometimes necessary questions in Boystown.
But, what’s your nationality? Inappropriate, pedestrian, and cliche. Especially when my answer these days really is “American”.
Last night, I was out with some friends and a dead-ringer for Anderson Cooper came up to me, a 30-something silver fox with Vanderbilt blue eyes and a photo-shoot ready, skin-tight black polo that could have been painted on by what I presume is Annie Leibovitz’s much-harried makeup artist or assistant. We talked for 27 seconds approximately before the “nationality question hit”:
“What’s your nationality?”
“American”.
“No, what’s your family’s nationality?”
“American”.
“What country is your family from?”
“America”.
“No, what’s their, you know, original nationality”.
“American. The greatest nation on Earth. America. That’s my nationality, American. I am an American”.
And man alive, I let those words hang in the air like Erika Kuester’s handmade sign. I AM AN AMERICAN. MY NATIONALITY IS AMERICAN.
All at once, I thought about Erika’s presentation to our grade school; I thought about volunteering all across the country through the years doing various community projects where I was always welcomed with such kindness by Americans; I was suddenly back in rural Iowa stuck in a snow drift campaigning for Hillary Clinton when a bunch of good Americans came out of their ramshackle farmhouse to dig me out of my mess; through 27 states during the campaign, at dozens of rallies and parades, there I was, surrounded by wonderful Americans all across this great nation; I was shaking hands with John McCain, Sarah Palin, Michael Steele and other great Americans on the Republican side of the aisle for the first time in my life; I remembered being in those public schools I visited in Chicago this past week, seeing how much separation and identity and racial politics were emphasized, and I realized how damaging this particular manifestation of liberalism really is; and, last but not least, I found myself sitting at my computer writing up these thoughts, reaching out to all the good Americans who stop by HillBuzz to yet again celebrate all we share in common, no matter how different we might at first seem.
And that is something I celebrate about myself today, and every day going forward. I AM AN AMERICAN. MY NATIONALITY IS AMERICAN. I will continue to give all of my free time to doing whatever I can to help the America I believe in, and to resist the efforts of those who would destroy it.
I don’t care where people came from. I don’t care how much money they have or how fancy their jobs are. I don’t care if they are Democrats or Republicans anymore. I don’t give a damn if they are black, white, red, yellow, or green (and I sure as Hell won’t write crazy poems about that to read at Inaugurations).
All I care about is if someone is a good American or not. If you are, we can most definitely be friends. You still have to make it passed the Fatal Five to get a date, but if you’re an American, well, hey, we’ve already got something great in common and I want to celebrate it. Looking like Chris Pine or Jake Gyllenhaal will also help you in more ways than you can immediately know.
As a fellow American, the label I will put on you is FRIEND. Keep asking me that nationality crap and you’ll get the other label in my bag, which is JACKASS. And, more likely than not at this point, you’ll also get a fairly long speech about how many different kinds of awesome this country is, and how much it totally kicks Europe’s saurian, sorry ass five times by Sunday, and how much of this RED, WHITE, AND BLUE verve I picked up at McCain/Palin rallies and Hillary Clinton events all around the country.
So, just like precocious Erika so many years ago back in Cleveland, I know exactly who I am. I AM AN AMERICAN. So, you don’t have to ask me that question ever again, and the nuns have to just DEAL WITH IT. I wrote a whole essay about it that is now on the Internets, floating somewhere in those pipes and tubes, where maybe you can share it with the rest of the Nationality Police and we can all save each other a lot of time.
As AMERICANS.
Sebastian Gray
Chicago, IL
