Friday,
January 11, 2008
My Wife Is Italian !
No Really!!!!
The
ANNOTICO Report
The
author's wife is an Italian from
Why is it that
the most aggressively self-satisfied citizenry - who'll tell you everything
that's "best" about the United States, even though they've never
visited anywhere else - never identify themselves as belonging to the place
they're so proud of?
Except when
they're overseas, that is. Put them on any other soil and they'll bray it to
the heavens."Oh, no. I'm AMERICAN," they yell.
Then think about
the insult being hurled around the world when a
Huffington Post -
Evan Handler
January 10, 2008
My wife, she ain't from around here. She's Italian, I tell people. Or
she tells them herself.
"Oh, and
have you ever been to
"I'm Italian," she says, with
as much patience as she can muster. "That's where I'm from."
"Ohhhhhhhhhh...," they say. "So you're really Italian."
As if there were another kind.
But there is. The American kind. For the
Yes, the
United States, the land of the self-satisfied, overfed, under taxed, and
inferiorly educated; the land where nearly everyone strains as if trying to
dislodge a mammoth bowel movement to refute each of those facts; the nation
whose politicians still use an eighteenth century phrase like "American Exceptionalism" as if it were an edict from their
private God, is the only place on Earth where there are no Americans.
It's true. Just
walk up to one and ask. I know what you'll hear.
'What's your
nationality?"
"Oh, I'm
Italian."
"I'm
Greek."
"Russian
on my mother's side, French on my father's side."
"Spanish
and Irish.
That's why I'm so crazy!"
It was within
days of my wife and I meeting each other that she first turned to me and asked,
"What are these people talking about? Are they really from all those
places? None of them seem to have any accents."
And I had to
explain it to her. Here in the
I wish I could
show the rest of my nation the look she gave me when she heard that.
"These
people who say they are Polish are not really from
No. I'm afraid
not, I told her. And the Italians aren't from
"Then what
are they talking about?"
And I have to
tell her that I don't know.
Why is it that
the most aggressively self-satisfied citizenry - who'll tell you everything
that's "best" about the United States, even though they've never
visited anywhere else - never identify themselves as belonging to the place
they're so proud of?
Except when
they're overseas, that is. Put them on any other soil and they'll bray it to
the heavens.
"Oh,
no.
I'm AMERICAN,"
they yell. "Can you believe it honey? He thought I was from
But here at home,
they're German. Because their last name is Schmidt.
I'll confess, I
never thought about it much before my wife pointed it out to me. Though,
personally, I never identified myself as being from anywhere else. I don't even
know where my ancestors came from. A no-man's-land called Russia-Poland,
according to my parents - though they could never name a specific town. They
couldn't even pin it down to a nation, apparently. If people really push, I
tell them I think my relatives were eastern European. But really I have no
idea.
It's the audacity
of it that gets to my wife, I think. The same audacity that
allows Americans to call themselves American, even though the term only
delineates between two continents out of seven. It doesn't even come
close to naming a country. (Hell, if you want audacious, there's not even
another word in the English language to describe someone who comes from the
The question most
often asked of my wife by her friends and family back in Italy, though, isn't
about the absurdity of school children pledging allegiance to a flag (with our
without any "under Gods"); it's not about the frightening sight of
seeing the national anthem played before every sporting event; it's not even
about the requirement that politicians ask God to bless their nation at the end
of every speech - none of which is done where she comes from....
Nor do we have "the
best healthcare" in the world, as each and every Republican presidential
candidate proclaimed during their
Again, the
ferocity of the insult being hurled around the world when a politician makes
the proclamation of superiority didn't hit me until I was living with my wife. But then I started to
hear the declarations through her ears, and to imagine how they must sound to
everyone else on the planet.
Both my in-laws
have had successful major surgeries. They were performed promptly, and they
didn't have to pay for them. When we traveled to
We told each that
we'd been giving her Zantac, an anti-acid medication for acid reflux that
nearly every infant I know in
I suppose, if
anyone were actually reading this and I wasn't just typing it to myself,
there'd be a contingent shouting "If you don't like it here, why don't
you go live over there?" Just the same way the eleven year olds I went
to junior high school with foamed at the mouth and screamed "
And now it's
thirty-five years later than that. Too late, it could be speculated. I heard
Randy Newman singing on the radio the other day. He's a songwriter I've long
admired, but in my own foolishness I'd kind of subconsciously written him off
as being past his prime. This was a recent, live performance that was playing.
He sounded great. His voice was strong.
Newman sang:
The end of an empire is messy at best
And this empire is ending
Like all the rest
Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea
We're adrift in the land of the brave
And the home of the free
Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
It's called "A
Few Words in Defense of Our Country," and it's great. Like all great
songs, it does what this fifteen hundred-word post does in a fraction of the
space. You can see him sing it at what looks like his piano at home on YouTube. You should definitely check it out.
Of course, right
under Randy's video, the top response read:
Go to any major
city in Europe, Asia, Africa or
So there you go.
Even if we don't question the responder's source for his data (my guess is the
source is his father saying that to him when he was a kid) it's thirty-five
years later, three thousand miles away, and it's the same story. Keep your
mouth shut or go live somewhere else. Everything here is the best, and don't
ever say different. Don't any of these people see the logic behind the
argument that every refusal to admit something's wrong prohibits anything from
ever improving?
Keep on singing,
Randy. If no one here wants to listen, we can sing to each other in
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ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:
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