HAPPY TOGETHER

One of the first negative comments I ever heard when I was a child was "go back where you came from". This was after we had moved to Valkenswaard, where all of my school teachers thought I sounded delightful and spoke like a civilized person, because I spoke proper Dutch. We had lived in Hilversum and Naarden before that and consquently my speech was clear and clean, and correctly accented. Local children did not speak like that at all, and they resented being told to emulate me. Go back where you came from.

And, given that their elders often discussed what a shithole the United States actually was, and add to that the fact that unlike them my family were heathens (not their religion), once it was clear that I was in fact a foreigner (American) though of Dutch descent, I was told to go back where I came from very often. Which occured in many social environments.

[The United States on the news every night: McCarthyism, racial conflict, Vietnam war, assassinations of Kennedys and MLK. And also Richard Milhous Nixon, Cambodia, Laos, Ronald Wilson Reagan, George Corley Wallace, the Cayuhoga River, atom bombs, what we had done to the Indians, the CIA, our meddling in Chile and the killing of Salvador Allende, our meddling in Indonesia and the slaughter of several million people from the fifties through Lubang Buaya into the seventies and eighties -- Borneo, Madiun, Maluku, Timor, Western New Guinea -- and let us not forget the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. Plus Charlie Manson, sex, drugs, hamburgers, and religious nuts.]

Which I eventually did.

Since my return to the United States I have been told to go back where I came from very many times also, because my speech is clear and clean, correctly accented, and I sound like a civilized person, probably foreign. Which is one of the reasons I damned well refuse to ever visit most parts of this country. I have NO need to meet the "natives", see the world's biggest ball of twine, and eat crap like scrapple and grits. Been there, done that. So to speak.
Let me tell you where to shove that cheese steak. And your regional pizza.

I was born in California. Where I have resided since returning to the United States for college. And y'all know what they think about California in the rest of this country.

We're all gay, communist, or ethnic here. Sometimes all of that. And many of us are closet Mexicans too. Plus we eat foreign foods here.


Do you really think that the two ways y'all cook raccoon and possum are any better? Or fried starch with a side of boiled starch? Let's not even mention scrapple and grits.
Or cheesesteak and your shitty regional pizza.



By the way: I've heard that in some parts of the country they layer ground beef with sliced American cheese and ketchup in a casserole, cover it with tater tots, and bake it.
Served for family dinner, washed down with soda or sweetened ice tea.
Surely that can't be true. Do they at least add pepper?



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