http://www.livejournal.com/users/syndicalist/299877.html
(Posted July 6, 2005) by Oliver
Recently, my aunt in Plano, Texas, (a wealthy suburb of Dallas) had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to accompany her husband, an executive at General Electric, on a business trip to Paris, France.
Like a lot of folks in Plano, she's a fan of Bill O'Reilly. As you may or may not know, Bill O'Reilly has launched one of the most insanely rabid anti-France boycotts I have ever seen. Part of O'Reilly's website features a list of products made in France that one should avoid buying. France's defiance of Lord Bush in the Iraq war was unforgiveable, you see. We helped them in World War 2 -- how dare they have a different opinion on the necessity of invading Iraq! They're cheese-eating wimps! Anyway, O'Reilly's French product list is staggeringly lengthy, and honestly until I'd read it I did not realize how many products we commonly use that come from France or French companies.
So what was her response, to go to Paris with her husband?
"NOOOO!!! They hate us!!!"
"Us," of course. Not just "Americans" -- but "us," you and me, personally, on an individual basis!
So my uncle will go to Paris, France, all by himself. If that part of the family had not excommunicated me last January, because of circumstances too complicated to go into here, I would readily volunteer myself to accompany my uncle. Hey, I'll hang out in Parisian cafes and visit the historic Left Bank, go to Charles Baudelaire's gravesite, get Absinthe from Switzerland, etc., and risk being treated rudely! It's not like there aren't enough assholes in Dallas, Texas, that don't treat me rudely on a daily basis, anyway. I'm used to it!
But my Plano aunt? "NOOOOO!!!!!!! They hate us!!" (Of course she has no problem with her husband working for a company that obviously does business with France -- I mean his company wants him to go there, right? -- which affords her her lavish, SUV-drivin' lifestyle. She is not so "NOOOOO!!" about that part of it.)
In my aunt's fantasy, as soon as she would step off the plane into Paris, legions of beret-wearing, baguette-wielding Frenchmen would swarm upon her, and bludgeon her to death with their bread. "Mondieu!! You support the fasciste George Double-yieu Busche!!! To hell wit' you!! HAW HAW HAW!!" *club club club*
There is a bizarre insistency on cleanliness and orderliness in that Plano household that reminds me much of the OCD depiction of Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Perhaps that is why their son, my cousin, is a neo-Nazi, who has a pictue of Hitler on his bedroom wall. This is tolerated by my aunt and uncle as "just a phase he is going through."
In fact, my cousin's collection of World War 2 Nazi memorabilia is pretty disturbing. He has actual SS daggers and a real Nazi battle flag that his grandfather captured in France after storming the shores of Normandy. In fact, there is a picture of me from several years back that I have since come to regret where he and I are posing in a picture, holding up this monstrous Nazi battle flag, and I am laughing because it seemed so silly and ludicrous. When the photo developed, it looked pretty bad: There's me, holding up a Nazi flag, laughing, yukkin' it up. It's the kind of thing I hope never comes back to haunt me.
I remember my family also used to take vacations to South Padre Island near the Texas/Mexico border. But as the years went by those stopped at my aunt's behest. You see, as time progressed, more and more Mexican tourists or Latino residents of Texas populated the island compared to white Anglos like us. That meant we should no longer go there.
Me: "So are we gonna go to Padre Island this year?"
My aunt:: "NOOOOOOO!!! There's more Mexicans there and it's unsanitary now! They don't have the same health standards we do!!"
It's all justified in scientific terms like "cleanliness" or "sanitariness" -- pure objectivity. She isn't racist or anything like that!
Well, how about my aunt come visit me in my ghetto apartment south of LBJ Freeway, here in good ol' Dallas, TX?
My aunt: "NOOOOO!!! The crime rate is horrible there!! I don't want to get robbed!!"
["Crime rate" = usually a code word for "too many non whites in the area." I swear, whenever they would make a rare foray out of Plano to come see me they acted like they were taking a tour of duty into Vietnam's Mekong Delta circa 1969. To Plano folks, anything south of LBJ freeway is "the ghetto" to them.]
Anyway, France is out of the question. Padre Island is out of the question. Even driving south of LBJ in the dallas area is out of the question. So what will my aunt do for the rest of her days? Probably stay snug and secure in her Plano home, living a clean, orderly, sanitary life, never worried about crime, disease, or anti-American hoodlums threatening her. Sounds fun.