Ethnicity

You know, this country is ethnically subdividing faster than the uranium-235 atoms in Fat Man and Little Boy. Our pleasantly bubbling societal jambalaya has boiled over into a provincial brew of suspicion, intolerance, and plain old not-niceness. Now, I'm not saying life has to he a fucking Coke commercial, but it would be great if I could tell a Polish joke once in a while without a horde of them descending on my house and unscrewing all my fucking lightbulbs, all right?

Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but when did the contents of our melting pot go from creamy to super chunk?

You know, if you're going to insist on telling me it's natural for all people of all races and all ethnicities to get along, well, you're living in a fantasy world full of elves and fairies. And, incidentally, elves and fairies didn't get along either.

They hate each other. Elves refer to fairies as "flying Tinker Bell nancy boys," and fairies call elves "rainbow-humping suck pots." You know, really, it should be a constant source of amazement that our country does work on a daily basis and doesn't simply burst into a hundred million separate fistfights. So step out of the Hands Across America line and realize the brutal truth that human beings always have and always will actively look for people to not get along with.

And this is true even within groups-northern Californians don't get along with southern Californians, Irish Catholics don't get along with Irish Protestants, circus clowns fight with birthday party clowns. Begrudging someone else's existence just happens to be the most convenient way to validate your own.

And nowhere are these ego-driven prairie skirmishes more prevalent than in the Tigris and Euphrates of immigration, good old America.

Now, listen, I am all for legal immigration. But I am unequivocally against illegal immigration. You know why? It's illegal, all right? Where is it written that you can la-di-da across the border at nine A.M. and get your teeth capped for free that afternoon? Fuckin' Canadians.

In addition to immigration, our country also plays host to the United Nations, where the American taxpayer gladly foots the bill for sons of foreign leaders to escape date-rape charges through diplomatic immunity. I must admit when people from other countries do abuse our largess I just want to hire a welder to go up the Statue of Liberty and turn that welcoming torch into a giant middle finger.

So I guess I am a little possessive about this great big lug of a country that I call my own. But just a little posses . . . I'm not gonna play Pin the Blame on the Immigrants for all our country's problems. As a matter of fact, I believe America, much like Keith Richards, thrives on new blood.

Foreigners do not come to this country and take our jobs. Face it, you don't want to be a busboy, or a maid, or the roadside Linus Pauling hawking citrus on the traffic island, or working the overnight shift at the Unocal station breathing gasoline fumes in a booth that's so small it makes the tiger cage in The Deer Hunter look like the Taj Mahal. These people are doing jobs that you would never dream of doing.

So get off the immigrants. Truth be told, if you check everybody's family tree, you'd realize that everybody in this nation is an immigrant except for the Indians.

I'm sorry, they're not called Indians anymore, they're called Casino Owner Americans. You know, we are all imported goods, it's just that from day one, people who came here by boat looked down on the people who came here by foot. Why so judgmental, comrades?

Well, America's trivial mentality seems to be made up of equal parts of self-loathing and mistrust of others. Not surprising when you consider that most of us are only a generation or two removed from ancestors who escaped religious and political persecution to find themselves fighting their way up from being the designated bottom-feeders in the New World koi pond of opportunity. But now it's gotten silly. Now we are all isolated in pissed-off little cul-de-sacs of paranoia, guarding our precious wedge of pie from foreign nibbles so jealously that we have lost our ability to enjoy it.

Bottom line. America is a polyglot, bastardized culture. It's been settled by wave after wave of immigrants who assimilated and became part of the establishment so that they could look down their noses at the next wave of immigrants. Therein lies the paradox of this great land of ours: Freedom of belief also means freedom to make fun of the 7-Eleven guy's sandals, all right?

But poking fun is one thing and exclusionary discrimination another, and if we're not gonna walk the walk, it's time to take down Lady Liberty, which, by the way, was a gift from the stinky French, and replace her with the doorman from the Roxbury. Remember, xenophobia doesn't benefit anybody unless you're playing high-stakes Scrabble.

On the other side of the coin, be it rupee, the drachma, the peso, baksheesh, or wampum, the favor of inclusion deserves the courtesy of assimilation.

Make the effort. It's poor party manners to come to live in this country and then have a hissy fit because the parking signs aren't posted in Hmong, okay? And, uh, don't get uptight because your college is teaching courses on Emerson and Thoreau instead of seventeenth-century Javanese goatherd poets, all right? Don't take your kid out of school because her third-grade class made colored Easter eggs but didn't conduct any druid rituals. You're in America now, so open the closet door and start hanging up your pants and shirts.

Yeah, this country's founding fathers are a bunch of dead rich white men, but they did set things up so you could come and sit at the table, so don't piss in the finger bowls, all right? Thank you. In return for unfettered economic opportunity and no government death squads, try to get along with your new stepmotherland, and don't be resentful if there's a set of house rules already in place.

Go with the flow. Pay your taxes. Speak the language. Garlic is not a cologne. And for Christ's sake, left lane fast, right lane slow.

Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.