I’ve become tired of this notion espoused among people who live on the East Coast that they are part of the real America and everything west of Philadelphia is sand and Portlandia.
East coasters who have moved to the West Coast constantly complain about how you can’t get good pizza here and talk about how their racist cousins back home are such colorful characters. It’s annoying.
A while back I was listening to The Howard Stern Wrap Up Show, which follows the Howard Stern Show on Sirius XM and basically recaps what happened on the show, allowing for plenty of goofing off between the show’s hosts, longtime Stern minions Jon Hein and Gary Dell’Abate.
The pair were discussing MMA fighter Luke Rockhold and how they thought he was a douche and wanted him to lose an upcoming fight against the Brooklyn born David Branch.
Bereft of examples of Rockhold’s character flaws, Dell’Abate said in a detesting tone, “I mean, he’s from Santa Cruz…”
He said “Santa Cruz” in the same tone that a dumb American would say “Afghanistan”, as if the people who come from this area lack some sort of moral fiber only found in the garbage strewn streets of Flushing.
Branch lost.
I would argue that people who live on the West Coast are not only not less American, but they actually embody the American Spirit to a greater degree than their East Coast dwelling counterparts.
Here’s what I mean:
The vast majority of Americans are descendants of Northern and Western Europeans who immigrated for a variety of reasons, namely, America was better than where they lived.
The vast majority of these immigrants settled on the East Coast.
There were also the Puritans and several Spanish, Dutch, French, Norwegian settlements etc. The point is that all of these groups left their homes to establish a better life.
So, most Americans have that gene in us. The adventurous, don’t get too comfortable, survive at all costs gene.
Otherwise, our ancestors would have decided to simply wait out the famine or keep practicing their religion in secret.
That might be why there’s so much violence in the Middle East, by the way. I’ve met townies. The barflies who have never left their crappy hometown. They’re usually angry about their lives and therefore quite ornery.
Now imagine their hometown was Ahvaz, Iran, and it was 129 degrees out and they didn’t have air conditioning.
It’s clearly subjective as to what part of the United States is best to live in. The West Coast has better weather and generally more square footage while the East Coast has a lot of cool metro areas with many statues and commemorative plaques.
But, all of the people who moved west, including the guys wearing Yankees caps yammering incessantly about pizza, moved to the West Coast either for opportunity, or because they simply found it to be a superior place to live.
In that sense, they reflect the American Spirit, the spirit which led America to be America, more so than their East Coast counterparts.
The East Coasters are the townies of the United States.
It is estimated that about half a million people were involuntarily brought over from Africa to America and at it’s height there were an estimated six million living under slavery.
Following Emancipation, most of them left their former slave states in the Great Migration.
Since Abolition, a great number of African American also moved to places like the Bay Area or Seattle because they found the institutional racism of places like Boston or Washington DC to be far too oppressive for comfort.
To get this out of the way, yes, New York City is very impressive culturally.
But that is one city, where literally only millionaires can afford to live.
Long Island is not superior in any way to Phoenix or Santa Cruz. Much different, obviously, but it’s not better.
Any elitism in regard to the East Coast is either misplaced or, perhaps worse, coming from an actual old money piece of shit East Coast elitist.
I have one final point in this regard.
I was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, the farthest west state of the union, and I’m tired of hearing people’s misinformed conceptions regarding it. Isn’t Alaska part of Canada? Can you see Russia from your front porch? They have Mexicans in Alaska?
Hilarious.
In fact, Anchorage, Alaska, is one of the most racially diverse cities in the entire country, perhaps even the most diverse. More diverse than… New York City!
In Alaska, more so than any other part of America, you can do pretty much whatever you want. Stuff that would see you jailed or at the very least heavily fined in other states. There’s no bureaucrat showing up to check the code on your new shower head.
Weed is legal.
You can make your residential yard into a junkyard.
There’s virtually zero environmental regulation. Guns are not a problem.
I once had a neighbor build a real life airplane in his yard and then take it out flying.
I’m not saying these are all good things, this freedom is how many people interpret the National Anthem.
The people who moved to Alaska really had to put in a lot of effort to get there, and they went there either for opportunity, or because they weren’t happy where they were at.
It’s the farthest west you can go.
The Last Frontier.
Many Americans consider Alaskans to be less American than people from, say, Connecticut. Yet, I’d argue it’s the exact opposite. They are the absolute epitome of that American Spirit they teach you in social studies.
Alaskans are the most American Americans.
Indeed, my ranking of how American the Americans in different parts of America is an arrow which points from Barrow, Alaska, to Jamestown, Virginia, with the level of Americanness decreasing each mile east.
So, to all the Bostonites,
The redneck Georgians sporting the Confederate Flag,
The guidos living with their parents in Jersey City,
The DC aristocracy,
The grizzled rust belt kids who always talk about their grandpa for some reason,
All you morons who’ve never left,
And especially you fat fucks at your Redskins game who think you’re more American than the rest of us:
You’re wrong.