5 Feet of Fury

‘…while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s…’

Liberal Joel “I don’t support the troops” Stein makes the kinds of humorous, commonplace observations in liberal TIME magazine that get me condemned as “racist” once a week by Canada’s “progressive”, self-appointed, out-of-touch guardians of propriety — who despite constantly talking about how “educated” they are, don’t seem to have read as much Mark Twain and PJ O’Rourke and Kipling and basically books in general as I have.

You could put my name on this article, change a few place names, and fool large numbers of people into thinking that I wrote it.

So I’ll be waiting for Certain People to try to get Joel Stein fired from TIME magazine now, or “banned from entering the state of Israel” or from speaking in a public place.

You’re right about one thing, my weirdly obsessed critics: one of us is out on the “fringe.”

But it isn’t me.

THIS IS HOW NORMAL PEOPLE TALK. You are the weird ones…

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. … There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime. …

For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.

Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who couldn’t fly home or Skype with relatives, Edison’s first Indian generation didn’t quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you’ll see that, while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully American that if the Statue of Liberty  could shed a tear, she would. Because of the amount of cologne they wear.