29 thoughts on “Stereotypes

  1. As I am sure you are aware of the concept of joking John Linder​ I will presume you ment something funny. These kind of maps and twisted fun pics tend to breach some boundaries but that can’t be taken serious as fun shit often is far from reality.

  2. Well since we are having fun and having a good ol’ knee slap … There is no map to show what Americans think of Europe … So please feel free to make one that says ‘No Balls. No Brilliance.’

  3. John Jainschigg  As a New Yorker, I can tell you that’s not our view. NY would defnitely be singled out, and the rest would just be “out of town,” not Texas. But we do have some idea of the states near us called New England and that there is a south where things move at pace much too slow for New Yorkers.

  4. Ariella Brown – Au contraire! Even the generation of Saul Steinberg and S.J. Perelman (see https://newtoseattle.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/view-of-the-world.jpg ), both great travelers, acknowledged Texas, and knew it was part of America’s great Hinterland. Texas has always been viewed by New Yorkers as a critical source for oafish millionaires whose nuptial ambitions can be foiled by Bing Crosby, as in High Society (1943).

  5. Ariella Brown — Well, no … Garrison Keillor land is out there too, somewhere, you’re right. Still, I think Texas can claim special meaning to New Yorkers — maybe because its mindset actively resists our natural hegemony and values, and its oil and ag economies mostly don’t gyrate around our centers of learning and innovation (not counting occasional Bush spawn passing through Yale). I think this is also what (smarter) Europeans sense: that Texas is the un-New York in important ways that, for example, LA and Silicon Valley aren’t.

    Re. “New Yorkers vs. Tourists” — I feel like this is something of a dated, maybe Woody Allen-, John Lindsay-, I<3NY-, Clay Felker-NY-Magazine-era view. As in: real New Yorkers buy their lox at Zabar’s and read the NY Times on Sunday. A little precious. Contemporary NY is like every other major city in the West: hugely diverse, with vast populations constantly assimilating. Where would you put my Uber driver from the other night? From Cote d’Ivoire, Muslim (celebrating Eid al-Fitr after his shift), fluent in English, French, Arabic, Pula’ar. Here for 22 years, with a daughter at LaGuardia. New Yorker? Tourist? You make the call.

  6. Even a native New Yorker (or Texan) is a tourist once he/she travels outside their borough (or county) – but both are a state of mind, if you believe the pop culture 🙂