John Stein - The Bigot Dog

[RedKnight]

@DeathGod you gotta too much time in ur hand to write such big replies, hand me over some of your free time

 

[Speaker]

If a common person does that then maybe I could have by-passed it as just an instance of human psychology. But this guy is a well known writer.. writing in TIMES.. surely they should be well informed of what is being written. A newspaper in not the place to vent out human emotions but to be rational and sane. In this case however I find it clearly failing.

This is Stein's style of writing. He is sarcastic, and likes to stereotype the subjects in his article including when he talks about different parts of the US, Christians, Yankees, Southerners etc.

Satire aside, you really can't argue with what he has written. It is unfortunately true.

 

[ganimi kawa]

This is Stein's style of writing. He is sarcastic, and likes to stereotype the subjects in his article including when he talks about different parts of the US, Christians, Yankees, Southerners etc.

Satire aside, you really can't argue with what he has written. It is unfortunately true.

I would humbly ask you sir if following things are true?

1.I question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.

2.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

3.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.

You have posted your location as usa so i assume that it is not necessary for me to explain about 'dotbusters' and 'guido' culture to you to realize the fallacy of points 1 and 2.
And yes,we do object to being described as "a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose." This is not satire.It's at best a non funny guy trying to be funny and a bigoted zealot at worst.
If what this guy writes is sarcasm then my local butcher is a cardiac surgeon.

 

[Dash]

DeathGod -

What is this article doing in Indian Defence? It could be else where.

 

[Speaker]

I would humbly ask you sir if following things are true?

1.I question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.

2.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

3.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.

You have posted your location as usa so i assume that it is not necessary for me to explain about 'dotbusters' and 'guido' culture to you to realize the fallacy of points 1 and 2.
And yes,we do object to being described as "a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose." This is not satire.It's at best a non funny guy trying to be funny and a bigoted zealot at worst.
If what this guy writes is sarcasm then my local butcher is a cardiac surgeon.

Your questions are valid, but it is a problem if you take this guy seriously. I have heard dot-heads, rag-heads and many other nice terms used for people from India. I agree it is offensive for the way he referred to our gods, but again, only if you take him seriously. He offends, and that is the way of his humor. Not everyone is a PG Wodehouse. Let me ask you this - do you find South Park and Family Guy offensive? If yes, then I take your point.

"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. "

I meant this one to be true, as long as you don't take his description on face value.

 

[Kinetic]

We can imagine what Red Indians (Native people) think about those Whites when they see their land is now taken over by them!!! lol

Whites in US has lot to see if they still think America is their land only! Many times in history American leaders wanted that only 'pure white' people from northern Europe should migrate to US! Not even southern Europeans! But later things changed though.

Now an ethnic Indian (born to Indian parents) is governor of a US state and another competing now. NASA, MIT and many other top US institutes and companies have lots of Indians. Lets see.

 

[CONNAN]

My Own Private India
By Joel Stein Monday, Jul. 05, 2010



Illustration by John Ueland for TIME

I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.

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. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.
(See pictures of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park.)

I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn't want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?

I called James W. Hughes, policy-school dean at Rutgers University, who explained that Lyndon Johnson's 1965 immigration law raised immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going over to Asia to kill them.

After the law passed, when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to AT&T, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. 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.

Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians "dot heads." One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to "go home to India." In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.
(See TIME's special report "The Making of America: Thomas Edison.")

Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants, friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who didn't card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.

To figure out why it bothered me so much, I talked to a friend of mine from high school, Jun Choi, who just finished a term as mayor of Edison. Choi said that part of what I don't like about the new Edison is the reduction of wealth, which probably would have been worse without the arrival of so many Indians, many of whom, fittingly for a town called Edison, are inventors and engineers. And no place is immune to change. In the 11 years I lived in Manhattan's Chelsea district, that area transformed from a place with gangs and hookers to a place with gays and transvestite hookers to a place with artists and no hookers to a place with rich families and, I'm guessing, mistresses who live a lot like hookers. As Choi pointed out, I was a participant in at least one of those changes. We left it at that.

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.

just worry about the mexican settlers than indians and asians. and also if 1 idiot gives his bull s h i t views on india and ther other posted it that too in a defence section grow up people ther is a thread for geopoltical issues

 

[Ras]

Guys, this is silly. Joel Stein is a humorist and satirist. What he states is pretty true, but said in a direct way with the satirist's license. Indians, and South Asians in general are very bad at assimilating the culture of their adopted lands, keep feeding off their benevolence and insult the locals for having no "culture". We want to live in their land, but not hang out with them. We want our kids to go to their schools, but not play with their kids, lest they become "immoral". We interact with a few workers in Walmart and K-Mart and conclude that all Americans are dumb. Sad, but true.

If someone got ticked-off by his bluntness, just let it pass. He is an equal-opportunity offender.

You mean some Indian-Americans try to keep a distance..it does not work.I am first generation.Trust me it does not work thankfully my parents never tried to shield me from the "Americans"(An oxymoron if anything)

If anything what annoys me like hell is the "disgust" some of the Indian American kids have for India.People need not fear them assimilating into America what they need to fear is them forgetting their roots completely.

 

[Ras]

"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. "

I meant this one to be true, as long as you don't take his description on face value.

True?...how is it true. Indians have the highest income among ethnic groups in the US.For dumb people Indians are doing exceedingly well if you ask me!

 

[dingyibvs]

You guys completely misunderstood the article. The whole thing is DRIPPING with sarcasm!

 

[ganimi kawa]

Your questions are valid, but it is a problem if you take this guy seriously. I have heard dot-heads, rag-heads and many other nice terms used for people from India. I agree it is offensive for the way he referred to our gods, but again, only if you take him seriously. He offends, and that is the way of his humor. Not everyone is a PG Wodehouse. Let me ask you this - do you find South Park and Family Guy offensive? If yes, then I take your point.

"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. "

I meant this one to be true, as long as you don't take his description on face value.

I do take your point about south park and family guy;some of the episodes were really funny. The problem with this guy though is that he is not even remotely funny and thus can't claim comedian's immunity.
I'm not denying that there's poverty in India,what I found offensive was the way he equated poverty with stupidity (the poor fellow must be unaware of the fact that india's GDP was among the highest in the world before the british came)


But I do understand your point of view...appreciating humour is a subjective thing.And I'll surely ignore this guy in the future.

 

[M8R]

It's funny to see Indians burning - These are the same people who praise every single piece of **** who says Pakistan is a failed state and bash Islamic Religion at Bharat Bakbak.What goes around comes around.

 

[lhuang]

It's funny to see Indians burning - These are the same people who praise every single piece of **** who says Pakistan is a failed state and bash Islamic Religion at Bharat Bakbak.What goes around comes around.

You sir, are a moron of the first order. The Indians missed the point of this article, you sir missed the article in general.

 

[Speaker]

You mean some Indian-Americans try to keep a distance..it does not work.I am first generation.Trust me it does not work thankfully my parents never tried to shield me from the "Americans"(An oxymoron if anything)

In that case, you may be a lucky exception.

If anything what annoys me like hell is the "disgust" some of the Indian American kids have for India.People need not fear them assimilating into America what they need to fear is them forgetting their roots completely.

As far as I have seen, our people live in self-imposed ghettos and are not as open to mixing with the "immoral" 'goras'. Somehow we never realize this is racism as well. Same is true for all other ethnic groups, but I can only talk about the Indian expats.

True?...how is it true. Indians have the highest income among ethnic groups in the US.For dumb people Indians are doing exceedingly well if you ask me!

Okay, maybe you took it literally as well. I agree Indian immigrants have the highest income, level of education and minimal crime rate. We also don't cross the line of the law as often as the others, although we tread on that line pretty regularly. Especially the merchants owning motels, Subways, Gas stations etc. - in which one guy comes up the hard way to citizenship and gets a virtual free pass for the rest of the extended family from India. Our intentions are honest, and so this has not become a problem. But these groups don't assimilate the local culture and keep looking for India and Indians in everything they see here. The lack of appreciation for everything that the goras do causes us to live in the ghettos I spoke about earlier.

I'm not denying that there's poverty in India,what I found offensive was the way he equated poverty with stupidity

That is just a mean sense of humor. But India's poverty is an indication of the stupidity of our governance, and maybe valid in that sense.

 

[Ras]

You are comparing Fresh Of the Boat immigrants while I am talking about first generation. Have you seen first generation Indian kids live in self imposed ghettos? I think I would know more about this as I am one myself.

FOB immigrants be it any color or nationality keep to themselves and this is expected.For instance have you noticed old Italian communities here? This is not an exclusive Indian problem.