Forget the sandwich. What kind of Italian can Mike possibly be, if an innocent joke about sandwiches gives him the feels?
Mike should definitely eat more meat and hopefully get his balls back from wherever he left them.
Jokes aside, I believe that this kind of portrayal would be a lot more offensive to Mike than the sandwich comment.
Being part Italian myself, I would just call up a legitimate businessman from Sicily and say “Hey, this ah guy is ah committing some ah microaggressions against ah me! We a need to ah stop his ah stereotyping!”
And then I’d go on eating my healthy meal because it’s hard to get ahead in organized crime if you aren’t in shape. The movies get us all wrong. Fat Italians can’t run down a punk and ah teach ah him some ah manners. You need to keep up with your cardio for that. The Romans didn’t conquer the world with carbs on the waistline, capisce?
“Mommy, mommy, Cindy is mean. She made fun of my apple slices.”
“It’s ok, honey, you don’t have to play with Cindy any more. Come, let mommy give you a hug.”
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This reminds me of the time I worked at an unnamed government organization some number of years ago and had to take sexual harassment training online. One case study (complete with a short video) focused on a man named Ivan speaking with what was supposed to be a Russian accent going around with a flip phone, taking pictures of women’s behinds. When confronted about his behavior, his defense was “that is normal in my culture”. The moral point of this case study was completely lost in the outrage that followed from a sizable population of the former citizens of FSU who were subjected to this training.
That’s a complete misunderstanding of the Russian-speaking culture. A real Ivan would never be bothered to take pictures of the behinds. Women would photograph their own behinds, bring the pictures to Ivan, clean his house, cook him a meal, and then maybe he’d deign to look at the pictures.
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“What kind of Italian can Mike possibly be”
Well that monologue from “Cindy” is maybe the most boring unfunny thing I’ve ever read…. she’s clearly not well (in addition to being desperately unfunny… like most women) so getting mad at her or feeling bad about anything she says is a waste of time.
I, on the other hand, am confident in my ability to offend Mike and any other Italian (or any other nationality) around…
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Cindy has issues for sure. This is quite a sad depiction of the modern workplace. Angry, aggressive harpies and emasculated, pathetic men.
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Right? It’s like they are trying to recreate it on every level.
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I dunno, if you ever want to offend a Peruano, insult Peruvian food. It’s hilarious. Say you don’t like potatoes, that you think rice with potatoes is excessive (and really, do you have to have rice with everything?), and you don’t see what’s so great about pollo a la brasa– it’s just rotisserie chicken, right?
If you survive the encounter, of course, you must then go find a pollo a la brasa joint so you can remedy your ignorance 😉
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“Jesus, Cliff.”
Sike! Did I say I can offend or did I say I can offend?
Cindy’s got nothin’ on me…… nothin’!
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This exclusively American usage of ethnonyms – though totally culture-specific and thus totally legitimate – really grates on my a** ! What does Cindy mean by calling Michael Italian ? He is NOT Italian, he is American. “You big paisan”: do me a favor !
Oh, Robert Hughes, where are you ? This culture of complaint, what a bullshit society America is turning into, boring and petty, and so juvenile, or should I say puerile…
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” exclusively American usage of ethnonyms”
It’s traditionally a northern thing (from the rust belt). When and where I grew up names were just names and no one thought about or cared that particular names were Irish or Italian or Czech or whatever.
It was only as an adult that I realized that names were related to European ancestry (weird but true I’m a true child of the Great Compression).
When northerners moved to other parts of the country they brought their ethnic affiliation culture with them.
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Thank you for your enlightening explanation.
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It’s mildly interesting to see all the things people are projecting onto the characters in this dumb anodyne little story.
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It gets a lot less anodyne once people are forced to sit through hours of these stories as a condition of employment.
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See, when I have to sit through this dumb shit I don’t randomly create an inner life for these object lessons. I usually want to forget it, but maybe I’ll just make up stories instead.
Cindy is an “angry[ aggressive harp[y], “not well” and is “desperately unfunny.. like most women.” Mike is an “emasculated, pathetic man” who runs to “mommy” and needs to “eat more meat.”
Why not add some lines about Mike’s eating disorder and the sausage fest he had at breakfast? Perhaps this is Cindy’s way of flirting in this story. She’s a feeder. And whole entire cafeteria is tired of watching them have the same conversation over 18 months.
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It sounds like you are upset with the #1 quality that makes human beings human. 🙂
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“Why not add some lines about Mike’s eating disorder ”
The making stuff up about the characters is an attempt to make this surreal stupid situation seem remotely real…
Simply forgetting it is the same as asking for more. What’s needed is to make subjecting normal human adults to infantile nonsense like this as painful as possible.
Is this one even real, or is it a parody? It seems parodic
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Maybe everyone is offended because they can tell, even while Cindy is speaking, that she doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re.”
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This is the real point of the exercise: to make people who learned standard English squirm in their seats, knowing that if they point out the grammar error, they’re racist for caring more about that than about the phony social scenario.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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