The Philadelphia Story

This is one part of a long essay I wrote about Philadelphia. It took forever to write and this blog post does not include the whole thing, it’s more of a summary.

The Philadelphia Story.

If you have read this blog before you’ve probably notice a lot of my sports and cultural references are related somehow to the city of Philadelphia. This is in fact because I am from the city of Philadelphia. And just like everyone who is from the city of Philadelphia, I grew up 10 minutes outside Philadelphia. Churchville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania to be exact. I later moved to Newtown, PA, which is about 20 minutes from the city. And when I say the city, I mean Northeast Philly. The Northeast is the part of the city which consist of spread out establishments like bowling allies, diners, and now finally a Sonic. Yes, the new Sonic in town was the long awaited fast food institution where the waitress’ actually wear roller blades. Roller blades?! WOOOAAAA! Yes, yes Roller Blades my friend. Roller blades! Scream it. So now that I live in Newtown, I am only 20 minutes from getting my chili cheese hot dog delivered to my car from a chain smoking roller blader who most likely hates me—but really 45 minutes from anything else. The real part of Philadelphia, the skyline in which we all come to love, is located in Center City, which is a good 45 minutes from Newtown. Yet growing up, I just figured it was all Philadelphia. I mean, our local news always talked about the city as though we all lived there. Since there wasn’t a NBC Bucks County, or any of the other big four (Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware), everything got lumped into Philadelphia. Everywhere on the news was called Philadelphia. If something happened in Germantown, it seemed like just another neighborhood, like ours in Churchville. Now if Philadelphia was structured the same as Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York, those big four counties would actually be technically a part of Philly. The Churchville or Holland or Broomall of Los Angeles would simply be Los Angeles. That’s why LA seems so big. They like to include everybody.

When I first attended Penn State I was awakened to the truths of many things (namely Marijuana), but mostly to the fact that I am not essentially from Philadelphia, but a suburb outside. I also learned to hate the Pittsburgh Steelers and that PA is not nearly as urban as I originally thought. Growing up in Churchville and 10 minutes from Philadelphia County, my surroundings were mostly building-based. In fact, I really didn’t see much farm land until family adventures to New Jersey. I remember taking pride in the Pennsylvania metropolitan culture and looked at New Jersey as though it was solely filled with tomatoes, corn, and Pauly D. I also thought that every person in America is huge Eagles fan. It wasn’t until I came to the middle of rural Pennsylvania when I realized I was actually an outcast.

As I grew older and traveled these United States, I have found more and more often that people didn’t think much of Philadelphia. Even going as close Hazleton, PA people made fun of the way I spoke. Usually accents are treated as a fun novelty people like to imitate. It’s fun for people from the mid-west to talk like they are from New York or Boston, but ask them to do Philly accent and they’ll get side tracked, “Speaking of Philly, that cheesesteak with wiz is disgusting. I also heard those people hate Santa Clause… Is two and half men on TV tonight”? For some reason when people think of Philadelphia they automatically think about Cheesesteaks and airborne batteries, not the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the forming of the US Marine Corps. Instead of thinking about George Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas day just a few miles north of the city, people associate Philly with the pelting of Santa Clause via snowballs and homophobia (thank you Tom Hanks).

While were on the subject, film directors, even the ones actually from Philadelphia, won’t even attempt to have their actors talk with a southeastern PA inflection. If you ever see a film or TV show that takes place in the greater Delaware Valley, everyone is given a New York accent. Yes, doesn’t matter if the character is Italian, Irish, Jewish, or Polish, everyone in Philadelphia speaks like Tony Soprano. Oh and Mr. Kevin Bacon isn’t helping either. In fact, the only time Hollywood really highlighted an unattractive accent, is in HBO’s The Wire—and that takes place in Baltimore.

But Hollywood actually has tried to materialize in the Philadelphia. After numerous attempts to build studios in the surrounding area, it became clear that Philadelphia was making a bid to become the east coast Hollywood. This was solely based on the tax credit Pennsylvania gave major studios to invest in the community by shooting multi-million dollar pictures within the state. It works like this: the major motion picture studio spends millions of dollars within the state and the state in turn recognizes the enormously large amounts of buying within local currency. The local economy is stimulated like a 15 year old boy who just looked at the November ’95 issue of Victoria Secret which he stole from his Aunt Dotty (Aunt Dotty couldn’t possibly fit in those skimpy outfits anyway. Speaking of which, why did she even have them delivered to the house? She would never in a million years spend more than $12 on under garment or anything else for that matter. $5 in a birthday card? What is this, the 1940s? Cheap Aunt Dotty…So if Aunt Dotty didn’t actually wear or buy the underwear….Oh. My word, Aunt Dotty is a lesbian. Not like there is anything wrong with that, in fact it clears up a few questions I had. I always wondered why Uncle Mitch wore a two piece swimsuit). Anyway, it’s not like the government is giving money to these Hollywood studios, it’s a simple fact that the government doesn’t tax as much as it would for other business’. Mathematically speaking, for every $1 that the PA state government loses by not taxing the movie studio, the local community makes $4. When big productions come into any given town, thousands upon thousands of dollars are spent on anything from hotel rooms to cigarettes and everything in between.

Let’s digress…

Politics are the greatest example of Newton’s 3rd law; For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Politics have morphed from people doing social justice to people taking part in an absurd version of football—politics is the rugby of society; you try to make sense of it, but it just looks like a bunch of homoerotic, nonsensical series of tackles and kicking. This happens on both sides of the isle (the evil side and the stupid side)—one person says one thing and another person, without reverence, is cogently obligated to say the exact opposite. Since this movie studio taxing option becomes an issue, like all issues, it is constrained to have somebody for it and somebody against it. If a democrat approved the order, a Republican must oppose it. If a Republican approves an order, the democrat (first cries, pouts, then does nothing about it), but ultimately opposes it. In the case of the Hollywood tax credit, the democrat was for it, and the Republican opposed. Which was kind of funny I thought, because Republicans are in favor of the exact same thing; tax cuts for the rich. Essentially, the Bush tax cuts and the tax incentives for Hollywood studios are the exact same thing—except the CEO of a big companies who will reap the awards from the tax cuts, spend will their money on yachts in Cape Cod and trained monkey butlers who wear funny little outfits as they feed crab cakes into your mouth and do back flips. “This is Geeves, my pet monkey. He makes a mean martini and is remarkably well informed in real estate.” And the Hollywood studios spend their money on promoting local business’ and communities and yes they monkey butlers as well, but environmentally friendly monkey butlers. (Anybody can be a production assistant if they are well enough connected)

But I digress…

So if it’s not necessarily the film community which projects such a strong opposition to Philadelphia, why is this city so widely misunderstood and harshly judged? Could all of that impedance be solely based on word of mouth? Maybe. Perhaps a few miscues in direction through the drive to south Philly for a cheesesteak put some unapprised tourist in a bad neighborhood where unpleasantness occurred. They go back to their respected village in Ohio or North Dakota and spread word of the brutal nature of the Philly ghetto—when in actuality, a perfectly cognizant person could completely avoid sketchy situations in Philly and throughout life if they are simply self aware of their surroundings. In Philadelphia, it is actually 10 times easier to get a parking ticket than to get mugged or get your car broken into… That’s not because there is no crime in the city (because like all cities, there is crime) it’s more of a statement on the Nazi influenced Philadelphia Parking Authority. Stupid bastards.

But barbarous meter maids and the occasional stabbing is an ingredient to any major city throughout the states, what makes Philly any different? Why are tourist so threatened? Somebody will say it is the high murder rate. Yes, this is true; the murder rate is too high for comfort. What is not mentioned is that the high influx of shootings occurs in sections of neighborhoods within the people who live there together. Beef is what’s for dinner. These are murders which occur in retaliation of other offenses. Most murders within the city are gang on gang. Here’s a bit of info: Don’t join a gang and you won’t get murdered. Don’t go to Taco Bell and you won’t have what seems to be an angry brown midget shoot out of your ass at 3 a clock in the morning. If you don’t want your car to be broken into, don’t park it near boarded up houses and a guy named Bubbles who has a shopping cart filled with copper and toilet paper. Be aware of your surroundings.

Thus it is easier to get a parking ticket than to get mugged because the Philadelphia Parking Authority is looking for you—they are unavoidable. Stupid bastards. They will search, manipulate, and hunt you down wherever you are. Taking a “short cut” down a dark alley way in North Philly is completely avoidable. The dark alley doesn’t come to you, you go to it. Cause you are stupid.

So it could be Pennsylvania politics. It could be tough parking rules. It could be a possibility of crime. But really, the reason people don’t like this city—the biggest and most probable answer comes to us in the 1983 Huey Lewis album, the one where they really came into their own—commercially and artistically, that is of course: SPORTS!

You knew I was going to go there. You knew this was the foundation of the essay—one of the reasons I started writing an article on Philadelphia, is to create a medium to tell you why Philly sports is much better than the sports that come out of whatever stupid village you’re from…I guess right there, that’s it. An example of why people hate Philadelphia; our unique cockiness with no backing besides one World Series and one Arena Football League Championship since 1983. Yes, we don’t have much to go off. Which is why it makes more sense to yell than to cheer.

But really, the true reason why this city is not loved, the truth behind the hostility against it can come down to six words; Joe. Buck. Joe. Buck. Joe. And Buck. It’s all Joe Buck’s fault (and a little can be accosted to Cris Collinsworth) (though he is not as bad as he used to be)

Now I would have to write an entire new article on the particular dynamics of Philly sports, but it comes down to this; we hate everybody including, at times, our own teams. A lot of writers and journalist around the country criticize our fans for being “too hard” on the teams that represent the city—but shouldn’t we be? A ticket for an Eagles game cost roughly $100. Add $20 for parking, $20-$50 on tailgating food, $8 for a Miller Lite inside the stadium, include gas and that is almost $200, maybe up to $300 if you go all out. On top of the $300, because of traffic, it could take you almost an hour to get out of South Philly. Think of it as this, if you were to pay $300 at a four star restaurant that it took 2 hours of total travel time to attend, and the food that comes out is on par with a Wendy’s or a McDonalds or a Sonic, wouldn’t you say something to the waiter? Wouldn’t you want your money back? Well, when a team doesn’t perform as well as they could—if it seems like they are half-assing—just as if a restaurant half asses their cooking and service, don’t you have the right to complain? The National media; the Joe Buck’s, Mike and Mike’s, and Cris Collinsworth’s of the world, only see our fans as harshly criticizing our own players from an outside point of view. They don’t see week after week of McNabb throwing interceptions and then smiling while pounding his chest or Brad Lidge blow a 4 run lead in the 9th—they don’t see every heartbreaking play of every game and they certainly are not coughing up the hundreds of dollars to do so, and really, they shouldn’t—but they also shouldn’t shout about or disparage Philly fans for expecting results for an expensive product.

I get the argument that, “well you shouldn’t look at a game as a product.” Which is true. But the owners and the players have turned it into exactly that; a product, a manufactured good. Merchandising and ticket sales have replaced the love of the sport. And if the sport is mechanically designed to please those who shell out money; those who buy the product are certainly allowed—like with any product—to criticize and complain about its flaws. That’s capitalism baby. If capitalism is American and America was born in Philadelphia, booing McNabb for throwing up on the 50 yard line during the Superbowl is as American as apple pie and cheesesteak’s.

So when you read articles or listen to the national media grumble about how Philadelphia unfairly treats its own players; remember this; a true fan (of both America and Sports) will always, ALWAYS demand the most out of their players. Those who think that fans should just quietly sit on their hands when they are upset are not only foolish, but un-American.

Joe Buck is a communist.

We can conclude that Philadelphia is a tough city. But it’s a good one. So when you think of Philly, look at the good things not the bad things; think The Roots, not Boys 2 Men. Think Bill Cosby Pre-1996, not Will Smith Post-2008. Think America, not Joe Buck.

On that note, I should say that I am probably moving to Albuquerque.