Let’s Make Fun of a State: Ohio
The Rusty Bunghole* Isn’t Funny Unless You Are Laughing at It
In case you are new to the writing collective known as “The Mill” and have not yet ingested straight dreck, let me explain some things to you.
There is no “Mill”. There is no “collective”. There is no Gutbloom. There is just me, pseudo-Gutbloom, a somewhat reformed Internet troll and soul blogger, grinding out pablum and publishing it here.
When I say “grinding out”, I mean “grinding out”. Check this out:
Yes, that’s 2,889. The word salad you are reading now will make it 2,890. As in, almost 3,000 times I have inflicted my menace on the Internet here… on Medium… if you include the Yahoo and Fox News message boards that number jumps to 38,000,238,744,900,0000.
You may be curious about the “six” next to unlisted. Most of those posts are “photo blogs” containing pictures of me eating meatloaf naked (I bake my meatloaf in muffin tins and call the output “meatfins”) or drinking coffee in my garden in the nude. I plan to release them as a kind of “reverse revenge porn” when the publishing Apocalypse occurs. You know… something like Ev Williams decides that Medium is out of server space and he’s going to charge me to get my 3000 pieces of dreck back. I cackle in my farting chair and command in an overtone, “release the nudes.”
What about the “seventeen” next to drafts? “Drafts?” Longtime readers may wonder, “Why, I thought Gutbloom just typed his dreck and hit publish.” That’s true, but I have some stuff in the vault awaiting the right news peg. When Notre Dame burned there were a couple of entries that probably should have been released. You know, it being a symbol of Western Civilization going up in flames and all, but I was too busy trying to cram obscene entries into the Words With Friends game I play with my wife, so I missed my chance.
You don’t get into the “thousands” of posts club through breathtaking originality. Have you ever gone to the museum and seen a contemporary “process” art project that makes you wonder… why? You know, someone who takes a picture of every bodega in Manhattan, or a selfie of their face every day for sixteen years?
This is like that. I’m going to make fun of every state in the country and I’m not even going to ask “why?” because I lack that kind of self-reflection. Now you know how to get to 2890 posts.
The Format: The “Let’s Make Fun of a State” posts follow a simple formula. You look up the state “symbols”, like the state bird, and make fun of that. Then you look at the food that is associated with the state and make fun of that. Last, you list the people you like and the awful people from the state and make fun of both groups. It’s really kind of easy. Until you get to Ohio.
I’m a teacher. I’ve been teaching for a long time. I believe that the Midwest is to teaching what France is to cooking. Here in the East, when I have to work with other teachers, I sigh with relief when they tell me they are from Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, or Illinois. The Midwest makes good teachers. I’m not sure why. Maybe because they lack humor? No, that’s not it. People from the Midwest can be funny…. sometimes…. very occasionally… if you count puns and laughing at your own “jokes” as “funny”. Maybe it is because people from the Midwest represent “Middle America” and we see the part of ourselves we like best represented in them.
As I researched the state of Ohio for stupid things to mock I kept liking their choices. Their state bird is the cardinal. Who can argue with that? After many hours of painstaking research… yes “research”…reading multiple “cool facts about Ohio” pages isn’t pleasure reading… my grand conclusion is that making fun of Ohio is like mocking a totally competent and beloved third grade teacher. It’s not a good thing to do. It’s not much fun, but, of course, we’re going to do it anyway.
The Presidents
Anytime you read about Ohio, the Ohioans are going to mention that seven presidents were born in Ohio. To which all the Virginians in the room reply, “that’s one less than us. Eight presidents were born in Virginia.”
My reply to those Virginians is: JUST WAIT, Virginia. Next to California, there is no state I am more eager to mock than you, you traffic-choked wasteland of arrogant mediocrity. If you are so proud of your presidents, why don’t you start putting up statues to them instead of Confederate Generals? I lived on Monument Boulevard in Richmond. You know who doesn’t have a statue on Monument Boulevard? George Washington. The guy on the horse is J.E.B. Stuart.
Speaking of Confederates, I’m against them. I’m a Union guy, all the way. Ohio provided more soldiers to the Union Army than any other state. They named their NHL hockey team the “blue jackets” to honor the Ohio men who fought against slavery. Many of the Ohio presidents first got famous by killing Confederates! While some Ohioans have achieved notoriety recently by killing people who are against racial hatred, it’s important to remember that Ohio, and Ohioans, have done their fair share in trying to correct the rotten center of our nation’s history.
Let’s get started:
William Henry Harrison: Not born in Ohio. The “we have the most presidents” argument hinges on born vs. elected from. I’m not that interested in the argument, but I include him here because he is a graduate of my alma mater. He got famous by killing Native Americans, but they were Native Americans being backed by the British. We have to be careful about our self-righteous support of Native American causes. Last time I looked, the Dakota Pipeline was still going through. Everyone who wants to give the state of Ohio back to the Native Americans raise their hand. That’s what I thought. You don’t need an act of Congress. You could just give your land back to the Shawnee and Miami. It’s not like they don’t exist. They’re still around. Who knows, were he alive today, William Henry Harrison might even think the Washington Redskins should change their name. What I’m saying is this: Hey, man, we’re all Indian killers.
U.S. Grant: I once said that Trump will be our most corrupt president since Grant. My brother got upset with me and told me to “bite my tongue.” My brother said, “He wasn’t corrupt. Everyone around him was. He spent his last days feverishly writing his memoirs while dying of throat cancer so that his wife wouldn’t be left penniless. The result was a great book.” My brother is right. The more I read about Grant, the harder he is to mock. Looks like I fell for the “fake news” that the Confederate restoration, “Lost Cause”, Jim Crow historians foisted on elementary school books about Grant. Sure he was a drunk and bad for Jews, but he was instrumental in defeating slavery and fought for a tougher reconstruction. Here was a president who was a genuine war hero. Here was a man who broke with a bad president of his own party and helped have that president impeached. Here was a president who created the Justice Department and actively fought to rid the country of the KKK. Hey, Ohio, do you have any more people like that? WE COULD USE ONE RIGHT NOW. Drunk or not, we may be interested. In fact, I’m pretty sure the drinking and corruption may not be that big a problem right now.
Rutherford B. Hayes: He was a successful forty-year-old Cincinnati lawyer when he joined the Union Army to fight against slavery. 40! At forty I stopped doing those “Walk for the Cure” fundraisers and helping people move because I felt like I was too old. This guy went to war.
And the Civil War, we all know, was a “let’s get shot in the face” kind of war. Hayes was wounded twice. At the Battle of South Mountain he got shot through the arm.
As president he was bad for Chinese immigrants, bad for Catholics… (though I’m not sure preventing Madrasas, Yeshivas, Flat Earth and Delphi schools from receiving public money was a bad thing)… and another Indian killer, but he signed a law allowing female attorneys to practice law in federal court and spent his time after the presidency working for education, civil rights, and better prison conditions.
James A. Garfield: This poor and fatherless boy had his biography written by Horatio Alger! His life was, literally, a Horatio Alger story. He did a lot to end slavery. He was an accomplished Union officer who fought at Middle Creek, Shiloh, and Chickamaugua. I always say that Lyndon B. Johnson was our only teacher president, but I forget that he is the only president who was a public school teacher. Garfield was a teacher. He was assassinated by a frustrated office seeker. In other words, Garfield was shot by the swamp. We lost a guy who had fought hard for civil rights, advocated for federally funded public education, and appointed Frederick Douglas to a Federal job.
Benjamin Harrison: Another Confederate killer! He fought against slavery as part of Sherman’s (another Ohioan) Atlanta Campaign. He also fought, unsuccessfully, for Federal funding for education and to secure the voting rights of African Americans. In presidential rankings by historians he usually ends up around thirty. You know what? Thirty is looking pretty good right now.
William McKinley: The last of the great Ohio Confederate killing presidents. He even had his horse shot out from under him during the Civil War. I said to my son, “Having your horse shot out from under you must not be a common as the movies make it seem. It is exceptional enough that biographies of McKinley almost always include it.” Mayor McFreaky replied, “Having your horse shot out from under you isn’t the uncommon part. Living to talk about it is.”
McKinley was a pretty good president. I’m not going to state all the boring facts. This has gone on much too long. Do you really want to have me try to say funny things about the Spanish-American War or the Dingley Act? Look, I told you, there is very little that is funny about Ohio. There is plenty that is good, but not much that is funny. Not even his assassination by an anarchist.
Billy Taft: Thank goodness. Just in time. Now we can make fat jokes. Ugh. The reality is, I have no stomach for fat jokes about Taft. The story of him getting stuck in a White House bathtub is nonsense. He was a high school baseball player, a talented wrestler at Yale, and worked hard to lose weight after the presidency. He kept the weight off through a healthy diet (no potatoes, bread, pork and other fatty meats) and healthy lifestyle (plenty of golf, no wine, liquor or tobacco). If you read about his tenure as Governor of the Philippines, you get a picture of a competent progressive doing his best to push the Philippines towards self-governance. He was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, so I think we can assume that he both understood and believed in the law. Also, look at this election map:
Warren Harding: All good things must come to an end. Warren Harding was the first truly bad president from Ohio. What happened? I don’t know, but if Tiger Woods can come back, so can Ohio, can’t it?
The Cities
Phew. We got through the presidents. On to the cities. There must be a lot to make fun of there. At least we’ll be able to make fun of the Cavaliers and the Browns. Ha, ha. The Browns!
In order of population, the top five cities of Ohio are:
Columbus (15th nationally) Cleveland (51st) Cincinnati (66) Toledo (74) Akron (121) Dayton (189)
Columbus? Columbus, Ohio is the 15th largest city in the United States??? What? It’s in the middle of the state. Who in hell would want to live in the middle of Ohio? I mean, other than the 900,000 people who live there.
Look, when I said it is hard to make fun of Ohio, I meant it is hard to make fun of Ohio. When you look up cool facts about Columbus, they talk about having the world’s first water filtration plant. It’s like Ohio is the engineering uncle you have to talk to at Thanksgiving. You certainly want to have him with you if you are going to kill Confederates, but watch out if he starts talking about aviation.
Columbus is on all kinds of “most livable city” and “best places to live” lists. Either arches are better in real life than they are on paper, or I don’t appreciate “dull” enough for my own good.
By the way, the Columbus Blue Jackets have an outside chance of winning the Stanley Cup this year. I’m going to root for them if the Bruins get sent to the showers. I missed my chance to root for the Union Army during the Civil War, so this is the best I can do.
Cincinnati I love that Cincinnati was named after Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus because when I was a kid I read How Cincinnatus Saved Rome. It turns out that the popular versions of How Cincinnatus Saved Rome were really a kind of propaganda aimed at mythologizing George Washington, and that the Roman story is not only bad history but also a whitewash of a Patrician dead set on keeping down the poors. So it turns out that the founders of Cincinnati and I all fell into the same trap. I like that!
Cincinnati is sometimes called the “First American City” because it isn’t on the coast. Those coastal cities… New York, Boston, New Orleans… were really “European”, you see. Founded after the American Revolution, the city became a boom town, thanks mostly to transportation, and grew rich and prosperous. I want to point out that demographically, Cincinnati is 44.8% African-American. Yea, suck on that, you MAGA hat wearing Neo-Nazis. “American”, in this case, means almost half black. There is no America without black people. Of course, there is no America without racial tension and riots. And speaking of riots, Cincinnati held the record for most destructive riot in history, when a jury failed to convict a white German and a guy of mixed European-African ancestry (but make no mistake, the crowd saw him as a negro) of murder. The only good thing about the riot is the the mob threw “rotten eggs and dead cats” through the windows of one of the jurors after the trial. Now, I know where you get dead cats, but who has a bunch of rotten eggs laying around?
Cincinnati is also famous for its chili. I know, nobody outside of the Midwest has heard of Cincinnati chili, but maybe that’s a mistake. The more I read about it, the more I like the idea of it and wish I could get it where I live. Cincinnati chili is really pasta with meat sauce, developed by Macedonians (the “are they Slavs or are they Greek? kind of Macedonians”, not Macedonians like Alexander the Great). I’m not sure why it is called “chili”. We’ve written about Chili before and I had my say. I will go on the record as saying Cincinnati chili is not chili. I think the name is a Slavo-Greek appropriation of Texas culture. To fight Balkanization, I’m all for this kind of appropriation.
More importantly, the originators of Cincinnati chili, Tom and John Kiradjieff, supposedly developed “the way” system of ordering. So, if you have ever been to the T Room in Lynchburg, Va and ordered a “Cheesy Western all the way” you have them to thank for the ease of ordering.
Last… I realize this is way too long, but we have miles to go… Ohio is so rich in dullness… I have to mention that the dusty miller may be a Cincinnati invention. I’ve written about it before. It remains a mystery.
Cleveland: Langston Hughes was from Cleveland… the river in Cleveland has caught fire thirteen times… the Cavaliers have always been called the Cavaliers because fans “thought” it was better than the name the “Presidents”… I can’t go on. Ask anyone who has lived in Cleveland and they will tell you what a great city it is. I don’t doubt it. I’m sure it’s a great place to be, it’s just not really worth talking about unless you are from… Ohio.
State Symbols and Why We Can’t Make Fun of Them
The State Burgee
The unique “swallow tail” design, makes Ohio’s state burgee (you know, the thing you hang off the back of your yacht) unique among the states. I like it. See the “O” in the middle? Come on, that’s a great state burgee. Easily the best burgee in the Nation.
State Tree
I grew up with a horse chestnut in the yard of my mother’s childhood home, and while a horse chestnut is not a buckeye, I am fond of the family for these are very nice trees. The state tree has the state name in it. You have to give Ohio that. You also have to be impressed that the people refer to themselves and their meathead football team with a reference to the tree. It’s a fuckton better than calling yourself the Tar Heels.
State Frog
Three states besides Ohio have the American Bullfrog as a symbol. They are Iowa, Missouri, and Oklahoma. The American Bullfrog may not be the most original choice, but it’s a good choice, don’t you think?
According the the Wikipedia article I just read, bullfrogs hang out in leks to attract females. The females generally only spawn once, but the males try to spawn as many times as they can. Here is the interesting part, despite the fact that the females have walked into an area chock-o-block full of horny male frogs, the males don’t “clasp” with females without their consent.
So, imagine if you will, there is a place, let’s just say it’s a beer hall with sports playing on giant TVs, where men get together. During the spring they turn off the TVs and begin singing Taylor Swift together songs in order to attract females. Females show up wearing dresses and no underwear because they want to have babies. The women walk around the room, decide which male they want to breed with, and back up to him. He hooks his arms under hers, she drops her eggs, and he blows sperm on them. They’re done, she leaves, he starts singing again.
I don’t see how this is not a more “advanced” form evolution than what we do. It would be even better if the beer hall was a pool. I’m going to have to add it to my list of ways we were cheated.
This Has to End
Oh, my goodness, I’m so bored by Ohio. Impressed, but bored. Normally I spend a lot of time on the people from the state. I can’t even do that. Trust me, I read the list. You know who is from Ohio? People like Doris Day, Dave Chappelle, Paul Newman, Bootsy Collins, Neil Armstrong, Steven Spielberg, Erma Bombeck, and Jesse Owens.
Enough. If you made it here, you can make it anywhere. If this post sucked, blame Ohio. Appreciate Ohio, but blame them anyway. It’s the American way.
- *The Rusty Bunghole is a nickname for Ohio coined by our favorite Ohioan Gérard Mclean.
