I Don't American Express

I keep seeing this American Express commercial with Robert DeNiro walking around New York City talking about what the NYC means to him. I love Robert DeNiro and I really like that commercial. But it got me thinking.

See, at the end of the commercial, DeNiro's last line is New York is my heartbeat, then he says some garbage about American Express. I could really care less about what credit card he uses, it's the city is his heartbeat thing that made me think. My city isn't, has never been, and will never be my heartbeat. That's kind of depressing really.

Cleveland really has nothing that's worth talking about in a commercial, or my life. Think about it. The last three national studies that have been conducted by independant sources list Cleveland as the poorest city, the dumbest city, and the city that broke the record for liquor sales per capita in the last year. We're ignorant, impoverished drunks. That may seem harsh for all you people who haven't been here, or maybe if you've just visited and only been exposed to the group of us that are either working or included in whatever business or family group you're here for, but for those of us that live here and deal with the people that live here on an everyday basis, it's not that hard to believe. (That may just be that longest grammatically correct sentence I've ever written.)

I don't connect with the city I was born in at all. I don't enjoy the things that go on here. In fact, I've purposely given up opportunities to back into the city because there's no way I can put myself in the position to live under the leadership structure we've got there. New York makes Cleveland look like a baby city. You know how many city council people NYC has? Seven. Cleveland? Twenty-two. There's thirteen people employed by our current mayor, Jane Campbell, that make between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars a year to do absolutely nothing. They're fluff jobs, and if I lived in Cleveland, I'd be paying their salaries.

Then there's Nate Gray. I've referenced him a couple times on here, currently he's facing charges on 47 counts of bribery and racketeering concerning scams from Houston to New Orleans to Cleveland. Needless to say it's a federal investigation. Yippee for Cleveland's outstanding public service division.

I've been to New York. New York has a heartbeat, it can be someone's heartbeat. Cleveland barely has a pulse at all.