Dear Mr. Vachon and everyone there at Vanity Fair,
Vanity Fair does not seem to think much of Chula Vista. Apparently one of New York’s finest tabloid writers took a turn down Broadway on his way to getting drunk in Tijuana.
Dana Vachon called The City of Trees a “curiously named town,” meaning he speaks no Spanish or he does not think we are muy chula.
Que lastima, pobrecito.
Then the fourth trenta espresso from Starbucks kicked in and he got mean. Really mean. Really, really mean.
“It is a sputtering neon error of beauty academies and pawnshops, recently terrorized by homicidal Tijuana drug gangs skilled at dissolving bodies in chemicals,” he sputtered as the caffeine terrorized his body with chemicals.
When Dr. Cheryl Cox, Chula Vista’s mayor and principal-in-chief, protested in a good-natured response, Vanity Fair dug down for some real New York vitriol.
“…apologies to the city of Chula Vista. First, for mistaking the city’s many thrift shops for pawnshops. Second, for suggestion that the presence of gangsters skilled at dissolving bodies in chemicals cause anything more than a shrug in the populace. Third, for suggesting that the city’s many fine neon signs are sputtering, instead of shining with a steady garish glow.”
Talk about people who live in glass houses throwing rocks. Mr. Vachon should scrape some of the grime and pigeon droppings from his office window and gaze out across his own flamboyant but very flawed city. New York fancies itself the “capitol of the world,” but it is also one of the meanest, dirtiest, most congested and rat-invested metropolises on the planet. Not to mention the most expensive, dangerous, poorly-run and poorly-maintained places where no intelligent Chula Vistan would ever want to live.
Chula Vista has America’s best climate (just ask all the New Yorkers who have moved here) and is a rare city with rivers, the ocean, mountains, valleys and plains in its boundaries. New York is all jammed up on an island in the middle of two dirty rivers. Some New Yorkers think they can walk on water and they are probably right. The East River is a trundling chunky oil slick that could probably support the weight of all of its greed-monger felonious Wall Street bankers and stock market manipulators who have brought our nation to the edge of ruin.
Chula Vista is an aviary heaven and the Four Seasons Hotel of the Pacific Flyway where birds and bird watchers from around the globe come to visit. New York has birds too, of course, large flocks of pigeons and larger flocks of birds flying from the fingers of belligerent cabbies. (Road rage is apparently legal in New York, if not encouraged.)
Vanity Fair folks obviously do not think much of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, which is their loss. Mexico has one of the world’s great cultures and is a global force in art, music, fashion, food and film. Chula Vista embraces its diverse population that includes Europeans who migrated west, Latinos who came north and Asians who sailed east. We all share neighborhoods, schools, jobs, teams, goals and dreams. New York is home to people from many different races, of course, but they all live in their own separate neighborhoods.
Vanity Fair is the Archie Bunker of the East Coast Media and evokes his famous screed, “You don’t know nothin’ about lady Liberty standin’ out there in the harbor, with her torch on high, screamin’ out to all the nations of the world ‘Send me your poor, your deadbeats, your filthy.’ And all the nations sent ‘em here. They come swarming in like ants. Your Spanish P.R.s from the Caribboin, your Japs, your Chinamen, your Krauts and your Hebes and your English fags. All of ‘em come in here and they’re all free to live in their own separate sections where they feel safe. And they’ll bust your head if you go in there! That’s what makes America great, buddy!”
We do have gangs in Chula Vista, but Vanity Fair has confused teenage graffiti painters with the organized drug cartel criminals from Mexico and Columbia. New York, as the cradle of American gang activity, has no moral ascendancy to on this issue. New York has an Academy Award-winning motion picture musical about its gangs, “West Side Story,” not to mention “The Gangs of New York.” Given the choice, we’d rather have our gangs than yours.
New York likes to boast about its arts scene – which is dazzling – but seems to forget that almost all great “New York” artists actually came from other places, including cities like Chula Vista, which has sent innumerable actors and musicians to the Big Apple. New York is home to the great Billy Joel, but does the staff of Vanity Fair remember that he had to come to California to get anyone to listen to his music? “Piano Man” and his early hits were all written in, gasp, California. We Chula Vistans love to remind anybody who loves music that we are home to the Cricket Amphitheatre, one of the world’s most beautiful and acoustically-perfect concert venues. But don’t take our word for it. Ask Sir Elton John, who said during a concert that it was “the best place I have ever played.”
New York has many great things that Chula Vistans admire like the New York Times, Broadway, Columbia University, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Plaza. It is also the place where Native Americans were slaughtered, AIDS took root in America and John Lennon was murdered. Beauty and horror. Yin and Yan. Light and darkness.
So let’s go easy on thrift stores, which, by the way, help the homeless, and pawn shops, which New York has plenty more of than Chula Vista ever will.
Go ahead and be smug about being the Big Apple. We are okay being El Gran Limón, the Powerful Pomegranate or the Almighty Avocado. At least those fruits really grow here. New York’s are imported from…Chula Vista.