Those Wild and Wacky Dutch People
By Beth Quinn
I thought I’d start with a little Dutch humor today as we are celebrating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson crossing the Delaware.
Or something involving some river in the New World.
There you go. A little Dutch humor.
Or at least it’s my humor, and as I am from Holland on my father’s side, I’ll call it Dutch. (My mother’s people are Italian, another humorous ethnic group, especially after a bottle or two of grappa.)
I’m bringing up the Dutch, though, because we are currently being overrun with Dutch revelers, who have come to New Amsterdam to celebrate their American heritage.
They’re also celebrating the fact that so many of their forebears left Holland in Henry Hudson’s footsteps, thereby decreasing the aggregate weight on the Dutch land and preventing their country from sinking even further below sea level.
While I admit there are very few Dutch stand-up comedians, I’m proud to say my people are very pragmatic. “Go, go!” the Dutch townspeople told my grandparents and several of their friends. “You weigh too much and we’re sinking! Don’t forget to take those heavy wooden shoes with you, too!”
And so they came by the – I don’t know, tens? Hundreds? There really aren’t all that many of us here – to Governor’s Island and then fanned out across the land to do what the Dutch do best.
Be sensible.
My grandfather somehow acquired a herd of cows while living in Clifton, N.J., which his sensible side told him was no place to keep cows. And so he walked the cows up to Orange County, N.Y, which still had open land and was not over-run with sidewalks, as Clifton was. Then he set the herd loose on some empty land and called it a farm.
See? Sensible.
And my grandmother offered me the following sensible Dutch advice as I was growing up:
Eat kale.
Use a dust pan and whisk broom to clean up small messes.
If you no longer have use for an item, no matter what it is, plant flowers in it. Hence, she had flowers growing in an old iron, in a salt shaker without its mate, and in a cradle.
But to truly understand how sensible the Dutch people are, you have to return to Holland and learn something about their Land and People.
I tell you this because you probably don’t follow news of Holland too closely, which is a shame because the Dutch follow our news really closely. My cousin Henk tells me they laughed and laughed and laughed at what simpel toonloos dummköpfe idioots we were when we elected George Bush not once, but TWICE!
See? The Dutch are very full of humor.
Anyway, since you probably don’t read the Holland Sentinel or the Windmill Herald, they have what’s called socialized medicine in Holland. And they don’t think “socialized” is a bad word. In fact, they LOVE it! Everyone has health care!
Plus, my cousin Henk assures me that there are no death panels in Holland as Sarah Palin says there will be here in America. “That would not be sensible,” my cousin Henk tells me, “because people wouldn’t want this form of health care, then.”
He has a valid point.
Holland health care is even good if you no longer live there. When my grandmother needed a new set of false teeth, she planned a trip back to Holland for them because paying air fare to get free teeth would have cost her far less than buying the teeth here in America.
Alas, she died before getting the new Dutch dentures, but I think it was a very sensible plan.
Also, those dikes. A few decades ago, the Dutch noticed they were wearing out and the little Dutch boys were no longer willing to plug them with their thumbs to keep the North Sea from killing everyone.
After a bad experience with the sea in 1953, they rebuilt the dikes, making them extra good and strong and very, very expensive. Billions of guilders were spent, but the Dutch considered it money well spent (an ons of preventie against verdrinken and all that).
Now, if they have a disaster like Hurricane Katrina (or Hurricane Beatrix, if you will), they are well protected.
Seems sort of sensible to me.
My cousin Henk tells me that Hollanders didn’t laugh about New Orleans getting wiped out because that would have been unkind. But they did shake their Dutch heads when, not only did the American government fail to prevent that calamity in the first place, but nothing has been done to fix it.
I will leave you now with one last bit of Holland humor. This is a real joke from some Dutch guy with a Web site:
Question: Why are there still so many windmills in Holland?
Answer: Because the Spanish lunatic Don Quichote and his companion Sancho never came so far up North to fight them!
Well, OK, he’s no Seinfeld. But who cares. After all, as they say in Holland, “God created the world, but The Netherlands was created by the Dutch.”
What a very sensible religion they have, wouldn’t you agree?
Beth can be reached at beth@ZestofOrange.com.
Tags: Beth Quinn
