Eat it, Cleveland-haters!

The Cleveland Cavaliers just beat the Detroit Pistons and are on their way to the NBA Finals. I, and many, many other Cleveland natives and expatriates have risen up and are riding high. Sure, it's just a game, but it is a victory for our city, and we have needed one badly.

During the past 30 years, Cleveland has gotten a bad rap from punks and pundits throughout the country. They laugh about our river catching on fire. They giggle about our rotten weather and lack of cheap-thrills for tourists. And they downright guffaw about our moribund sports franchises, which have swung between "close but no cigar" and "dead as a doornail" since 1964.

Well, to all these laughing hyenas, these, as Agnew put it, "nattering nabobs of negativity," I say "eat it!" I would say worse, but the pathetic and petty political propriety police might poop their pants. So, again I say, "eat it!" The success of LeBron James and the Cavaliers stands out as simply the latest reminder that Cleveland does indeed rock.

In this vein, I some food for thought for brain-starved Cleveland bashers:

- Please, please, please get over the river catching on fire, the "Mistake on the Lake" and other such cliche Cleveland insults. First of all, the Cuyahaga river caught on fire in the 1969. That is almost two generations span of time ago. Secondly, cleaning efforts have brought both the river and Lake Erie to a higher state of cleanliness than many city waterways can boast. Let's see the keepers of the East River, Boston Harbor, and Chesapeake Bay match that improvement.

- Take a closer look at Cleveland, and, if your head is truly out of your posterior, you will see that, like the Tranformers and Magic Eye posters, it has a lot more to it than meets the eye. Consider the following abridged list of attractive qualities: friendly people, nice parks, low cost of living, thriving arts scene, world class orchestra, traffic sanity, reasonable pace of life, diverse culture, great restaurants, and fine universities. All of these things, and more, contribute to a quality of life that is above the petty bashing of numbskull naysayers, most of whom have never been to the Cleveland area.

- Finally, all of you Cleveland haters need to take a good look in the mirror and ask yourselves if YOUR hometowns are that much better. Do you have a right to look down on Cleveland when your own houses are not in perfect order? Consider a sampling of other types of urban areas: northeast cities are crammed with rude people who are too much in a hurry to do anything except continue to live in the past, when their region actually mattered; cities of the Sunbelt are crowded with crabby sunburned fossils, freakish right-wing evangelicals, and gun-toting, NASCAR-watching homers; and West Coast towns teem with self-centered, self-righteous New Age posers. Are these places really that much of a step above Cleveland in terms of quality of life? Hardly.

So again, Cleveland-bashers, I urge you to get over yourselves, and eat it. Face it, the only reason you hate Cleveland is because it does not conform to the consumptive, materialistic, me-first values of American society.

And that is precisely why Cleveland rocks.