While fans of lawsuits and/or insipidly lowest-common-denominator clothing chains may best know about West Virginia from its run-in with Abercrombie & Fitch last year over the company’s sale of T-shirts with the mocking phrase, “It’s All Relative in West Virginia,” it may be time to update your repertoire of insults for the 35th state in the union.
Mull over this disturbing factoid from the Associated Press, which comes via President Bush’s visit to the southern state on the fourth of July this past weekend.
Making a pitch for votes in a state where 200,000 veterans comprise 15 percent of the population, Bush praised veterans for “setting a good example for those who have followed … in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said Bush. Thirty-six percent of all male West Virginians fought in World War II, 16 percent in Korea and 20 percent in Vietnam.
Now, that last line seems ridiculously erroneous, and most probably involves some sort of grammatical error in relation to the first sentence of the paragraph sampled above. Because, otherwise, that means roughly 70 percent of West Virginian men are approaching retirement age.
And if that is in fact true, be on the lookout for next week’s hard-hitting TimeOut New York cover story, “WV to NY: Young and single West Virginians hit big on the New York bar scene!”
3 replies on “That leaves about five percent of them who can reasonably lust after Lindsay Lohan or Orlando Bloom”
i think you’re not considering that those percentages overlap (e.g., someone fighting in korea may also have fought in, say, ww2 or vietnam)…
🙂
I think you also might be misreading this. I take it to mean that in each of those wars, XX percent of the military-eligible men served. The people drafted in WW2 are not going to be the same men drafted 20-plus years later for service in Vietnam.
thank you for the lame attempt at making a joke at WV’s expense. It would have been much cooler if you had pointed out George W’s poor math skills instead(considering his business acumen)but you most likely were trying to get your postings up while still half asleep this morning and went for the cheap joke instead. Just to set the record straight WV has, per capita, a tradition of sending more of it’s young men to war than almost any other state in the union during the twentieth century. This has partly been due to appalachia’s general lack of well paying jobs caused by rugged terrain and poor transportation. Still, WV in particular has a certain pride that stands out more than any other state than I can think of (excepting Texas maby)which has been responsible for the unusually high amount of service people from such a small state. We just get tired of all the same old jokes and all the idiots who ask if “western virginia” is close to Richmond…my god people…look at a freakin map will ya…I mean we were gonna be the 14th colony if the revolution had happened 6 months later than it did! Anyway, my cousins callin me to bed so good night. (see! We got a sense of humour!)