In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (14 page)

ANTIGAY POLITICIANS

A politician can say, “I’m against gay marriage. I’m traditional that way,” and I think, All right. But when the guy starts really digging in and introduces legislation to ban them from holding hands in public, he’s gay. He cares too much about something that doesn’t affect him. I don’t trust a guy who’s extremely interested in shit he shouldn’t care about. When my kid is old enough to go away camping, I want to get the group of dads in a room and say, “Who wants to take the kids up to Mount Pinos for the weekend?” And if one guy’s hand flies up, he’s out. I’ll say, “Sorry, Bert, you’re out. Your hand flew up too fast. I don’t trust you.”

As a straight man, your attitude about the gays should be “Great, more pussy for me.” You should have the same feeling about gays as you do about a team you don’t follow. So be it. You’re rooting for your team. If they want to trade a quarterback and get a new mascot, who cares? That’s their business. You should be aware that they exist, and when your team plays them you should hope your team kicks the shit out of them, but you didn’t grow up in that town or go to that college, so who gives a fuck? Once you start protesting too much about what that team is doing, something tells me you might have some of that team’s colors running through your blood.

THE HPV VACCINE

In 2007, Texas governor Rick Perry mandated that girls in his state get the HPV vaccine. But because of that he took heat from a bunch of right-wing Christians. My wife lost one of her best friends to cervical cancer. She was thirty-four. Is that what you want? You want that for your daughter? I know you’re religious and uptight about sex, but it’s not like if she gets vaccinated, the next day a bunch of truckers are going to tag-team her on a pool table. It just means she’s vaccinated. If you get vaccinated for leprosy, you don’t get dropped off at a leper colony the next day. These are just idiots trying to slow down progress. They’re all nuts about God, but then accuse doctors of playing God. Well, which is it? Do you love the fucking guy or not? If you do love him, how about we play him? It’s a tribute. Look at it as Halloween: I’m dressing up as God. Or a Beatles cover band. Not the real thing, but still a good time—Jesusmania.

ANTI-EUTHANASIA VOTERS

The playing-God argument comes up every couple of years when a state puts a euthanasia law on the ballot, too. Someone whose body is riddled with cancer or is in the final stages of ALS has zero quality of life. Imagine going to bed every night and not knowing if you’re going to choke to death on your own saliva.

How about we let these people go out on their own terms? Taking them off the feeding tube is not playing God: Hooking them up to it in the first place is playing God. What about organ transplants? Or Dick Cheney’s heart surgery? Isn’t that playing God? A lot of these same folks are for the death penalty and just got done bombing an abortion clinic. Pretty sure that’s playing God. Of course, these dummies will offer the slippery-slope argument—“Sure, one day you’re removing the breathing tube from a brain-dead ninety-year-old. Then the next thing you know, your perfectly healthy son goes in for his peewee football physical and the doctor snuffs his life out with a pillow and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it!” Dr. Kevorkian made it possible for people who are suffering with terminal illness to pass with dignity. The state of Michigan spent millions of taxpayer dollars prosecuting and eventually incarcerating him when just outside the courthouse on the streets of Detroit were boarded-up storefronts and a bunch of homeless people who should have been in mental hospitals or in rehab—but there weren’t enough beds because all the taxpayers’ money was spent on a bunk for Kevorkian.

THE WAR ON DRUGS

Politicians in both parties are guilty of perpetuating this, but the liberals are definitely on the correct side. I go nuts when I read about how much the DEA spends on pot versus what they spend on crystal meth. There are certain drugs that when you get beaked out of your brain on them, you look around for the worst imaginable thing you could do. Meth makes you do evil things. Weed makes you eat pie filling straight out of the can. I’ll put it this way. Who would you rather have living next door to you, a bunch of Phish heads or a bunch of meth heads? The first group might keep you up one night with a twenty-five-minute guitar solo, but the tweakers are gonna steal your stereo, pawn it for meth money, then microwave and rape your cat.

A quick note on meth. We can’t have twenty-eight different “meth capitals.” Every time I turn on the news, I hear about the “meth capital of America.” We need to have them fight it out. The biggest meth head from Lancaster, California, and the biggest meth head from Jackson County, Missouri, sort it out in the octagon. Get Michael Buffer to announce it. “In this corner in the heavyweight division, six foot seven, weighing in at one hundred and nineteen pounds …”

When the history books are written, the prohibition of marijuana is gonna look like the prohibition of alcohol in the twenties and thirties. Our grandkids will think we were idiots. There was an ad that came out shortly after 9/11 saying that if you smoke marijuana, you’re funding terrorism. No, the fact that the government made it illegal funds terrorism. They created a black market. I can’t believe it’s 2010 and we’re still arguing about this. It should have been legalized in the early seventies. We could have generated millions of dollars in tax revenues and saved billions of hours arguing about something that’s not intrinsically dangerous. Here’s my philosophy on pot in a nutshell: The people who smoke pot will continue to smoke pot, legal or not. The idea that the second they decriminalize marijuana my dad’s going to go out and buy a bong and a Hacky Sack is insane. As a parent I would prefer my kids didn’t grow up to smoke pot, but I would also prefer they not eat chili burgers, ride motorcycles, smoke cigarettes, drink hard lemonade, or play with samurai swords. Since none of those things are illegal, it’ll be up to me to educate them on the consequences of those behaviors. But let’s face it, eventually the kid’s going to rip a bong load and go for that chili burger. It’s not going to kill him—we’ve all done it and we’re all still here.

The government thinks pot is a drug and that all drugs are evil. They’re not. It’s what you do with them. Like cars. You could pick up your kids at day care or plow through an outdoor swap meet and kill a bunch of people.

And by the way, if drugs are so awful, how is it that no one works harder than crackheads? There are drug-free people who can’t manage to get their shit together, but crackheads always manage to score. They are the tip of the ingenuity spear. Think about when you see the homeless guy pushing the shopping cart with two dirigible-sized bags of recyclable bottles and cans. He spent two days Dumpster diving and three hours at the recycling machine in the grocery-store parking lot feeding those filthy cans into the crusher so he could get the equivalent of a packet of Sweet’N Low to put up his nose or in his veins. And he had to steal the shopping cart. It’s testament to the tenacity and initiative of the American drug addict.

Back to attacking the government. Let’s not forget the intent-to-distribute shit. If the cops pull a guy over with more than a couple of joints’ worth of weed in his car, they hit him with an intent-to-distribute charge. Maybe he just loves weed. That’s like the cops pulling me over when I have a boner and charging me with intent-to-rape.

Where’s the NRA when it comes to this stuff? They’re constantly squawking about your rights and the Constitution and big government. Charlton Heston used to shout about taking guns from his cold dead hands. Yet these hypocrites have no problem with me getting my house confiscated and auctioned if I grow a pot plant in my backyard. No issue with that, huh? What’s more dangerous, a bong or a bazooka? Idiots.

My overall problem with the right is they’re foot draggers. They don’t understand that in the near future gays will be allowed to marry, marijuana will be legalized, and stem cells will be used to repair organs. It’s called progress; it’s what societies do. And history isn’t kind to those who don’t recognize that. In my mind, these topics are no different than the two sets of drinking fountains installed for whites and Negroes. We’ll burn millions of hours arguing over it, there’ll be a few rallies, a few people are going to get hit with fire hoses, and twenty-five years from now magically every politician will have been for gay marriage back in the day.

Then there are certain political issues that both parties participate in. They cover the dipshit spectrum all the way from liberal pussy to conservative dickhead.

Which brings me to the lottery. This is state-sponsored gambling. It’s hypocrisy of the highest order. I can’t play blackjack without driving to Vegas or an Indian reservation, but every time I’m at the liquor store I get stuck behind some dropout playing his “lucky numbers.” First off, you’re buying a pint of Malibu rum and lotto tickets. You don’t have lucky numbers. Second, I know you don’t have anywhere to go, but I do, so speed it up. I don’t understand why it takes so long to play a lotto ticket. I know you’ve got an eighth-grade education and numbers are confusing, but pick up the pace. There should be special liquor stores with signs that say
WELCOME IDIOTS
where you can get your lotto tickets, Slim Jims, and malt liquor, and then ones for the rest of us smart people so we can get our booze and move on with our fucking lives.

The lotto is the pinnacle of Loser Mountain. This is a horrible message for elected officials to send to their constituents and a worse message for you to send to yourself. Participating in this government-run scam is you announcing, “I’m a loser. I can’t get my shit together, get a job and an education, and pull myself out of poverty. I have one shot at life and that’s to hammer my welfare check, put on my slippers and bathrobe, shuffle down to the liquor store, pick up some lotto tickets, and maybe God will smile on me.” You’ve officially waved the white flag at life and declared, “I give.”

Around Christmastime you’ll hear radio ads for lottery gift certificates. This is assfoolery on a level that can’t be measured by any test or instrument. Not only are you a loser for buying lottery tickets, now you’re trying to indoctrinate your friends and relatives into your brain-dead cult. You’re giving someone a slip of paper so they can haul their ass to the 7-Eleven to get another slip of paper. Why don’t you just burn the five dollars in front of them and save the trip?

Recently I saw a TV ad for the local lottery. In it the Garcia family wins the lottery and rents out Dodger Stadium for a family-reunion barbecue. Think about how horrible this message is and who it is geared toward. The state of California is saying, “Let’s tell the people who can barely make ends meet and have a fifty percent dropout rate that their only shot is to throw what little money they have into the lottery and pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe that it all works out.” Even worse, they suggest that on the minuscule chance they do win that they should immediately blow the money on an extravagant party for mooching relatives. How about investing the money in T-bills or Microsoft stock? Nope, let’s rent out Dodger Stadium, get a shitload of carne asada, and go to town on the world’s largest piñata. The tagline for the commercial is “Imagine What a Dollar Can Do.” I’ll tell you what a dollar can do. It can go into the bank or a fucking mason jar toward a college fund or bail. This reminds me of a great joke I heard when I did
The New Gong Show
. “What has five balls and rapes Mexicans? The lottery.”

And 50 percent of the money that goes into the pot never comes out. Plus if you do win, you get your choice between barely half of the money you won in a lump or a twenty-year payout. Can you imagine applying that math to a Super Bowl office pool? The employees would burn the fucking building down.

Of course the defenders will talk about how the schools benefit from the lottery proceeds. Oh, you mean the schools that I can’t send my kids to because they won’t get educated and will get shot? Those schools? Our public schools have metal detectors at every entrance, barbed wire on the fences, and textbooks that look forward to the end of the Korean Conflict and welcoming Hawaii as a state. Public schools are essentially coed prisons with worse food. So don’t give me that bullshit about lottery money going to the schools. To you assholes who defend the lottery: one question. Were the schools in California better before or after the lottery? And am I the only one who finds it ironic that the proceeds from this state-sponsored Ponzi scheme go toward an institution that’s supposed to exalt the virtues of hard work, dedication, and preparation? If a school counselor suggested to one of his students (sorry, I’m just picturing a dude) that the student should cross their fingers and play the lottery, he would be shit-canned.

THE SCHOOLS

Everyone wants to know what’s wrong with public schools these days. The dropout rate is through the roof, the test scores are in the toilet. What happened to the teachers? Nothing. I’m sure the unions haven’t helped and the teachers are doing a horrible job, but let’s take a moment to focus on the families. First of all, what’s a teacher supposed to do when a kid drops out? Jump onto a horse with a cargo net and go after the kid like it’s
Planet of the Apes?
It’s up to the parents to make sure their kids attend school each day. We love to blame the system for everything. The bottom line is the system isn’t the thing that’s changed: The families have changed.

Let me give you a quick, personal example. I went to North Hollywood High in the early eighties. It was a large public school with almost every culture represented. The teachers weren’t great, the school was more than fifty years old and not exactly state of the art, and the football field was mostly dirt. My group of friends consisted of Mexicans from the north Valley, blacks bused in from Compton, white trash from the mid-Valley, and Jews from the hills. We all attended the same classes and had the same teachers. But at the end of our senior years, while my Jewish friends went off to Cal, Stanford, and UCLA, we went off to Wendy’s, Carl’s Jr., and Arby’s. Why? Their families were intact, their parents cared, they made sure their kids did their homework, and they made education a priority.

So to be fair to the teachers, it’s not their fault. I’m sure teaching in a public school now is exactly the same as being a guard at juvie. The job of a teacher in today’s public school system is to prevent the students from raping each other in the coat closet. It is children of all races who come from shitty homes with absentee parents. These kids have no chance no matter how much money you pour into the schools. But there are other kids who are being brought down by the public schools. They’re not being taught any necessary life skills.

In junior high I was forced to take horticulture, cooking, plastics, and sewing classes. When I was at North Hollywood High, we had majors. I was a ceramics major. And as you all know by now, before I got into show business I had a successful career in the fast-paced and lucrative world of pinch pots. Ceramics major: what a joke. Have you ever met a famous potter? Has anyone ever put an addition onto their house from the money they made from terra-cotta pots? No. It was such time-wasting warehousing. My buddy Ray was in the Future Farmers of America, a skill that serves him well to this day from his shitbox apartment on Kling Street in North Hollywood.

They should size kids up when they’re in ninth grade, and if they’re like me, Ray, or any of the guys I grew up with, take them out of the sociology class. That’s not going to do them any good when, like me, they’re carpet cleaning. Just pull them out one day and say, “You’re not heading to Harvard, you’re heading to Hamburger Hamlet to push around a carpet wand.” Not everyone is college material, so let’s teach them a trade. Train them how to be electricians and plumbers and make sure they’re prepared for life and the workforce. I’m not talking about shop class. I mean full immersion in a trade.

And what about some training for how to do a job interview and fill out applications? Kids shouldn’t be able to get out of school without knowing where to put their name and Social Security number on an application or that when you walk into an interview you shouldn’t be wearing a My Chemical Romance T-shirt and say, “ ’Sup? Do I got the job or what?”

Why not have all kids take a full-semester course on basic financial planning? As I said earlier, you’re going to be raped by the government on April 15 of every year. Shouldn’t public schools have mandatory classes about taxes and how to fill out your forms? Or how to write a check and balance your bank account? The economy in this country has gone down the shitter because no one can understand credit-card interest and mortgage payments, and thus get fleeced by the dickholes on Wall Street. This affects all of us.

Or CPR and first aid. Teach them basic lifesaving skills. I don’t mean a day devoted to it in health class, I mean an entire semester. Make it mandatory. We could turn the next generation into para-paramedics. Not necessarily someone who can administer an IV of morphine, but someone who could save your kid if he was drowning in a pool or put a tourniquet on you when you get shot by one of the other dropouts from the public school.