Read In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy Online

Authors: Adam Carolla

Tags: #Essays, #humor, #American wit and humor, #Form, #General

In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (19 page)

BOOK: In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy
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DIVERSITY SEMINARS

Not only does every employee of every corporation have to sit through a bullshit sexual-harassment seminar, they are also mandated to have three hours of their lives stolen for a diversity and racial-sensitivity seminar. I had to sit through these when I was working for CBS radio. They always do a question-and-answer thing at the end of this garbage, and I declared to my lackeys that no one could ask any questions or I would fire their ass. The more questions asked, the longer we were going to be stuck in that room. Ironically, I then ended up dragging the thing out because I eventually reached the tipping point and couldn’t handle the bullshit being piled on.

The woman conducting the seminar, who looked like Maya Angelou with the giant amber beads and muumuu, posed this retarded question: “A Hispanic male robs a liquor store. The only information the news has is that he is Hispanic and male. Should they mention his ethnicity?” At this point you, like me and every other rational person, are thinking, “Of course. Whatever is necessary to get the word out and catch this guy.” But I kept my mouth shut. Florida from
Good Times
declared no, his ethnicity should not be mentioned because there are too many Hispanic males in Los Angeles (twenty thousand more slipped in while you were reading that sentence). To say that fact would draw suspicion on every Hispanic male in the population. At that moment I hit my saturation point with Aretha Franklin’s less talented sister and asked, “Then why are you bringing up that he’s male? I’m male—I don’t want to get lumped in with liquor-store robbers.” Her response was as stupid as her original point: “But he was a male.” I shot back, “He’s Mexican too. Why do we have to ignore that fact but not the fact that he’s he’s got a dick and balls?” Take that, Cinco De Maya Angelou.

EVERYONE EARNS IT

So let’s drop the act and just face the fact that as a race, you earn your stereotype. We’re supposed to celebrate our differences, but as soon as somebody points out that some of those differences are negative, that person gets called a racist.

It’s an all-or-nothing attitude that causes the problem. Ironically, the Berkeley-educated white folk who attack me and say, “Not
all
black men are in prison” and “Not
all
Muslim men are terrorists” are the first ones to get the petition going to have a peanut-free school because
one
kid has an allergy. Not
all
the kids have a peanut allergy, so why should
all
of them suffer? I’m not saying “all” of this group or “all” these people, but “some” of this group and “enough” of these people.

As I stated earlier, whether you are a car company or a race, you earn your reputation. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this chart of ethnic stereotypes.

STEREOTYPE
ETHNICITY
Big Noses / Run Hollywood and the Banks
  Mexicans
Large Penises / Great Athletes
  Asians
Excel at Math
  Native Americans
No Sense of Humor / Love Hasselhoff
  Blacks
Make Good Prize Fighters / Gardeners
  Indians
Love Rap / Teenage Pregnancy
  Canadians
Make Great Doctors / Computer Techs
  The Irish
Uptight / Have Bad Teeth
  Brazilians
Terrible Drivers
  Germans
Treat Women Like Property / Are Religious Zealots
  Swedes
Own Convenience/Liquor Stores
  The British
Constantly Drunk / Love Casinos
  Jews
Constantly Drunk / Love the Celtics
  Arabs

If you believe there’s no truth to stereotypes, then nothing in that chart seemed odd. But admit it, you fucking hypocrite, you laughed.

My “everybody earns it” theory extends to the gays, who technically aren’t a race but, fuck it, it’s close enough. They have anti-defamation leagues, their own parts of cities, and parades. That’s enough to qualify as a race. Plus gay is its own race because that’s the number-one attribute that gets made fun of. So if you’re busting the chopsticks of a fat Chinese gay guy, the first insult is about his sexuality. Then eventually you work your way down to fat and Chinese.

Before you call GLAAD, let me say this. I have no problem with gay people. I’m open-minded, but closed-behinded. I love the gays. All they do is pay taxes for schools they don’t use, for prisons they don’t inhabit, and to repair potholes their peach-colored MINI Cooper convertibles don’t create. Meanwhile, they rarely use government programs and they don’t crap out more kids that use up resources. In fact, they gobble up all the world’s unwanted kids. They recycle like hell, their cars always have a fresh coat of carnauba wax, and the lawns of their houses look like someone took tweezers and nasal-hair clippers and finely manicured them. Their homes look like country clubs. You don’t see the gay guy with an El Camino up on blocks and a sofa rotting on the porch. Those are the Jews. (Oh, confused? I thought you didn’t buy into stereotypes.)

The gays take care of their homes and their community. As a group they care about the environment, they are very civically minded, and nonviolent. You don’t need to worry about a gay guy putting a knife in your back at the ATM. Plus they leave all the chicks for me. (Hold this page up and high-five it.) You want to live in the gay part of town. If you live in L.A., all you need to know about the gays versus other groups can be determined by a drive down Santa Monica Boulevard. Santa Monica Boulevard is a long, filthy, graffiti-covered stretch of asphalt that cuts through the heart of Los Angeles. Except for one two-mile stretch that has medians with green grass, spotless sidewalks, and happy couples strolling with laptops and lapdogs.

Al Gore is obsessed with big business and its carbon footprint. I’m obsessed with groups and their social footprint. And the gays have a small social footprint. This is a stereotype they’ve earned, and it’s a good one. But another not-so-good one they’ve earned is on full display at the “pride” parades.

The juxtaposition of people at these parades demanding respect while dressed in assless chaps is funnier than anything that hack John Waters could ever shit out. Don’t worry, gays, your respect is coming. It’s just around the corner. Continue dragging your gimp partner down the street by his nipple clamps. You’ll soon get that respect you so richly deserve. Society is
this
close to accepting you and your life partner with the handlebar mustache and the studded leather thong.

A quick pitch for the dictionary folks. In the next edition, I would like to include a new definition for the word
parade
—“any more than eight gays congregated together.” That should be the term, like a flock of geese or a pod of whales: a parade of gays. Also, please add the term
behymen
, as in “a man who has never been with another man still has an intact behymen.”

Allow me to make a controversial point to show that despite all the cries of how homophobic and intolerant our society is, we’re actually very accepting: There’s surprisingly little gay-bashing based on how repugnant we find the act of gay sex. To be clear, I’m not saying we should step up the gay-bashing: I’m just saying it’s surprising there’s not more.

Straight men have a visceral reaction to gay porn. I would rather witness a nun get lowered into a wood chipper than watch ten seconds of gay porn. And this isn’t just me. Dr. Drew, one of the most open-minded, tolerant guys in the world, confirms this. When straight guys see two dudes tongue-kiss, they get nauseated. It’s the way we’re wired. When men are straight, we’re straight. It’s not like chicks, who can become a lesbian on any given weekend. Heterosexuality for men is a life sentence. For women, heterosexuality is like a club where they get their hand stamped but can come and go as they please. If you show a girl two dudes going at it, you’ll get a light “Ew.” Show a straight guy a clip of
Glory, Glory Hole-elujah
, and he’ll be swept out of the room by the tidal wave of his own vomit. And it’s not as if we have delicate sensibilities. The same guy who would rather poke his eyes out than watch five frames of cornholing is the same one who, if there’s a clip of a fighter getting a compound fracture in the octagon, will forward it to all of his buddies under the subject line “You Gotta See This.”

So the fact that this is something that is universally physically repugnant to straight guys and yet virtually none of them, not counting the religious nut jobs, ever raise a hand to gay men is a sign that we’re evolved. Or super-lazy. We’re not the backward homophobic nation that some people paint us to be. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still progress to be made in the marriage and “don’t ask, don’t tell” department, but look at other countries. Over there gays don’t even have the right to
exist
, never mind adopt. The reason you don’t ask and don’t tell in Yemen is because they’ll stone you to death or put a burning tire around you.

And it can’t get more damning than this: Every straight woman would rather watch two chicks going at it than gay porn. In other words, women who love cock would rather watch a video with no cocks than one with two cocks.

Let me wrap up with this:

I love it when a black guy says something racist against white people and they call it “reverse racism.” As if white people were the only group capable of being “real” racists. White people didn’t invent racism, we just perfected it.

I WANT MY
FUTURE
BACK

According to the TV and movies of my youth, by this point we were all supposed to have flying cars, robot butlers, and a crystal that would power our house for a thousand years. We were supposed to be living a technological utopia. But that’s not the case. I’m consistently disappointed by how the things we create to make our lives easier tend to fuck them up worse.

Growing up, we had a black-and-white Zenith TV in a metal case with fake wood grain that you could pound on. You could beat the shit out of it. It’d go vertical or horizontal or the stabilizer would go off. I’d be trying to watch
Maude
and it would be all over the place. So I’d come up behind it and do that Fonz move.
Boom
. And it would straighten out. To fix something back in the day, you didn’t have to be a technician. You’d just slap it on the side or whack it on the top. Even with cars, you’d start to smack the dash and shout, “Come on, baby.” There used to be radios you could hit, TVs you could whack, even toasters you could hit if they were mistreating the bread. I used to have an electric space heater with the coils in the metal sheath. I was living for a while in the garage of my dad’s house. It didn’t have heating or air-conditioning. During the winter it would be cold as shit, so I would sleep with a space heater next to my bed. And at some point in the night the thing would start making this weird harmonic buzz and vibrate. So I’d just whack it once and it would straighten out. It would be cool for about twenty minutes, and then it would start up with the buzzing and I’d smack it again. Nowadays, if your iPhone starts fucking up, you don’t start mashing it. You’re gonna fuck it up worse. If your Prius doesn’t start, you don’t drop an elbow on the dashboard.

We’ve fixed a lot of the problems with certain pieces of technology, but there are a lot of products that have stood still or even gone backward.

TOASTERS

Where’s the toaster technology? Toasters haven’t progressed since Lucy and Ricky were on TV, but now we’ve got an ankle monitor to make sure Lindsay Lohan hasn’t taken a drink. Imagine traveling back in time to the forties and telling someone sitting around their kitchen, “In 2010 this toaster isn’t gonna toast bread one second faster than it does now. Not one goddamn second. But there will be a thing the size of a pack of cigarettes you strap to your ankle that will contact a satellite if you’ve had a thimbleful of Kahlua.” They’d slam your head into their Formica tabletop and bury you in the backyard.

And half the time the toast comes out burned. Why was it built with the ability to burn the toast anyway? Do we need the ruin-my-breakfast setting? There are degrees that people enjoy, from lightly toasted to dark brown. But nobody wants briquette. Jacuzzis go from warm to hot, but not enough to kill a human or poach a salmon. The heater in your car can get pretty warm, but it will never go up to blast furnace and melt your face. Why do I need to be able to smelt ore in my toaster? I bet the toaster manufacturers have some kind of unholy alliance with the bread companies. I picture a guy who looks like Karl Rove, wearing a gold Toaster Manufacturers of America blazer and smoking a cigar, saying, “What if I could guarantee that every seventh piece of bread ends up in the garbage? It would increase your sales by fifteen percent.” Then we see the Pillsbury Doughboy laugh, slide a briefcase full of cash across the desk, and say, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

MICROWAVES

Microwaves haven’t been around as long as toasters but are also desperately in need of an overhaul. If I want to make some tea, it takes as long to heat that cup of water as it would in a kettle. Then there are mugs that I can’t touch after they come out of the microwave because they are hotter than lava while the water in the cup remains room temperature. And the man who invents a microwave that can handle foil is going to be a billionaire. Why hasn’t this happened yet? We could keep dumping money into Africa, or we could put some R&D into a microwave that can deal with the little metal handle on Chinese takeout containers.

Takeout/doggy-bagged food comes in one of three containers: either the foil pan with the bendable lip and the clear plastic top that never fits back on once it comes off, the aforementioned cardboard container with the coat hanger, and the good old foil swan. None of which will work in a microwave. Either somebody has to create a microwave that tolerates metal or the fuckwads who are in charge of designing the takeout containers should do something that is non-metallic. This doesn’t feel like too tall an order to me. It’s not 1943, and we’re not in the army. Open your fridge. Is there any metal in the containers? The milk carton, the egg carton, the tub of margarine, the Sunny D bottle, the yogurt cup … stop me when one of these fucking things has a paper clip’s worth of metal in it. But every fucking container choice on the market for the microwave contains some sort of metal.

Pardon me. I did forget a fourth option that doesn’t contain metal. It’s that white Styrofoam one that melts and becomes one with the half-eaten burger and fries you’re attempting to reanimate. And for those of you who are asking, “What’s the big deal? How about you just scrape the contents onto a plate and zap it that way?” you’re missing the point. The best part of the fettuccine Alfredo or whatever you’re reheating is trapped between the creases of that foil container and will never be set free by the futile scrapings of your cold fork. Thanks.

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