The Rants, page 3
Still, a lot of the blame falls on us. There seems to be this notion that good, honest, hard work is something to be viewed down our collective snout. That doesn't make the workers at the bottom of the pole feel very good. Does it?
If you want better service, the next time you see one of I hose workers in an "employee of the month" photo at a last-food restaurant, suppress your urge to make your friends laugh by ridiculing the guy as a dork loser with a bad haircut. Instead, why not seek out the guy who actually took pride in doing his job the way it was supposed to be done and thank him for dotting the i's and crossing the t's and making sure there is toilet paper in the stall and ketchup in the dispenser. Make that person feel good because he is the last thin blue collar line between a frayed but still functioning society and full-blown "We'll be there anytime between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. or maybe we won't even show up at all, assface" anarchy. All right?
And let's grab the reins as customers. Don't stay on hold forever. "What's that? I should press one if I am calling from a touch tone phone? Hey, Hal, I'm pressing flash, 'cause I'm hanging up now and taking my business to a human operator!" Don't settle for fish nugget and the green spooge, turn the car around, go back, and demand the goddamn cheeseburger you ordered!
And lastly, let's get our pride together, go to the whip, and regain our position at the head of the socioeconomic pack!
How about less billions being spent on getting the war machine cherry, and a few more billions on tightening up our educational system. Forget the "moment of silence" in the morning, let's shoot for a moment of science, okay?
It's time we stopped looking up Japan's ass, and you know why? Because that definitely is "not our job, man."
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
victimless crime
WHAT ARE WE DOING SPENDING BILLIONS OF dollars trying to keep people's private lives in order? And I'm talking about legal-aged, consenting adults here. Not kids. We obviously have to take special precautions to protect kids. But what is this Orwellian hang-up of ours of sticking our nose into other grown-ups' affairs? What concern is it of ours if some mindless stoner wants to spend his life hooked up to a Turkish skullbong?
Those are the statistical champions by hundreds and thousands of deaths. And wouldn't you rather shoot a game of pool with a guy smoking a joint than a guy drinking whiskey and beer? Someone smoking a joint doesn't all of a sudden rear back and stab his partner in the eye socket with the cue stick, okay. He's too busy laughing at the balls.
And as far as harder drugs go, if somebody wants to shoot up and die, right in front of you, more power to him, you know. It's his call. And you know, the herd has always had a way of thinning itself out.
We aren't stupid people, no more than anyone else in the world. So why are we obsessing on habits that harm no one but the habitual, while we let real problems slip even further out of reach?
We seem to be willfully turning away from reality, and from logic might I add, to punish people who in many instances are doing an extremely fine job of punishing themselves, thank you. And in some cases, they're not even punishing themselves, but rather just following age- old spawning instincts that are woven as deeply into their brain as is their need to watch "Seinfeld."
Is there anything more fruitless than trying to legislate sexual behavior? You know, according to the law, you can't even get a blow job in Georgia. No wonder Sherman hustled through there.
Now I'm not pro-drug. They obviously cause a lot of damage. But I am pro-logic, and you're never going to stop the human need for release through altered consciousness. The government could take away all the drugs in the world and people would spin around on their lawn until they fell down and saw God.
Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but it seems to really enrage the vast cheese-dog and beer-quaffing nation out there when someone decides to waste his own life chasing down chemical euphoria. And I'm not sure why. Our displeasure with someone hell-bent on self-ruination through drug use seems really disproportionate to its direct impact on us. And as a matter of fact, we amplify that impact when we attempt to enforce unenforceable laws. It not only costs us billions but puts us in harm's way as addicts are driven to crime as a means to an end.
Why do we chase druggies down like villagers after Karloff? Let them legally have what they already have and defuse the bomb.
You know, I think the hysteria about drugs is oftentimes baseless, and this comes from me—a man who has never done cocaine in his life, although I did smoke dope upon occasion during my stint as a student at Oxford in the late sixties. And the war on drugs is more often than not fruitless and patently hypocritical. Be honest with yourselves, now, what drugs are the most dangerous to most Americans? It's a no-brainer—cigarettes and alcohol.
And really, if you stop to think about it, who is hurt by the time-honored, unavoidable trade of prostitution? Only the guys who pay extra to be hurt. There is no sane reason to cling to this archaic legal attempt to curtail an activity that will be around until the end of time. You know, you could come back to this planet ten thousand years from now and Man may have evolved to the point where he doesn't even take in nutrition through a hole in his head anymore, but I guarantee he'd still be cruising Ninth Avenue and trying to get a knob shine from somebody named "Desiree."
What sort of perfect, Harrad Experiment society are we striving for, folks? One where you will be forced by the rigid puritanical mentality of your pinheaded, Gladys Kravitz neighbors into a tightly constricted, overly regimented existence? A life safe from the temptations, and rewards, of the flesh? Well, if that's your kink, go for it.
But for the rest of us, let's save the money we're wasting trying to regulate other people's private lives. If an individual wants to smoke a joint, shoot up, or munch blotterlike Tic Tacs and drop out, then let him.
Let's put the billions we're wasting on a drug war fought by fitness fanatics on steroids and three-martini senators rolling in pork back in the educational system. Let's free the courts and jails of lonely men and broken women who feel the need to buy and sell sex. Let's let the hookers and their johns have a safe building somewhere, off the streets, inspected medically, and taxed up the wazoo. Let's go on from there to tax liquor and cigarettes 500 percent, so that those industries can pay for safe, one- lane, drunk-proof highways and air-purification systems.
Most important, let's stop pretending that people are going to lead the lives that we tell them to lead. Let's stop pretending that a few simple prohibitions on substances and activities will yield up a nation of Beaver Cleavers, polite, clean, sexless, and ready to serve their fellow man, no questions asked.
People are people. They are going to do with their lives what they want to do, whether you like it or not. There is nothing you can do about them that won't break the bank, overcrowd the prisons, or corrode an already oxidized judicial system. People are perennially going to continue to get fucked up, and fucked, and we are going to continue to get fucked over if we don't concede the fact that there is absolutely fuck-all we can do about it.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
activism
WE ARE A NATION OF PROCRASTINATORS, AREN'T we? Activism in the midst of a passive period. And that's a shame, because activists throughout the years have been able to alter the course of history. They advanced civil rights for African-Americans, protected the rights of the worker, saved the whales from being extinct, and once kept "Spenser: For Hire" on for a whole extra season.
Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but it seems the activism times, they are a-changin'. Increasingly, we've become such a nation of self-obsessed me-monkeys that most of us feel like we've done our good deed for the day if we pull over and make a complete stop when an ambulance passes. And also, the tone of present-day activism seems to have turned for the worse. There's nothing more unbecoming than somebody who's pathologically rabid about an issue that in the long run is cosmically inconsequential. To the overzealous, I say: Stop being so selfish and work your rage out in your personal relationships like the rest of us. Okay!
I'll be honest with you. There are times I'd like to shout, "Shut the fuck up and stop blocking traffic with your 'Save the Head Lice' rally, asshole."
Sometimes it's hard not to think, "Hey, could I please just eat my Cherry Garcia without some aging Vermont ice cream hippies constantly reminding me how bad the rain forests are doing?" Hey, boys, as far as the rain forest goes, does a bear give a shit in the woods?
But every time I go to turn my back on activism, I remember that in the sixties, a bunch of college kids brought about the end of a profane war and helped boot out a corrupt President. Activism got results —people felt empowered. The sixties were the "Us Generation."
The seventies, however, were the "Me Generation," and the eighties, well, the eighties were the "Me, Me, Me Generation," where cruel got confused with hip, serious with smart, attitude with belief, and the Mercedes emblem with the peace sign.
Now it's the nineties.
We've gone from the Red Cross handing out coffee at floods to Ricki Lake and the freak patrol blitzing Karl Lagerfeld's office and chaining themselves to the Poland Spring dispenser.
Now to me, Paul Newman does activism the right way. He makes delicious popcorn, salad dressing, and marinara sauce and then mentions in small print that the profits from this enterprise are going to charity. He sneaks it by you instead of ramming it down your throat, running his whole operation with a truly cool hand.
Remember, there is a fine line between activism and just being a pain in the ass.
But trying too hard is probably preferable to not trying at all. Believe me, we're all guilty of lying in the hammock, myself included. I'm about as societally active as J. D. Salinger during hay fever season, because quite frankly, it's a tad dangerous to get involved nowadays. There are forces of evil out there—powerful politicians, multinational corporations, Dick Clark—that would love for us to become the complacent, blond Illya Kuryakin tribe from H. G. Wells' Time Machine.
And does activism even make a difference at the end of the day"? Is there a happy ending? Well, hey, I'm one of the more pessimistic cats on the planet. I make Van Gogh look like a rodeo clown. And, with reluctance, I will say this—when you get involved, most probably, it'll suck at first. It'll be hard work with unclear results. But you know something? So what? That is life in all its glory. Life is not a movie. The right thing to do is simply get in the game. The price of apathy is too high to pay ... remember "We Are the World"? You want to see Dan Aykroyd singin' again? If only to prevent something like that from ever, ever recurring, please—get up off your ass, put some goddamn pants on and some undies, and do something.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
funding for the arts
NEWT GINGRICH RECENTLY SAID IT IS ABSOLUTELY essential that we cut funding for Public Broadcasting. I believe Gingrich made those comments on "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour."
Why is it that the newly elected Republicans in Congress are so intent on eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts? Well, historically, thumbdicks like these guys shy away from supporting anything that has the word "endowment" in it.
Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but why do we suddenly find ourselves locked in this pointless little pas de doo-doo over something called "arts funding"? The federal tab involved here is a lousy 500 million dollars— one five-hundredth of 1 percent of the national budget! That's less than what Clinton spends on 1-900 calls from Air Force One.
The trick is, art is subjective. It's like Mapplethorpe's bull- whip up the ass photo. One man's homoerotic statement is another man's unfortunate incident at the proctologist's.
As a nation, we're becoming more and more leery of art, as if one whiff of a ballet recital will inevitably send us reeling into a depraved tailspin of nipple clips and amyl nitrite tabs.
You know, picking on arts funding is easy. Art won't ever find a cure for disease. You can't cut art down to build our homes. Art doesn't patrol our streets and protect us from crime. But then again, art doesn't hit us in the head with a fucking baton sixty-seven times. What art does is educate us, enrich our lives, and reacquaint us with the beauty of human potential.
Unfortunately, in the current Attila-like political climes, enrichment of the soul is the lowest form of plankton on the humanistic food chain. Conservative politicians may talk big about education, but they're cutting arts funding quicker than Sollozzo's capos cut Luca Brasi.
Face it, most of these politicos think PBS is what makes their wives so cranky each month. Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I meant to say, what makes their mistresses so cranky each month. Besides, if we lose funding for public broadcasting, folks, you know what will happen? More fucking PBS strap-the-rat-cage on-my-face pledge breaks. Okay?
Believe me, it's not easy for me to stand here and defend the arts. I think that 95 percent of what passes for art in this world is complete and utter shit. And 4 of the other 5 percent is shit with an asterisk. But oh, that 1 percent makes you proud to be a human, doesn't it?
Come on, surely even you ultraconservative Republicans can sympathize with the empty feeling of watching true art disappear. You must have gotten a taste of that when "Hee Haw" was canceled.
Look, art is communication. If you get the message, or any message, it's successful. If you don't, hey, next painting.
So let's just shut up and bite this Lilliputian-sized tax bullet. Help keep some great old paintings and some deranged new ones in plain view of the average citizen, and at the same time, help defend individual expression against the first wave of the brain gendarmes. Because if we are to remain a truly great nation, we need to embrace our inalienable right to walk out of a modern art gallery, take a big bracing gulp of American air, and say, "You know something, honey? That really, really, really, sucked."
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
violence
LOOK, AMERICA HAS ALWAYS BEEN A VIOLENT country—rent Birth of a Nation if you doubt that—but nowadays we've gone off the Richter scale.
I can remember when I was a kid leaving our screen door unlocked at night. I can remember going to the playground and my mother worrying about me getting hurt on the swings, not me getting snatched and duct-taped into the trunk of some loser's Trans Am. I can remember going to school and worrying that the two bullies—The Only Two—might select me for a quick ass-kicking in the hallway.
If today's schools are any indication, in the future our kids are gonna have to worry about getting shot by the fucking guidance counselor.
Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but violence has turned the American dream into an Imax-George Romero film. Look out over the landscape and what do you see"? You see a demented Toontown, filled with carloads of gun-wielding maniacs exploding innocent bystanders like cantaloupes at a backwoods turkey shoot. You see a twisted bizarro-land gone crazy on a lethal cocktail made with equal parts of instant gratification, self-righteous anger, and notions of entitlement. This country's a hotel room and The Who are in town, folks.
You know, in the last few years we've seen cops beat the shit out of a guy like a pinata. We saw violent retribution at the corner of Florence and Normandie. We've seen two spoiled Beverly Hills brats chase their mother down the hallway, reload, and blow her away.
We've seen a woman cut her husband's penis off and the jury could not make a decision. Didn't have enough data—
"Let's observe her for a while—see if she does anything weird."
So you put her in a state hospital for six weeks. At the beginning of her stay you count up all the dicks.
Six weeks later you do a little Johnson re-tally. If the penal count is the same, she walks. It's the American way.
I'm telling you it's a madhouse out there. I feel like Heston waking up in the field and seeing the chimp on top of the pony.
How did it all happen? Probably too much wealth forming a thin crust over the poverty pie, too much of the good life on TV, and too little of it on the table.
But also, isn't the real problem here that somewhere along the line society took the wrong fork in the blame road and decided to give criminals the benefit of the doubt? How did they become the victims? Come on, everybody knows that's a bunch of shit, that's why Dirty Harry made Clint a big star.
You know it seems like we had some kind of handle on violent crime in the fifties, but in the interim thirty years the eye has passed over and we are back in the bloody storm called human history. Bottom line, folks, for all our evolutionary bluster and braggadocio we are animals and we live in a zoo where it's turned into free crack night in the ferret hut.
We have got to pull a Dennis Rodman and start getting aggressive on the offensive glass so the bad guys know that their next violent act will most certainly be their last. It's the nonpunks versus the punks in a Texas cage match for the unified belt and we must not go gentle into that bad night.
