President Me (36 page)

Convincing depressed dumpy chicks they're perfect just the way they are is not a great plan for the future. I want Beyoncé to come out with a song about shedding a couple of pounds and dressing up nice for your boyfriend or job interview.

The worst was last year when I was in New York doing a live show at Town Hall for the comedy festival. I was completely burnt from doing the show, plus two shows the night before, and had to be up at five the next morning to catch a flight. But my buddy Daniel was in town and we made plans to go out after the show to a high-end steak joint in Manhattan called STK.

Before we even sat down, I was annoyed. The jams were being pumped. I looked over and saw a live DJ on a riser at one end of the place. When the waitress came over to take our order, she had to shout the specials at us like you do at your deaf grandmother when you visit her in the home. “IT'S NOT A TRADITIONAL CRAB CAKE . . . NO,
CRAB
CAKE . . .” I shit you not, the techno was so loud I had to act like a UN interpreter between the waitress and the guy sitting next to me. “SHE SAID THAT ONLY COMES WITH TWO SHRIMP, SO WE SHOULD PROBABLY DO THREE ORDERS!” We all got a nice side order of tinnitus with our asparagus.

And they were not just any jams. No, this DJ was doing it mash-up style. So not only were we treated to Carly Rae Jepsen's “Call Me Maybe,” but it was mashed up with the bass from “Roxanne.” And to add insult to injury there was ten seconds of relief when they played the intro to Frank Sinatra's “New York, New York.” I thought, “Oh, thank God. Finally, a little Sinatra in a New York steak house, the world is right again.” And then came the Alicia Keys.

And that's the point. How about some Sinatra or jazz? Would people light the place on fire and throw chairs through the windows if you played a little Dave Brubeck? Is this a steak house or a fashion show? I came here for a porterhouse and some mashed potatoes, not a rave.

Of course
I had to talk to the waitress about this. I asked, “Do people like the music so loud they can't hear the specials?” She gave me two very unsatisfying answers. First she said, “I know. Everyone complains about it.” Then why don't you do something about it? Is there a city ordinance that the music must be louder than a jet engine? The second part of her answer was worse. When I asked why the DJ cut Sinatra, she said the owners wanted it that way to make the place more friendly toward women. I thought, “Women or eleven-year-old girls?” Because that's who this “music” is appealing to.

This was not the first and definitely won't be the last time a live DJ ruined my life. I was at an event at the Tribeca Film Festival and the white DJ, who I've lovingly dubbed DJ CrackerJew, was pumping up the jams as if the room was full of thirteen-year-old girls with learning and hearing disabilities. I went up and asked him politely to turn it down and he said no. I asked, “Do you see anyone dancing?” He replied that he didn't. So I asked again if he could turn it down and he said no again. Then I snapped, “No one likes your shitty music.” He said, “I do,” and turned it up. I wanted to find this guy's parents and kick the shit out of them. Just never stop kicking them until my shoes were covered in teeth and blood. Can we get black people DJing again? White guys have too much to prove.

Seriously. Remember when party DJs were lovable black guys in Run-D.M.C. sweatsuits whose shoes were untied? (Unclear if they were trying to cultivate a look or if it was the morbid obesity that prevented them from doing so.) They played some Temptations, they played some Marvin Gaye, they dutifully honored the “Walking on Sunshine” request, and then went the fuck home. Now they're spindly, obnoxious white guys in front of a Mac laptop with their hats on crooked looking like a cheap Chinese bootleg of a Beastie Boy. This guy doesn't seem to notice he's in a room full of people whose average age is fifty-one and average skin color is Meryl Streep. This is just jacking off, they don't care what their audience wants to hear, as long as they look and feel cool doing it and get to take a coke break once in a while.

But that was in New York. It's an urban center where everyone is trying to be cool. So it's not a total surprise. The most egregious example of this shitty music permeating our culture was when I was in St. Paul, Minnesota, for a live show. I was playing at Garrison Keillor's theater. That is the whitest building in the whitest city in the whitest state. Long story short, I was late for the gig and had to hop in a cab with my manager on the phone giving me directions. Meanwhile, the cabdriver named, no joke, Habib, was playing some form of music that was so grating and computerized I had to hang up with my manager and ask him what the fuck it was. I had never heard anything so annoying. Speaking to one of the neck rolls on the back of Habib's head, I asked, “What is this?” He replied through a heavy accent, “Soca. It is Soca music.” I said, “Soccer?” No, Soca. “What is Soca?” I asked. My swarthy friend said, “It's for the young people, to dance the club and make love!” I thought, “What part of this looks like that? Our combined age is ninety-six and half and we're in a cab in St. Paul.”

PUTTING THE MAD IN MADISON AVENUE

The pursuit of youth and “the demo” started with advertising. This never made sense to me. People will talk about trying to get people while they're young and have disposable income to “create brand loyalty,” but when I was nineteen I didn't have a pot to piss in. So go ahead and youth up your commercials all you want, they're falling on deaf ears and an empty wallet.

If advertising is to be believed, we should all be attending rooftop parties with our young, perfectly racially balanced, one-of-every-color group of friends. I should be heading up to a rooftop with my black friend, my Hispanic friend, and my Asian friend to see DJ CrackerJew spin some records and drink a refreshing Dr Pepper. But the reality is that the majority of my friends are white and we've never been on a rooftop together. I don't think these parties actually exist. The only time I've ever seen a Mexican on a roof, he was rolling out tarpaper, the only time I've seen an Asian on a rooftop was with a rifle during the L.A. riots, and the only time I've seen a black guy on a roof was waving down the coast guard in the Ninth Ward.

And I've never seen an American Indian in one of these ads—especially liquor ads. African Americans are 13 percent of the population, but if beer and McDonald's ads are to be believed, they're 50 percent. American Indians are 1.2 percent of the U.S. population, yet never appear in any commercials. If you apply the same racial math Madison Avenue does with black people, every tenth beer ad should have a Mohican in it.

Everything has to be young and cool when it comes to ads, even the maxi-pad commercials. I saw a Kotex ad recently and the whole point was “This isn't your grandma's pad. This one is edgy and in-your-face. Wear them loud and wear them proud.” The lead chick is walking by a faded ad on the side of a building for some boring old maxi pad. She goes into her bag, in which she is conveniently carrying a couple cans of spray paint. A Joan Jett knockoff song kicks up as she starts tagging up the billboard. Then all these other hot rock-and-roll rebel chicks—one of every ethnicity, of course—come out of the stores and schools and into the street with ladders and paint to team up and do a little graffiti about maxi pads. It ends with the tag line “Take a Stand Against Bland.” Yeah, that's what chicks want, to advertise their menses. How dumb do they think women are? Just because they changed the packaging on your maxi pad to Day-Glo doesn't make you part of the Runaways. I'm no expert in this area but I've talked to my female friends and they don't have strong opinions about the color of their pad packaging. They think the more subtle the better.

As president, I'm going to decree that maxi-pad packaging should come in three styles—a beige one, a suede one, and a leather one so they blend in with your purse. This should help me land the female vote for my reelection.

And the younger the advertiser is aiming, the more annoyed I am. Because these ads are all about attitude. I saw a commercial where the kid was annoyed that his mother made him Pop-Tarts instead of Toaster Strudels. Fuck you, you little turd. I would have sucked my gym coach off for a Pop-Tart when I was a kid. I wanted to reach into the TV and punch him in the face. Let's see how many Toaster Strudels you can eat with no teeth. We're empowering these little shitbags too much by catering to them and constantly telling them it's their world. But by ingraining that attitude, we're ruining ours.

The ad that's driving me nuts right now is a Pepsi campaign where they tell you to “Live for Now.” Not only is there something slightly morbid about it—basically it's saying, “Fuck it, you're going to die, have a Pepsi”—but this is the opposite of what we should be teaching our youth. We should be telling them to save for later. Living for now is what collapsed our economy. A lot of people took out home loans they couldn't afford because they were living for now. Now they're living in tents under the freeway. You show me a student that lives for now and I'll show you an F. That's why Asians are handing our asses to us. We're telling our young people, “Sure, you have a book report due tomorrow but you want to play
Grand Theft Auto
. Live for now.”

But I've noticed another disturbing trend in advertising. It's worse than the catering to kids, it's catering to lazy deadbeats.

I remember as a kid, I would tell my mom I was sick so I could have a day out of school. The joke was on me. I would sit around and be punished by whatever was on her thirteen-inch black-and-white Zenith. Every commercial I'd see in between scintillating segments of
Wagon Train
reruns was about how you could become a nurse or get a welding license. And there were many choices for schools to learn how to be a trucker. “Hi, I'm Wally Thorpe for the Wally Thorpe School of Trucking . . .” or “At the Dootson School of Trucking, we can get you your Class 7 license and get you behind the wheel of a big rig and making big money in three weeks. I should know, I'm Debbie Dootson.” Nowadays what does every single commercial if you're home during the day sound like? “Did you slip and fall at work?” “Were you exposed to asbestos?” “Chronic pain from your transvaginal mesh? Call the law office of Steven R. Johnson.” The message used to be “What are you doing at home during the day? Get a job, you lazy fucker.” Now it's “Don't get off your ass. Dial the phone with your fat sausage fingers, we're gonna get you some cash.” This is a little pH strip for our society and how off the rails we've gone. Instead of getting a career and hitting the open road in your big rig and earning your pay, it's all about sitting on the couch with your Big Gulp and getting the grocery store you slipped and fell in to pay for your Doritos.

Another bad sign of the times are beer commercials. Every beer ad when I was growing up showed a bunch of guys walking into the bar covered in grime and wearing hard hats after clocking out. The voice-over would say, “You've worked hard all day, you've earned a cold one.” They'd take a pull off it and let out a nice “aaahhh.”

Now every beer ad shows the aforementioned multiethnic rooftop party full of twenty-three-year olds with DJ CrackerJew spinning the tunes. No one did anything that day except try to get laid. You used to work for your beer. Not anymore. A voice-over saying, “You read the
Huffington Post
on your Kindle and watched a biracial couple make out at a poetry slam, you've earned a cold one,” doesn't quite work, does it? The guys who would knock off work and hit the bar for Miller Time after placing girders are gone, it's all skinny guys in scarves and porkpie hats who look like Adam Levine drinking sixty-four-calorie “ultra” beers. No wonder every bridge is falling down.

AND THE OSCAR GOES TO

Let me wrap this up with another example of how wrong we've gone as a society as symbolized by the media. Watching the Oscars this year, I realized two things. It used to be that the person who won would get up there and thank their agent, their wife, and the people who worked on the project with them. Now they have to go up and thank all the other nominees first. Back in the day John Wayne just got up there, thanked the William Morris Agency, and went backstage to get shit-faced. Now the poor wife of the best actor doesn't even get thanked before the music is playing him offstage because he spent the majority of his speech talking about how everyone else in the category deserved the award instead of him. This is the culture we've crafted. No one wants to be excellent, no one wants to be part of the one percent. Because they know that only engenders envy. The American public no longer wants to look up to the people winning awards, they only want to look down on people for getting kicked off the island.

The language at the Oscars has even changed to suit this purpose. It wasn't that long ago that the presenter would open they envelope and say, “And the winner is . . .” Now it's “. . . and the Oscar goes to . . .” Because saying “winner” implies there's a loser and that can't exist because we're all equal and everyone is number one just like
Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!
said. Well then, why even have a fucking awards show at all? “The Oscar goes to . . .” sounds arbitrary, as if they picked a name out of a fishbowl backstage. We're trying to figure out who was the best, their peers voted to see who that was. This is the participation trophy generation coming of age and making changes.

So I now issue the following executive order: We will continue the trend of not saying “and the winner is” but with a twist. Now the presenter will announce one by one the names of the other four nominees by saying “and the losers are . . .” allowing plenty of time for them to bask in their shame. Like all things in my America, I want talented people who bust their ass and do a great job to be rewarded, and the people who don't to receive a healthy dose of do-it-better-next-time shame.