The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (21 page)

ROVERRATED

 

New Rule:
If America can’t get off its back and get something done, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can’t get up. As long as we’re pathetic, we might as well act like it’s cute.

And I’m sorry, we are pathetic. Inert and lethargic. Unable to end bad things—like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, sixty thousand troops still in Germany, the drug war, useless weapons programs. And unable to initiate anything good—and even when we do address a problem, the plan is always half-assed, and it can never start until years later. Like the climate-change bill in Congress now: It mandates a whopping seventeen percent cut in the greenhouse gas emissions that are killing us . . .
by 2020.
Who’s in charge of this program, FEMA? No, really, fellas, don’t rush, only the whole western half of the United States has been on fire for a month.

We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn’t start until 2016. In that year, our cars of the future will glide along while achieving a breathtaking thirty-five miles per gallon. My goodness, is that even humanly possible? You socialist dreamer.

“What do we want!? A small improvement! When do we want it!? 2016!”

When it’s something for us personally, like a laxative, it has to start working
now.
My TV remote has a button on it now called On Demand.
You get your ass on my TV screen right now, SpongeBob, and make me laugh now!

But with big, important things, we’re that puppy. The president has said about health care, “If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense.”
So let’s start from scratch.

Instead, we have a crappy lobbyist-written blowjob-to-corporate-America bill, and it doesn’t even kick in until 2013, during which time close to two hundred thousand people will die because they’re not covered, and three million will go bankrupt from hospital bills. I have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don’t let Obama do anything. What kills me is: Apparently that’s the Democrats’ plan, too.

We weren’t always like this. In 1965, President Johnson signed Medicare into law, and eleven months later, seniors were receiving benefits. In World War II, FDR converted car companies to making tanks and planes virtually overnight. In one eight-year period, America went from JFK’s ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon to
landing a man on the moon.

This generation has had eight years just to build something at Ground Zero. An office building, a museum, a Pinkberry, I don’t care anymore. America: Home of the Freedom Pit. Which, ironically, is spitting distance from Wall Street, where they knock down buildings a different way—through foreclosure.

That’s the ultimate sign of our lethargy: millions thrown out of their homes, tossed out of work, lost their life savings—and they just take it. Thirty percent interest on credit cards? Are you kidding me? It’s a good thing for the banks the Supreme Court legalized sodomy.

I still like the president; I can’t help liking the president—but what happened to “change,” and when did “the fierce urgency of now” become “Your call is important to us, please continue to hold”?

 

 

—September 25, 2009