The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (28 page)

YAHOO NEWS

 

New Rule:
Since the number-one cause of death in the Civil War was diarrhea—true—Civil War reenactors must do all their inspiring battlefield re-creations with a steaming load of crap in their pants. And if you think that sounds uncomfortable and unpleasant, try slavery.

I mention this because today marks the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy, and that’s when all the shooting and pooping started. And tomorrow in Montgomery, Alabama—in just one of many slavery shindigs around the South this year—the Sons of the Confederacy are sponsoring a march to “celebrate the Confederacy,” part of a whole year of nostalgia, including battle reenactments, parades, and grand balls—which is what you have to have to convince people that there’s nothing fucked up about celebrating slavery. Oh, I know, they’re not celebrating slavery, they’re celebrating a way of life: “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton”—because someone else was picking it!

I tell you, southerners—and I love them—have more disconnects than AT&T. And it started with Jefferson Davis—in his inauguration speech, he didn’t once mention slavery. He just talked about “agriculture” and “resources,” and then winked so much his wife thought he was sexting her by Morse code.

Now, I know you southerners have had a tough go at it. You lost the Civil War to the North. Reese Witherspoon to Hollywood. And the Dixie Chicks to Satan. And I’m not trying to offend my southern friends, mostly because you’re on meth and packing heat, but underneath that trucker hat there’s a plantation-size mental split going on. Because even the southerners who do the reenacting and lionize their slaveholding ancestors would tell you that they now think slavery was wrong. Then how could killing people to defend it have been right?

If my ancestors had fought for the right to abduct teenagers and force them into prostitution, I probably wouldn’t reenact that on weekends with the cast of
Gossip Girl.
And why is it that the people who want to reenact the war are the losers? That’s like doing sexual role-play and starting with, “Hey, remember that time I couldn’t get it up? Let’s relive that.”

So I’m not saying that your great-great-grandpa Lucius Meriwether Cornpone didn’t fight bravely at the Battle of Whogivesashit, but he was fighting on the wrong side. Just as I’m sure there were brave soldiers in Hitler’s army, but I wouldn’t start a restaurant called the Waffen Hut.

And all this talk about the “southern way of life” . . . please, I’ve been to the South. It’s the same way of life we have over here. You watch TV, you go to the mall, you eat a soft pretzel, and you go home. You just do it
slower,
that’s all.
Gone With the Wind
was just a movie. A movie made in Culver City. By Jews.

 

 

—February 18, 2011

 

WAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

 

 

New Rule:
Television networks have to stop making shows that try and put a happy ending on America’s enormous wealth disparity and instead make a show called
Shine My Shoes, Fuckface!
This is America, where the top four hundred people have more money than the bottom 150 million combined.

ABC gave us
Secret Millionaire,
which is like
Undercover Boss
but less intellectually taxing. In each episode, one of our richest one percent drops in on the wage slaves for a week and finds out that living on one hundred eighty-five bucks a week in America really blows, so they then anecdotally solve the wealth-gap problem by showering everyone with cash. It’s like
Pretty Woman
if you were the whore.

It’s amazing. TV used to give Americans the reverse fantasy: What if you, normal person, suddenly became a millionaire? Now it’s “Oh, who are we kidding? You consider yourself lucky to hold on to your job deep-frying chicken parts, but how’d you like to be briefly
introduced
to a millionaire? Would you like that? You can even touch his garments!” And people watch this shit and find it inspirational. It’s why they fawn over Donald Trump when he flirts with running for president every four years, even though he spends the rest of his time letting eighteen people kiss his ass before he fires all but one of them.

America’s rich aren’t giving you money. They’re
taking
your money. Between the years 1980 and 2005, eighty percent of all new income generated in this country went to the richest one percent. Let me put that in terms even you fat-ass Tea Baggers can understand. Say one hundred Americans get together and order a one-hundred-slice pizza. The pizza arrives, they open the box, and the first guy takes eighty slices. And if someone suggests, “Why don’t you just take seventy-nine slices?”
that’s socialism
!

I know, it’s just a TV show. But it does reinforce the stupid idea people have that rich people would love us, and share with us, if only they got to walk a mile in our cheap plastic shoes—but they’re the reason the shoe factory moved to China. We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super-rich are the same. Like somehow the rich will eventually get so full that they’ll explode, and the candy will rain down on the rest of us. Like they’re some kind of piñata of benevolence. But here’s the thing about a piñata. It doesn’t open on its own. You have to beat it with a stick.

Forget
Secret Millionaire
; I have a better idea for a show. Every week, one of the men responsible for the global financial meltdown is dropped into a poor neighborhood, and . . . And that’s it. No cameras, we just leave him there. I call it
I’m Alan Greenspan. Get Me out of Here.

 

 

—March 11, 2011

 

BARRY, WHITE

 

New Rule:
If the Republicans’ idea of governing is just being against everything the president is for, then they have to change their name to the “I Know You Are, but What Am I?” party and nominate for 2012 a man who is the exact opposite of Obama. A fat, white, small-eared idiot who angers quickly, overreacts to everything, and can bowl 300, and who carries only one form of ID, his original birth certificate. A man so the antithesis of our current president that even his name is Barack Obama spelled backward. Say hello to the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidate, Karab Amabo.

Now, before I give you the details about Karab Amabo, please understand, I’m not making this premise up. This week the Republican Party did a one-eighty on Libya so hard it drove John Boehner’s tears back into his face. Totally ruining the leather. But let me tell you about Karab Amabo.

Amabo would be our first homeschooled president, and the first in his family to ever
not
graduate high school. After flunking out of bartending school, he spent years
dis
organizing communities, and wrote two books: a memoir,
Dreams from My Food Court,
and a policy book,
Thinking Is for Dummies.

And what are his policies? Karab Amabo believes we should
increase
our dependency on foreign oil, and shrink the size of government until it performs only the most basic functions: killing Arabs, paying farmers to grow corn, and probing people at the airport. Karab Amabo believes abortion should be illegal,
especially
in the case of rape or incest, and he is so pro-life his slogan is “Life begins at erection.”

Karab Amabo pledges to repeal the job-killing health-care bill, and to implement Amabocare, a comprehensive program that gives uninsured people with preexisting conditions the opportunity to walk it off.

Temperamentally, Karab Amabo believes America has had enough of “no drama Obama” and his measured, Vulcan logic. At the first sign of crisis, Amabo will pray, scream, shit his pants, and fly
Air Force One
into a mountain.

And what of Amabo’s family? Karab Amabo’s wife is a sour, ashen midget whose flaccid arms are so weak she can barely do her job, operating the deep fryer at Jack in the Box. The Amabos and their two sons go to church every four hours, and they have a meth lab where the White House garden used to be.

 

 

—March 25, 2011