NASCAR
Most of these people have never been IN a car even though they live in countries absolutely polluted with deep, thick, unbelievably rich oil and gas preserves. And we have rules in place so that if Kasey Kahne or Jeff Gordon tries to sneak jet fuel into his gas tank we can fine him-just so they don't have an unfair advantage as they race around a circular track at two thousand miles an hour for half a day in order to win a couple of million dollars.
Look-I'm like you-I like to see car crashes as much as the next guy. Especially when it doesn't happen on a highway I'm driving across and therefore affects my commute. And especially when it's in a controlled situation that includes high-def cameras so I can watch the crash replayed in digital slo-mo from seventeen different angles.
But let's face the facts-in many places other than America and Europe-this may be the biggest example yet of profligate waste and arrogant expense. One tribe saunters along through 27,000-degree heat under a desert sun on top of a thirsty camel in search of moisture and food while down in Daytona Beach well-fed white hillbilly guys with leather jumpsuits on ride multicolored road rockets 500 miles to nowhere.
Tennis, anyone?
How about golf?
REHAB
They've never even heard of it.
Until rich white American celebrities started "entering" it.
They drink red wine with lunch and dinner and live to be one hundred and sixteen years old.
We have celebutards who can't make it past age nineteen without downing eleven-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne and vodka while blowing eight balls up one orifice and sucking weed and x through another.
Been drinking without wearing panties for six to eight months?
Rehab.
Image declining because of late-night drunk-driving arrests and numerous public pukefests?
Rehab.
Wanna kick that nasty heroin/cocaine habit and get back in the good graces of the studio execs who won't hire you for that next big movie or TV show?
Rehab.
Why-we can even cure your homosexuality. Ted Haggard did three weeks in a rehab center and came out claiming he was back in love with women.
What a deal. Go gay for as many years as you like-hell, throw in an addiction to methamphetamines-and whenever you feel the need (or you get outed in the press by a male hooker/drug dealer, whichever comes first), get back in the good graces of the public AND your wife by spending three weeks in a glorified spa and pop out the other side drug free and no longer desiring anal sex with men.
Talk about worth the price of admission.
And then-once again-there's Britney. She did one day in Eric Clap-ton's Crossroads rehab facility and then checked out. A week later she did a day at Promises in Malibu before checking out. Then she checked into a third rehab joint about a week later. She was a little confused at first, apparently she thought "one day at a time" was meant to be taken literally. Thirty days in thirty different rehab centers in thirty different cities. Hey-she spent most of her life on tour, so can you really blame her?
ICE CREAM
You scream I scream we all scream.
Yup. One of the first food items welcomed back onto the streets of Afghanistan after the fall of Osama et al. was-you guessed it-ice cream.
Even terrorists love it.
And we have the best.
Hands down.
Hence-one very simple reason for them to hate us even more.
Hдagen-Dazs.
Ben and Jerry's.
Maybe that's the key to peace on earth.
Instead of dropping bombs we drop half pints of Chunky Monkey and Cherry Garcia and good old just plain chocolate.
Somebody get the Dove Bar people on the phone.
ANGELINA JOLIE
Okay. It's not just Angelina.
It's Angelina and Madonna and Rosie and Meg Ryan and whoever else in the female acting world fits the following requirements:
Fame
Cash
Raging hormones
A private jet
That's it. That's all you need. Those four simple items will allow you to fly into any Third World country and scoop up a black or brown or yellow baby, sign a couple of autographs and then head on home.
Where you can name the kid according to whatever whim strikes you. No need to adhere to the kid's actual ethnic or national background.
Chinese boy? Name him Johnny Boy.
African girl? Name her Ellen.
Totally up to you.
Now I have a cousin who adopted a Chinese kid years ago and named her Colleen. Which is well within her rights as the adoptive mom. But she wasn't famous or rich and didn't have a private plane so it took her THREE GODDAM YEARS to pull the whole thing off.
And why is it always white actresses flying in and scooping up?
Oprah flew into Africa in a private plane-with cash and fame and more than likely a SHITLOAD of raging hormones-and she started a school for African kids.
Why aren't black actresses flying into piss-poor white countries and nabbing parentless little pink children and jetting them back to the Hollywood Hills?
Grab a so-white-he's-almost-transparent white boy out of the Belfast slums of Northern Ireland, jet him off to a mansion in Bel Air and call him Jamal. Or Kaleel.
Never happen.
And you wanna know why?
'Cause caustic see-thru white kids with new names don't make for good press.
OR fashionable appearances.
I think a lot of these kids are like Gucci purses or Jimmy Choo shoes-not only are they cutting-edge accessories.
They're on sale.
THE WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB DOG SHOW
We've already discussed what most of our household pets are considered in other countries.
Throw in a full week's worth of dogs that have personal groomers and personal trainers and individual walkers and their own hotel rooms?
Death on a leash to a terrorist.
DR. LAURA AND MIKE AND MIKE IN THE MORNING
I like Dr. Laura.
I really do.
Besides the dirty pictures she took when she was young and foolish (and let's face the fact-weren't we all) in which she is actually very hot, she has grown up to piss people off. And by people I mean the morons with cell phone service who call up to complain about how their mom won't listen or their boyfriend doesn't wanna have sex anymore or their husbands want dinner on the table at such and such a time and her in a pink thong and high heels and they feel like they are not appreciated and blah blah blah and Dr. Laura comes thisclose to calling each one of them a whiny, self-obsessed, deaf and dumbass bitch. Over and over again. Which is what I wanna say when I listen to them. I love Mike and Mike in the Morning as well-when it's just the two of them OR the two of them and a sports expert discussing sports. Once they get into the cell phone calls from ingrate assholes on their way to work but unable to make it there without wondering how the Yankee pitching staff or the Islanders' goaltending or Eli Manning's left hamstring is gonna work out-I wanna grab a gun and take no hostages. This is a running, screaming, constant commentary on why we need to thin the herd on our own before the terrorists do it for us. Let's make it this easy-if you feel the urge to call Dr. Laura and ask whether you should stay in your current relationship even though your boyfriend has told you he doesn't love you and he's moving out and you weigh too much and he's banging your sister AND your best friend-and Dr. Laura tells you to get out now and you still don't wanna go? Save us all the trouble and swallow four bottles of aspirin. Better yet-make that sleeping pills. Maybe she'll even send you the prescription for them. If you really really actually for certain no bullshit now I'm serious here cannot drive to work without finding out what an ex-lineman and a nerdy little Jewish guy think about Brett Favre's ballsack? Drive off the highway and into a lake. Now. Otherwise we may have to place a suitcase bomb in your garage long before an angry Muslim fundamentalist does.
ME
What terrorists and communists and dictators hate most of all is guys like me. Guys who make a living writing the kind of stuff you are reading right now. Humor, comedy, satire-these are the first things to go out the window in any society ruled by an iron fist or organized religion. Remember the uproar in Muslim countries over political cartoons lampooning the prophet Mohammad a couple of years back? Their first response was, of course, abrupt and absolute violence and when that was ridiculed they decided to publish their own Hitler and Bush Jr. cartoons. Which, of course, weren't funny.
In America, you have the freedom to say/paint/sing/dance or film whatever you want, and within your chosen medium you can satirize/ denigrate/lampoon/cajole or blister any place, person or thing. Except Jesus.
Oh boy-stay away from Jesus.
I still remember years ago when Rudolph Giuliani was mayor of New York, an up-and-coming painter no one had ever heard of had a showing at a gallery in the city that included a piece in which the Virgin Mother was either urinating on Jesus or vice versa. I can't remember-which probably shows just how lapsed a Lapsed Catholic I truly am. Giuliani held a press conference and announced that such a piece of so-called art would never be displayed while he was the boss of the Big Apple. Much press coverage and many lawsuits ensued. Giuliani's approval rating shot through the roof. The Catholic Church went crazy. And considering how crazy the Catholic Church is to begin with-well-nuff said. I love an organization that says you can't paint an abstract portrait of Jesus or His Mom because that would be sacrilegious but hey-if you happen to see the face of Our Lord The Saviour or His Mom in a grilled cheese sandwich or in a bunch of random wood knots on a bathroom door or even in the wet birdshit-ridden bark of a public golf course maple tree-it's a miracle!
Call CNN! See if we can get Anderson Cooper down here-even though he's gay and we believe Jesus hates him!
I met Jesus once at a party in Boston sometime during the summer of 1985. He slipped out of a cloud of smoke in the living room-full beard, long hair, flannel shirt, scabby hands, the whole nine yards (I figured the flannel shirt was his way of fitting in a little). He walked up to me and said "Hey-they orderin' pizza or what?" I was so stunned, I didn't have the chance to tell him I think so but lemme ask you about the whole hell-fire and damnation thing and whether The Clash will get back together or not because he kinda snarled at my silence and disappeared back into the crowd. My first reaction was shit-he better not hit on Ann (then my girlfriend and now my wife. By the way-I trust my wife now and I trusted her even then but, c'mon-we're talking about the Son Of God here. Even though she hates beards-who knows what tricks he has up his Holy Sleeve). Later when the pizza came I saw Jesus grabbing a slice and heard someone call him Doug and realized that in fact he wasn't the Messiah but a stonemason cousin of the guy throwing the party AND I'd had about seventeen beers and eight shots of Jameson's. So there ya go. Ya see what ya wanna see.
I was raised under the thumb of organized religion-I did twelve years in a Catholic school. The beauty of it was, the nuns and the priests and the monsignors and the bishops pretty much forbade laughter in the classroom and the hallways and in the church itself and all that led to was us laughing and giggling. When they published the list of banned books and records and movies in the church newsletter every Sunday, guess which books and records and movies we immediately sought out.
So-talk about simple math-because of Giuliani's public outrage and the front cover stories in the New York Post and the fact that it takes weeks to get the legal system lined up-the painter's little-known show became a sold-out sensation. Yup-it was good old-fashioned American-style capitalism gone wild. No one talked about whether the art was good or bad or even worthy of an admission price. It was all about the Benjamins and that most basic of human itches-curiosity. Not to mention that the people who were the most outraged by the moral fecundity of the art-a guy who was probably already in the process of cheating on his second wife and a church built on the concrete foundation of hiding and transporting pedophiles-were both standing on very soft and unstable moral ground. But he got the attention every politician craves and they-more than likely-saw a spike in the green cabbage their dedicated Sunday churchgoers drop into the basket each week. It was a win / win situation for the mayor AND the pope. Meanwhile-I got a five-minute routine out of it that I performed onstage and as a guest on David Letterman and Jay Leno. See? What a great system.
Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.
Every single album and DVD and television special and book-most likely including this one-that I have ever put on public sale has been banned or scorned or both by the Catholic Church. And-in the nineties-by Tipper Gore. She made them put an explicit lyrics/language sticker on my CDs and DVDs. Guess what happened? The sales quadrupled. So here's to hoping that-as you read this-the Catholic Church is warning teenagers and kids everywhere NOT to read Why We Suck. And just in case they are somehow not offended by and/or banning it yet-let me make sure they do. Sorry. This'll just take a couple of lines here: