I Drink for a Reason (23 page)

Okay, Larry the Cable Guy, I will ignore the irony of a big ole Southern redneck character actually using “inbred” as an insult,
as well as the fact that a shekel is currency from Israel, the towel heads’ sworn enemy. But at least you’re passionate about
what you see as inhumane injustice (not on a global level, of course, but on a national level) and the simple black and white
of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s kinda like you’re this guy who speaks for all these poor, unfortunate souls out there
who wear shirts with blue collars on them, work hard all day to put food on the table for their family (unlike people who
wear shirts with white collars or wear scrubs or T-shirts or dresses or costumes that consist of flannel shirts with the sleeves
cut off and old trucker hats), and pray to the American Flag of Jesus to protect them from the evils of Muslims, queers, illegal
immigrants, and the liberal Jews who run Hollywood and the media. I guess one could say that you’re “telling it like it is.”
And considering the vast amount of oversimplification you employ to describe with sweeping generalizations all of America
and the world that “don’t make no sense to you,” as well as your lack of sensitivity and second-grade grammar, one might be
led to think that you are somewhat proud of not appearing (or being) too intellectual. Combine that with your sucker appeal
to the knee-jerk white Christian patriot in us all who would much rather hear 87 fart jokes than hear a joke in which the
president (the current one, not the last one), or the pope, or Born-Again Christians, or Lee Greenwood get called on their
shit for being the hypocrites that they are, and I think we’ve got a winner!

As for being a multimillionaire in disguise, that’s just merely a matter of personal taste for me. I do not begrudge you your
money at all; it is sincerely hard earned, and you deserve whatever people want to give to you. What sticks in my craw about
that stuff is the blatant and (again, personal taste) gross marketing and selling of this bullshit character to your beloved
fans. Now look, if someone wants to pay top dollar to come to one of your shows and then drop a couple hundred more on “Git-R-Done”
lighters and hats and T-shirts and windshield stickers and trailer hitches and beer koozies and fishing hats and shot glasses
etc., then good for you. I just think it’s a little crass and belies the “good ole boy” blue collar thing you represent. But
that’s no big deal.

Now, as for the last statement that “We’re in a state of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride.” Well, I think
that’s true. When you can rally the troops (so to speak) with a lazy, “latte drinking, tofu eating” generalization of liberals
and “black ass rag fags” to describe Arabs, then, yeah, I think that falls in the “ignorant” category. I think that with even
the slightest attention to the double standard and hypocrisy of both the Left and the Right in this country (if not all of
the Christian Extremists as a whole) coupled with the bullshit they lazily swallow and parrot back while happily ignoring
the gross inhumane treatment of those that aren’t them so that we may have cheap sneakers and oil and slightly less taxes
(although I’m sure the bracket you’re in now gives you a ton of tax money back), then you could maybe see my point.

Now here’s the best part—in your book you preface the above quote by saying, “but I guess I’m not as intellectual as David
Cross. In that
Rolling Stone
article, he sure showed us what a deep thinker he is by sayin’ ‘America is in a stage of vague intellectual pride.’” Jesus
Christ, can you even fucking read?! Whoever read that article to you butchered the actual quote. The quote that was right
fucking in front of their face! I would fire your official reader and have them replaced with a Hooters Girl who doesn’t fart.
That way you have something nice to look at while you are getting your misinformation.

As for “anti-intellectual pride,” that is Larry the Cable Guy in spades. Let me quote you again (from an online interview):
“I consider my jokes to be very jeuvinille [
sic
]. Stuff a 14 year old would laugh at because that’s the sence [
sic
] of humor I have.” Hmmm, okay. That was easy. Well, I suppose I’ve already covered part of that in the above. But you also
specifically dumb down your speech while making hundreds of purposefully grammatical errors. How do I know this? It’s on page
17 of your book, wherein you describe how you would “Larry” up your commentaries for radio.

What does it mean to “Larry” something up? Take a wild guess. The reason you feel the need to “Larry” something up? Because
you are not that dumb. I mean you, Dan Whitney, the guy whose name the bank account is under. You were born and raised in
Nebraska (hardly the South), went to private school, and moved to Florida when you were 16. This is when you developed your
accent?! Not exactly the developmental years, are they? At age 16 that’s the kind of thing you have to make a concerted effort
to adopt. Did you hire a voice coach? Or were you like one of those people who go to England for a week and come back sounding
like an extra from
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
? As you said yourself in an interview once, “I can pop in and out of it pretty much whenever I want.” In your book on page
89 you say in reference to the “gee-shucks” millionaire comment, “see, to his [David’s] mind, bein’ well paid means I’m no
longer real and I can’t be a country boy anymore. It’s just an act.” Hey, it’s always been an act!

That’s my fucking point! You admit it yourself, so cut the indignation shit. And I am in no way deriding your work ethic.
You clearly have more fart jokes than most, and for that I applaud you. You go on to talk about how hard you work and life
on the road and living on Waffle House and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I get it, we’ve all been there and played shitty, degrading
gigs and sacrificed etc. etc. Then you say, “This [the personal attack] was different because David basically hammered my
fans in that
RS
article by implying that they were ignorant. He crossed the line when he railed against them, so I had to tell ya what I
felt about that. He can hammer me all he wants, but when he screwed with my fans, it was time for me to say something.”

Aww, that’s so sweet and egregious. I can’t stand that fan ass-kissing bullshit. You and Dane Cook ought to get together and
have a “my-fans-are-the-greatest-people-on-earth-and-that’s-why-I-do-this” off. You could both sell a shitload of merch, too.
But having said that, I would truly love to get some of your fans and my fans in a room together to debate some of the finer
points on comedy, music, culture, the issues facing our country today, and just about anything else we might find worthy of
discussion. My fans are pretty smart as well. They are also, I imagine, as “hardworking” as your fans. Not all of them, of
course, but most. And I’m sure that they may come up with some genuinely interesting, insightful points (and would do so without
spouting a bunch of meaningless Christian platitudes). And if you really, truly want to respect your fans, lower your ticket
price as well as the price of your ubiquitous merchandise. I’m sure all those hardworking Americans could use the extra money
now that the budgets are being cut drastically from Transportation, Education, Health and Human Services, HUD, Dept. of the
Interior, EPA, Farm Service Agency, FEMA, Agricultural, FDA, VA, FHA, National Center for Environmental Health, and numerous
other departments and agencies that they might directly rely on for help. All so that we can pay off this massive tax cut
during “war” time that we’re all getting (them not so much, though). Oh, well. That’s just one of those “political” things
that I think about occasionally.

Anyway, I just wanted to address the stuff you wrote about me and clear some things up. Mostly the air around here… I just
farted!!!!!

Think-of-Something-to-Do-and-See-That-Task-to-Completion!!!!!

Fart,

David Cross

P
UT DOWN YOUR TUBE OF
B
ED
H
EAD AND THINK ABOUT IT FOR
just five seconds. How many people throughout history can you consider true “heroes”? One hundred? A thousand? Wrong. Science
has proven that there have been literally millions of heroes throughout time and space. But of course the concept of what
is heroic depends completely on the worshippers’ values. To many, Martin Luther was a hero, as was Martin Luther King. But
to others the guy who shot Martin Luther King was a hero. And then to even others the guy who shot
Martin Luther King—The Movie
or the guy who designed the Martin Luther King ride out at Six Flags Over a State are heroes. I could go on and on if my
editors weren’t such unfunny pricks. My point being that, one man’s hero is another man’s sworn and bitter enemy.

It was many a warm summer’s night that found Mother and I listing gently on the veranda, leisurely sipping on gin and biscuits
and debating who was the truer hero, a real retarded manboy or Cuba Gooding Jr. as “Radio,” the fake retarded manboy. We never
came to any satisfying answer, and we’ll just have to wait and see what the Academy thinks come Oscar time. But the “hero”
debate continues to rage across this vast and innocent land of ours, stretching into the sea and back. Will we ever lay down
our arms and see eye to eye? No, not as long as there is some lonely, overweight woman down in the basement heading up the
Accounts Receivable office blubbering on and on about how Laci Peterson is a true American hero. But we can at least agree
to severely narrow down the criteria for being a hero.

Four categories have to be quickly and violently tossed out before we can go any further: rich and pretty and fuckers and
athletes. Nobody should make it onto the hero list solely by virtue of the fact that they are rich. This means that anyone
who has ever said or even thought to himself, “Dude, that guy who came up with the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ series is my hero. He’s
got his own helicopter and he gets to see drunk tits all the time!” cannot participate in this discussion that is not really
a discussion.

Nor does being pretty make you a hero. What kind of pathetic loser thinks of a supermodel as qualifying for hero worship?
Answer: either monumentally ugly people or other very attractive people, that’s it. It is absolutely the least deserving of
all the hero factors. Also people who manage to have sex do not deserve the mantle of hero. (Unless you live in a car and
smell like the third day of the Burning Man festival yet still managed to fuck all of The Donnas, in which case you actually
are a hero, and I raise a Coors Light to you). And last, anybody who excels in sports. There is not now, nor will there ever
be, a “hero of the gridiron.” Nobody in his or her right mind should give a fuck about some well-padded millionaire with the
reading level of a twelve-year-old home-schooled by Kip Winger, just because he tackled another well-padded millionaire.

So agreed, they are all out. Especially if you consider the billions of people who have quietly, with no expectations of earthly
or heavenly glory, sacrificed their lives for others. Whether the sacrifice was literally their life or just a given life
of leisure, these are the only people who should be considered heroes. I don’t have any illusions that I will ever be even
remotely like that kind of person. Selfishness, and a love of fine champagne and diamonds, combined with an ability to both
ignore all the suffering that goes on around me and the talent to delude myself into thinking that when I do take some miniscule
“action” that it actually makes some difference, ensure a life free of heroism. Jealous yet?

Yeah, it’s time to retire the word
hero
outside of the aforementioned use. Let’s save it for the truly self-sacrificing. Firemen? Heroes. Lenny Bruce? Not a hero.
An important, groundbreaking cultural icon to be sure, but hero? Nope, too egotistical. Joan of Arc? Hero. Joan Jett? No.
In fact, there is only one artist that can be considered a true hero, and that is Whoopie Goldberg. No, of course not. When
thinking of Whoopie Goldberg as your hero, please, stop to think of criminally underappreciated Glenn Hoffstetler—that fucker
ate seven (!) hits of acid and had forgotten that his parents were flying in that day from a long trip to Africa and he was
supposed to go pick them up at San Francisco Airport. And he fucking did it! Now there’s someone deserving of fame, fortune,
and parades.

E
VERY ONCE IN A WHILE YOU SEE OR EXPERIENCE SOMETHING THAT
jolts you from your narcoleptic existence of useless pleasures and missed opportunities. And you are simultaneously reminded
of both what can be and also of just how lame we are as a people, as a culture. Maybe it’s an “art car,” where someone has
done something like nailed a couple hundred bloody Barbie heads all over it (I’m not saying that it has to be particularly
clever, just interesting) or you see some lady wearing a dress made up entirely of “Have You Seen Me?” missing-kid things
from the back of milk cartons. You see that, and you’re reminded, “Oh… right, that’s possible. ” And I don’t mean in an “Oh
yeah, I guess there could be black Chinese people, I never thought of that” way. More like, “Oh, that’s right, you can do
that… I forgot.”

And that is very telling about just how boring we are. It takes some fucking dipshit dressed in a beekeeper’s outfit gluing
used tampons all over his car to make us realize that
our
cars are boring. Ask yourself, “Why should I not paint my car? What’s so great about maroon, and only maroon? What am I afraid
will happen? Will people not like me anymore? Will they think I’m some kind of lunatic? Will I be forcibly hospitalized? Will
police arrest me? Will I never get laid again?” Well, I’ll tell you what. Next time you see something like that, check out
little kids’ reactions to it. They fucking freak out. They start a contemplative journey that, if they’re not excessively
Christian and thus too far gone, can only end one way.