I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (4 page)

“Did you see what happened to Earl? Earl got his ass
whupped
.”

“Well, it’s about time!”

The vast majority of the world is
happy
to see us get it.
We’re the asshole who finally got what he deserved
. We don’t get that, but that’s just how it works. We would rather be feared than respected. We can’t brag about being the world’s superpower—and then complain about having our nose in everyone’s business. We’re the muscle, not
the brains. We’ve declared it explicitly and implicitly, constantly and repeatedly. Barack Obama wasn’t regarded as a strong leader until he killed a man, namely Osama bin Laden—a man “on the run” who still managed to have a better housing situation than most Americans. Every American leader is determined to show that we’re strong and that we’re going to whup some ass. In the Middle East, for example, it’s always, “We have to show our strength.”

But if you keep looking for a fight, eventually you’re going to get one.

Other countries have been down this road before, and we can learn from their mistakes. At different points, Germany and Japan were the nations who wanted to be the baddest people in the world. The Germans were so certain that they could beat the world that they tried it
twice
. The Japanese genuinely thought that they were a superior race. They believed America was soft and that we could be taken. They hit
us
first.

But now Germany and Japan are part of the G8, aren’t they? They let go of the idea of having to be a military power, and instead they became economic and intellectual powers. They do a lot of things we don’t, like having universal health care and investing heavily in education. I don’t need to explain how well that’s worked out for them. We all know where Japan lies on the curve. Germany outranks us in virtually every reliable skill except for the military. Those nations own a great deal of America. As does Russia. As does China. All these nations that are supposedly “worse” than us are doing all right. Would it be so bad to take a page from their book? Let’s be Europe for a while. Let’s act like Japan.

Damn, I think I’m turning Japanese. I really think so.

It will be very hard for us to change our ways for the better. The only way we can change is if we admit that what has worked for
us in the
past
isn’t working for us in the
present
. The last vestige, the last thing to die, is the idea people have of themselves. It’s true when it comes to athletes, and it’s true when it comes to nations. As hard as checking ourselves may sound, the alternative is much harder.

Germany and Japan didn’t wake up one day and decide to stop their military ambitions and educate their people. Far from it! A country couldn’t have been more violent than Japan and Germany. Japan is a nation only about the size of California. How bad do you have to be to come from a country that small and then try to run the world? They were not big dudes, but they had some big ideas. Yet they weren’t beaten by bigger
ideas
. What fixed Germany and Japan’s perspectives was some good old-fashioned ass-whuppings. A bunch of people died, they were humiliated, and they said, “You know what? Fuck this shit! It ain’t working for us!” Violence ain’t so great when it’s being done to you. When you get your ass whupped, you start to change your perspective. So do
we
have to go to that level before
we
get it? I sure hope not.

The other countries in the G8 got their asses whupped already. They had the idea of who they were beaten out of them. They
know
what it’s like to not win. They had to either perish or become something else. They evolved into more genteel, humane, sophisticated, cohesive societies—even bloodred China is quietly making reforms in that direction. But let’s look at the example of Japan again. The denim we wear, the most American of fabrics, is Japanese. We don’t even own the mills anymore; they do. They exert major control over our banking system. They buy all the jazz albums, all the hip-hop albums. American musicians can’t
wait
to tour Japan, because that’s where they make the most money. The Japanese are the same people they used to be—only they went up the chain
mentally
.

Americans are also the same people we used to be—only we went the other way. All this time we messed around building up our muscle while our minds got duller and duller. We were the first nation to put men on the moon. We remain the
only
nation to put men on the moon. Now we don’t even want to go into space. We canceled the program and said we’d rather hitch a ride with the Russians. I’m not going to ride with a Russian to Brooklyn, and NASA is going to go into outer space with them? Are they crazy? Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his sarcophagus.

Our delusional self-image prevents us from even considering certain solutions to our issues because they’re “beneath” us, as if there’s anything below rock bottom. I know a little something about hustling. Two years ago, I discovered that my credit rating had dropped. I had no idea why. I knew that I’d always kept up with my bills. When I called Ma Bell, they told me that I had an outstanding phone bill in the amount of $972. “I’ve
never
been late on my phone bill,” I told the service rep. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Do you live at 539 Lysander Street?” she asked me.

Right away I knew what had happened. 539 Lysander was my mother’s address, the house I had grown up in. My mother had put the phone in my name when I was six years old. For the last couple of months, she hadn’t paid—and it went into collections. The phone company had looked at the records. They
knew
that I was only six when I got that phone in my name. Decades later, they could pin it on me without any qualms whatsoever.

I doubt my mother had even asked me, as if a six-year-old would have insight anyway. But we needed a phone in the house, and that was that. In times of economic crisis, people tend to look to the powerful to figure out what to do. After all, they’re used to handling
large amounts of money. But the elites aren’t the ones who have to figure out where to get their next meal from. They’re not the ones who are struggling with surviving day to day. So who is
really
smart when it comes to handling economic adversity? Is it the wealthy—or is it the poor?

No one is coming to bail out Bushwick, Compton, or Newark. When you grow up in a place like that, you do what you need to do to survive. You know the safety net is very frayed—if it exists at all. There’s nothing proud about starving, and there’s no shame in gaming the system if you aren’t hurting anybody.

I was watching the news recently, and the percentage of Americans who are collecting unemployment insurance was almost 16 percent. But if you combine that with the people who have stopped looking for work, the actual number of unemployed people was over 30 percent. Those people haven’t stopped eating. They haven’t stopped getting shoes and buying gas. So they sell weed. They turn a trick or two. They hook this dude up with that dude, and they take a cut. Instead of working, they hustle. They stop messing around in the streets and they get down to business.

America needs to do more shit like that. Let’s put our phone bills in Mexico’s name. We can open an unregistered day-care center, babysit some kids, and keep it off the books. Got a job? Make them pay you in cash. You can get an EBT card and sell it, like some dope dealers I know. ODB managed to be on welfare until he was dumb enough to show it off on MTV. If any man has to choose between some Chinese bankers he has never seen and feeding his family, his family will win every single time. Our politicians argue that we have to pay off the national debt immediately—when people are broke. But that debt is like the small print on the loan application. Would you rather Bank of America be mad at you, or your kids starve? I
hear conservatives use these credit-card analogies for rednecks who don’t understand that the national debt is not the same as personal debt. How the fuck are you worried about the Fed owing money when you live in a trailer park?

America
has
hustled in the past when things got tough. For years and years, gambling was a complete taboo. Liquor was regarded as such a vice that the Constitution itself was amended to prohibit its sale. These positions weren’t reversed because people thought that drinking and gambling were now
good
things. Those weren’t benevolent moves. People were broke and they needed jobs! We let go of our idea that we were a sober country that doesn’t play cards. What must have seemed like a shocking legalization of sin at the time is met with shrugs today. It all reconciled pretty well with who we are.

Corporations hustle
all the time
. Lobbying is straight hustling. When GE or whoever gets their people to write the tax code with loopholes big enough to drive a Buick through, that’s a hustle. It might be perpetrated by Harvard-educated lawyers in expensive suits and perfect ties, but the mentality of gaming the system is exactly the same.

The easiest hustle we can pull nowadays is the legalization of marijuana. Legalizing pot would mean
instant
revenue. It’s not like pot farms don’t already exist. It’s called weed because the stuff is so goddamn easy to grow! We grow
a lot
of it. It’s the biggest cash crop in America today. We grow
$35 billion
worth of the stuff every year. That’s more than corn, more than beans, more than anything else. If it’s not fair that huge corporations pay zero dollars in taxes, how absurd is it that we’re not taxing the biggest crop in America?

That’s just on the revenue side. Savings would also come from a decrease in spending. In Orange County alone, they spend a billion dollars in legal fees, prosecution, and containment simply on
marijuana cases. That’s just the court. That’s not counting police man-hours, and that’s not counting the investigations. The prisoners cost money too. They get housing, they get food, and they get $1,800 worth of medical care every year. Imagine how much more effective the police would be if they weren’t worried about some dude selling weed.

But no one wants to think in these terms, because of our self-image. The biggest idea we have to give up is that we’re a hardworking people. That reputation hasn’t been warranted for a very long time—but it
was
warranted decades ago. We only became a hardworking nation because we came from immigrants. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, America completely reinvented itself after beating the shit out of ourselves in the Civil War. The slaves had just been freed and the Great Migration began. People came from all over the world with their ideas about what they wanted to do. They came from Ireland and they came from China and they came from Eastern Europe. They all arrived with their ideas to make this country great and turned away from the bullshit that they had seen back home. “Fuck this,” they said. “There’s got to be a better way.”

It was a certain kind of person who came here. If you were rich, you weren’t going to get on a boat and cross an ocean to a country that had
nothing
. Whether you were a domestic slave who had been freed or you were from the slums of Europe, everybody that came here was a “nigger” where they were from. They left
everything
they had before and appreciated what they had here. The American experience
had to
work for them. We were plan B—
and there was no plan C
. This was it!
That’s
why America was so tough. They came
here, to Irishtown and Chinatown and Little Italy, and they got their first taste of freedom.

We became a
great
country with this huge influx of immigrants. The American character had to get cut with something instead of being that unadulterated colonial Puritan
bullshit
. Before the immigrants, we were just racist rednecks and white landowners. After the immigrants came, we were amazing. We became hybrids! You can see the same phenomenon happen even today, if you ever see someone who is racially mixed. They’re just
prettier
, because they’re the best of two things.

The two world wars came when all those immigrants had just about had enough. Before the world wars, people weren’t scared of us. It wasn’t until the many became one that America turned into a global force to be reckoned with. Take one of the many examples out of the conflict: World War II was the first time that black people were allowed to fly. At first, white people hated them. The Tuskegee Airmen had no support—but they had a lot to prove. That’s why the whole time they were commissioned, they never lost a plane. Their record of protection was so great that the white pilots started going, “Gimme the coloreds.” During this whole era, the one thing that held this nation together was that we were broke motherfuckers who weren’t taking any shit. Back any dude who has just tasted freedom into a corner and see what happens next. Spoiler alert: It will not end well for you.

All those immigrants had
pride
in what they did. Wearing a uniform and putting in a hard day’s work at the factory meant something to them. Even when the Great Depression hit, many men were too proud to accept “handouts” in an economy collapsing through no fault of their own. Everyone likes to think that America is as proud as ever. But is it? Or is pride the exception? Take a look at
photographs of people shopping at Woolworth’s back in the day. Now compare them to people at Walmart. Are they from the same country? Are they even from the same
species
? Our leaders are only as good as our people.