I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (5 page)

I’ve seen how businesses handle pride from both sides. One recent Saturday night, I had a performance in San Francisco. The showtime was technically 8:00, but since I had an opening act I didn’t have to get there until 8:45. I went with a couple of my friends to a restaurant called Farallon. We arrived at 6:45, which would give us plenty of time to enjoy our meal before I had to go on stage.

They served us the bread, and they served us the salad. I got my Dungeness crab appetizer, and I had my roasted tomato soup. They were spectacular. But by 8:20, we hadn’t gotten our meals yet. I called over our waiter, knowing I had to leave. “Box up our orders,” I told him. “We’re getting ready to go.”

Immediately
, the manager came over. “Was everything to your liking?”

It’s not like I was irritated and had been complaining. “Everything was
excellent
,” I told the dude. “I just have a show, and I gotta go.”

“I’m not going to ask you to pay for this,” he said to me.

“I can’t do that,” I said. Between the food and wine, I knew that the bill had to be over five hundred dollars.

“No,” he insisted, “we didn’t get your food to you. We don’t want you walking out with bags of our food when you didn’t get a chance to enjoy your meal.”

Next, the
chef
came out of the kitchen and apologized.

Even the owner of the restaurant, who was having dinner in a
booth by us, came over and apologized. Then they gave me the box of food to take with me for
free
.

The next night, I went back to Farallon—and this time I paid. Every time I go to San Francisco, I go back there because they had such pride in their product and their service. American service used to be head and shoulders above everybody else’s, and the customer was always right. Even motherfucking Domino’s Pizza used to promise they could get you their “food” in thirty minutes or less.

I told my friend this story and he just rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but you’re a celebrity. Of course they treated you well.” He exactly proved my point: It was such an aberration that a person gets exemplary service, even at a top-class restaurant, that there must be some other explanation. That kind of thing might happen to you if you’re known, but the Average Joe is SOL.

My friend was right in one sense: Nowadays, nobody promises you
shit
. A month after I was in San Francisco, I took a Delta Airlines flight to Chattanooga. It was a small commuter plane, with gateside bag check. I gave my bag to the guy at the base of the plane just like I was supposed to. When they gave it back to me, I saw that my wheel had been bent off. I went to complain about the damage to the customer-service desk.

The lady listened to what had happened, glanced at my bag, and then waved her hand at me to dismiss me. “We don’t fix wheels,” she said.

“Can you find someplace that’ll fix my bag and have it fixed for me, so I don’t have to buy another one?”

“We don’t do that.”

There was no apology. There was no sense of guilt or embarrassment that they had damaged someone else’s property. She could
have said, “We normally don’t do this, but we’re going to just accommodate you.” Instead, she treated me like I was annoying her about some trifling nonsense that didn’t matter.

I gave the woman my frequent-flyer number so she could look up how often I flew Delta. “Let me tell you something,” I said. “I’ve flown three million miles with this airline. Three
million
. Do you know why I am going to
stop
flying this airline? Because of that wheel that you broke.”

Now it became about the principle. Not only was the customer not always
right
, they were acting like the corporation was never
wrong
. I spent an hour and a half arguing at that desk. They broke it, but they sure as hell weren’t going to buy it.

Finally, the customer-service lady buckled. “We’ll give you a three-hundred-dollar voucher to fly on this airline in the future.”

“Why would I take a ticket?” I asked her. “Your reward to me is to fly on the very airlines that I fucking hate?”

She’d had enough. She went and got her supervisor—which she could have done ninety minutes earlier. The supervisor came out with a big checkbook. “We don’t normally do this,” he told me, “but here’s a check for your trouble.”

I guarantee, getting that bag fixed themselves would have cost them less than three hundred dollars. I also guarantee that taking five minutes to take care of a problem would have felt a lot better and been a lot less stressful than spending an hour and a half arguing with a pissed-off D. L. Hughley. But people don’t think like that anymore. They just shrug their shoulders and say that it’s not their problem.

When was the last time customer service felt like actual
service
, instead of an imposition? Half the time when you call for help, you literally have to sit through an automated message and press the
right buttons. What kind of “servant” won’t even take your calls? A person won’t take your calls if they’re more important than you, not if they’re trying to help you! The computerized voice will do everything in its power to keep you from speaking to an actual person. That robot on the other end of the line doesn’t want to help you. It doesn’t actually
want
anything!

When was the last time an American corporation bragged about the quality of its product? No, the commercials always talk about how it’s cheap, it’s fun, and you can have a lot of it. That sounds a lot like taking a big shit, don’t it? Ford had ads that said, “Quality Is Job 1.” But that was over twenty-five years ago. It’s gone from being an American motto to being the answer to a trivia question.

They always say that pride goeth before a fall. Well, America’s already had its fall. Maybe it’s time for some of that pride to come back. That would require men and women of leadership and courage to come forward and turn this fucker around. But
there are no incentives for extraordinary men to come forward
. Bill Gates is an extraordinary man. Steve Jobs was an amazing person. Traditionally, those are the types of men who would be up there with the Rockefellers. They would be running the country, whether politically or socially. They would have a sense of civic duty to not only make money but to make this country better and to give it the benefit of all they know. You don’t have to deny Andrew Carnegie’s evils when you recognize the good he did in his later years. The founding fathers stepped into their roles because they were the outstanding citizens of their time, not because they were politicians. Our leaders are just not extraordinary today, and that extrapolates out to
everything
.

What would happen to an extraordinary man who stepped forward to lead America? Would he be treated with respect and
dignity? Would people come together to forge a way forward? We don’t need to argue these issues as hypotheticals. It’s playing out right now in full public view. All we need to do is look at Barack Obama—the man who embodied the American dream—and the reaction to his presidency.

T
HERE’S
a profound difference between
disagreement
and
disrespect
. I respect a lot of people I disagree with, and I have no respect for many people who happen to share my views. Not everyone who cares about the environment, for example, cares about humans as passionately—and sometimes they’re just dicks.

Let me refresh everyone’s memory about how Senator Obama became President Obama. To even get the Democratic nomination, he had to take down the Clinton political machine. The Clintons
had been working behind the scenes for over a
decade
to get Hillary into the White House. No one can claim that Obama got the nomination through chicanery or playing dirty. He beat her fair and square. In doing so, he achieved a goal that the Republicans were desperately trying to achieve for sixteen years:
He got Hillary Clinton to shut the fuck up
.

After he got the nomination, Obama didn’t get elected by scaring the country. He didn’t claim that a vote for McCain is a vote for another 9/11, and he didn’t attack McCain personally or attack his character. Every time Obama would say something or answer a question, people would go look at his books or go to his website. He created a perception that he could actually do things. This dude talked the country into voting for him based on the fact that he was going to go to Washington and change shit. He really told the country that although he may not have had any experience, he had this hope and this magic, and the country believed him. Did the Republicans regard him as a breath of fresh air, an opportunity to put partisanship in the past and to work together? Did they take it as an opportunity to disavow the wildly unpopular Bush years—or did the GOP immediately start plotting how to take the motherfucker down?

I don’t need to catalog what a shambles President Bush left this country in, both domestically and abroad. Let me point out the abysmal level of
sophistication
that Barack Obama was replacing. Like every other frat-boy drunk, President Bush loved his fart jokes. What he especially loved was to meet idealistic young aides, then fart like mad and stink up the place. Bush found it hysterical to watch their faces, trying to maintain composure and give the presidency the respect it deserved. Bush’s staff even had a name for it: the Austin greeting.
That’s
who Obama should be measured against.

White people thought Obama was going to be charming.
I
thought he was going to be hard-core, that he was going to get in there, grab his nuts, and go, “Shit just got real.” In the Bible it talks about “the last shall be first, and the first last.” It was supposed to be that kind of thing. But it sure didn’t work out that way.

When Obama was first elected, the right were crapping their pants. “How can we criticize him? He’s the chosen one.” They didn’t know what to say or how to engage with him. But when Obama didn’t respond when Joe Wilson said, “You lie!” in front of Congress, all bets were off. Let a motherfucker take your lunch once, and he’ll be eating it for the rest of his life.

The right just got increasingly emboldened—and President Obama never really fought back, and definitely not in the manner that he should have. I think Obama believes that he’s occupying some kind of intellectual and moral high ground. He definitely wasn’t prepared for the level of animus that he got. It irritates me that a black man doesn’t get how harsh things are and didn’t get how hard it would be. On some level he really thought it would be cool for him, that he could just forget all the bullshit that’s out there.

Then the dog whistles started, subliminal racist cues that your ear doesn’t hear but that your mind registers. Michele Bachmann said he “stole” money. She said he
stole
. Rick Perry brought up the fact that Texas can secede. Was
that
an accident? Every time in America when race comes up, there’s that same acrimony. It happened during the Civil War; it happened with the civil rights debate; it’s happening with President Obama. These are the stretch marks, the last bit of fat that America needs to lose before we can really see ourselves as post-racial. That’s why it’s the hardest—and if people aren’t interested in doing that, it’s downright impossible.

On some level, John Boehner and Eric Cantor really feel as though they’re superior to the president. They
must
feel that way,
because that’s how they act. President Obama was going to deliver a jobs speech before both houses of Congress. John Boehner refused to let the president speak on the date he wanted, citing security risks. If John Boehner felt that unsafe on the floor of the House of Representatives, John Boehner would not be setting foot on the motherfucking House floor himself! But the kicker is, President Obama rescheduled for the next day. The
speaker
got the
president
to reschedule. What the
hell
is that? President Obama is the leader of the United States! He had to ask for
permission
? That’s like me asking my butler, “Can I come in?” John Boehner is
third
in line for the presidency, not first. Since when is the bronze medalist on the Wheaties box? Is that not a gratuitous slap at Obama to know his place?