I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (7 page)

Besides my bully, there’s another half-white, half-black Bubba that President Obama can learn from: Bill Clinton. In the 2008 Democratic debates, there was a big laugh when Barack Obama was asked if he agreed with Toni Morrison’s characterization of Bill Clinton as America’s first black president. “Blacker,” Morrison had said, “than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

Although the premise of the question was humorous, there really was truth to her statement. Obviously, in a strictly skin-color sense, Obama is black (or at least, mixed) and Bill Clinton is not. But in terms of which one of them is more a product of a black upbringing, I would argue that Clinton has the leg up on Obama.

Obama’s upbringing wasn’t just white—it was the American
dream! He was raised by a white family from Kansas. That’s how
Superman
was raised. That’s how Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
was raised, and that movie was so fucking white that they had to make
The Wiz
so that black people could relate to it. Obama worked hard and made his way through top colleges due to hard work and intelligence. It was a record of achievement and pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

Bill Clinton had more experiences that were common to black people than Barack Obama did. He grew up in a rural home in the Deep South and he had to hustle all his life. He was raised by a single mother who was a nurse. He constantly interacted with and had a lot of experiences with black people. From playing the saxophone and wearing the sunglasses to all the consequences of his slick talking, in many ways he acted like a black man—both good
and
bad. The dude used to be chubby and endangered his marriage for a big-assed shawty. Clinton loved his fried food and would jog with a fucking Big Mac in his hand. All that stuff is things that blacks could relate to, and it was really
him
.

This motherfucker got impeached, almost fired from his job, and he still went back to work like shit didn’t happen. Only a black dude is going to do that. He could just slick-talk his way out of anything, like, “That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” and, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” All those iconic statements that we now remember are the speakings of a hustler. Bill Clinton stole the Republicans’ ideas and sold those very same ideas back to them as his own. That is straight hustling.

I definitely am not using the word
hustling
in a negative sense. The basic characteristic of a hustler, in my estimation, is
someone who gets shit done
. You might not like
what
he gets done, and you might want to avoid hearing about his methods, but that cat will
deliver for you. That’s what a hustler does, and that’s what Bill Clinton did. He was one nickel-slick motherfucker.

President Obama is probably a more
principled
man, but in terms of political tactics, there is just no contest. A true politician doesn’t keep getting his ass whupped like Obama does—and then do nothing about it. Bill Clinton got his own “shellacking” in 1994. But he learned that first lesson and then ran the table against the Republicans. If Bill Clinton talked as much as Obama talks, he’d get everything he asked for. When Bill Clinton took his case to the people, there has not been a more effective speaker. And by “effective,” I mean
it had an actual effect
. His words caused people to take action. Famously, Bill Clinton’s teleprompter went down when he was giving a State of the Union address. He didn’t look at it again and delivered a rousing speech on no notes.

Barack Obama is an eloquent speaker, but you get the sense that he’s detached from what he’s saying. When Clinton said, “I feel your pain,” people thought that this motherfucker really did feel our pain. I sometimes get the impression that Barack Obama doesn’t feel
anything
. He is very intellectual, but I don’t think he loves people the way Bill Clinton
loves
people. When Barack Obama is finished with the presidency, he’ll go away and do lectures and be well regarded. But when it comes to Bill Clinton, politics is what he
is
.

Sixteen years after Clinton’s government shutdown, the Republicans were about to try the same thing with Obama. “Don’t call my bluff,” Obama told Eric Cantor. Cantor did—and Obama folded immediately. The Republicans got everything they asked for and made no significant concessions. If that was Bill Clinton, the Republicans would have feared telling him no. They might have still done it, but they’d be waiting for the other shoe to drop at any
minute. Obama needs to learn from Bubba. What the president doesn’t seem to get is that you can be loved
and
feared. He is loved and
well regarded
, but Bill Clinton was loved and
feared
.

The ultimate test of blackness is not taking no bullshit. Who would be the fastest to slap the hell out of someone in an argument: Bill Clinton or Barack Obama? That’s the answer to Toni Morrison’s question, and it’s an answer you don’t need an Ivy League degree to know.

It’s not too late for President Obama to change, and maybe he just doesn’t have it in him. But the principle here is bigger than one man, even if that man is the president of the United States. Bubba Rankin taught me a lesson as a kid, and then I taught him one when we got older. After Bubba dislocated my shoulder and generally made a fool out of me, he moved out of our neighborhood. When I was eighteen or nineteen, he came back to visit. But things had changed in the intervening years. I had dudes around me who I got high with. They were
my
people.

So five of us young dudes were hanging out, and Bubba came walking down the block. He was now a grown man, reminiscing about the old days and glad to be in the neighborhood. Of course
his
memories were positive. He wasn’t getting his ass whupped. No one remembered Bubba’s and my history.

But I sure as fuck did.

When Bubba came up to us, I started saying something smart in response to whatever he said. Then he’d say something else and I’d say something
else
smart. I was like some sort of sarcastic parrot, and no one likes a back-talking bird.

“Hey man, how you doing?” he said.

“Motherfucker, how
you
doing?” I repeated.

Even though he came up to us all friendly, eventually I started to
get on Bubba’s nerves. “Hey, motherfucker,” he yelled at me. “Who you talking to like that?”

Soon after that, we all jumped him. Now it was
my
street and
my
neighborhood. I
still
couldn’t whup him—but six of us could. Man, oh, man, that was the best shit ever. My mother even saw what was happening, and she let it go for a while. Eventually she came out of the house and had to put a stop to it because it was getting so bad. I stood up, looked Bubba square in the face, and I said, “You can’t never come on my street no more. It’s my street.” He never bothered me or my friends again. Now
he
feared
me
.

So Mr. President, I understand how you want to remain above the fray and not fight these people. But Mr. President, we’re standing with you. Fuck whether you win or not. You’ve got to let these motherfuckers know it ain’t going to be easy. If you’re going to be treated like an angry black man, then maybe you should start acting like one. My entire street is behind you, and many, many other streets like mine. All we need is for you to give us the word.

What we need more than anything, Mr. President, is for you to lead. Because we sure as fuck aren’t getting that from the other side of the aisle.

P
ART
of the reason our nation is so divided is because we have become a multicultural nation. We have two dueling cultures in America, the red states and the blue states, and they perceive things completely differently. You can watch a story on a network news show and get the facts—and then you can turn to cable news and see the same story interpreted and reinvented in a completely different way. We don’t have a national dialogue anymore. Instead we have two national monologues.

We used to have national discussions and disagreements. There was a standard of truth and objectivity. Now, thanks to our mass
media, people can believe whatever they want and never have their views questioned—and these views are simply based on who people surround themselves with. You live in the South, you’re a conservative Christian. You live in San Francisco, you’re a progressive Democrat. Our philosophies are not randomly distributed across the nation but instead lie in enclaves. People put themselves, or
try
to put themselves, in positions where they are constantly around others who edify their beliefs. Who would question their own views if everyone around them felt the same way?

But I don’t like that mentality, and that hasn’t been my approach. I have been around more conservatives than people on the other side of the aisle have been around liberals. I’ve traveled this country and know many people from various political perspectives. I’ve personally met prominent Republican politicians and interviewed them one-on-one. I’ve sat with them backstage in green rooms and had meaningful discussions—not elevator talk, but real conversations about the issues.

When I condemn specific politicians, it’s only
after
I’ve listened to them. I think there are a lot of evil conservatives—but there is evil on both sides of the aisle. Robert Byrd, for example, was a fairly evil Democrat. There are things you can’t square with me, like being in the Klan.

People on the left think that everyone on the right is stupid. But a politician can only get elected if he gets votes, so the Republican leaders have no choice but to kowtow to their crazy base. Mitt Romney is not a good actor. It’s obvious he doesn’t believe half of the shit he’s being driven to say. But any deviation from the party line is like heresy. It’s really like a religion for these people, and they’re constantly searching for heretics. They even have a term for it: RINO, as in Republican in Name Only. This term has been
applied to Rudy Giuliani, and it’s been applied to Mitt Romney. But how far to the right do you have to be to consider Mr. Law and Order and a multimillionaire investment banker to be
Democrats
? From their perspective, there’s no room for a
minority
opinion in the party. Isn’t that
telling
? And isn’t it a piss-poor strategy in a democracy?

The Republican Party has gotten so crazy that people are trying to forget just how nuts the process was for choosing their presidential nominee. A bunch of nobodies thought, “If this black dude could get elected president, surely
I
have a chance.” Politicians like to sweep unpleasant things under the rug if it doesn’t suit their interest. Well, I think I need to lift that rug up and remind everyone of just how demented things were this past election cycle.

People who are serious candidates and could do the job of president are finding it
impossible
to get through the gauntlet of crazies. There is no better example of this than Tim Pawlenty, the first man to drop out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. When Tim Pawlenty started out, I thought he seemed like a bright and reasonable guy. Just like everyone else, I found him bland. He bored me to tears. He was kind of young to be
that
bland. It’s hard to be
that
young and white and boring as fuck. You’ve got to be around for a long time to be that fucking boring. Mitt Romney is that boring, but he’s had years to have all of his personality drained out of him. But boring is hardly a disqualification from the presidency. If that’s the worst thing you can say about a man, then he’d probably be one of the greatest presidents ever.

The two-term Minnesota governor was knocked out by a bat-shit harpy from his own state, a congresswoman with no legislative achievements to speak of whatsoever. Michele Bachmann
went there
. She appealed to the crazies who hate gay marriage, and the crazies who only care about abortion. I’m not speaking about people who happen to be socially conservative or pro-life. I mean the
crazies
. Michele Bachmann went for the lowest common denominator—and those are precisely the people who vote in straw polls, whether they’re left or right.

Let me quote Bachmann, because she once said something so telling that it really speaks to the heart of many in the GOP: “Those who are coming into France, which had a beautiful culture, the French culture is actually diminished. It’s going away. And just with the population in France, they are losing Western Europeans, and it’s being taken over by a Muslim ethic.” She often brings up the specter of Sharia, or Islamic law, being imposed in Europe by the burgeoning Muslim population.

Bachmann and people like her know perfectly well that the possibility of Sharia being voted in in the United States is zero. Muslims constitute less than 1 percent of the American population. What she’s playing on are fears of dark-skinned people “infiltrating” our society and imposing their perspective. So what is it that the Mexicans are bringing into the United States that’s so bad? When the Irish came, they brought Saint Patrick’s Day.
Every
politician walks in those parades. Italians brought pasta. Are Cinco de Mayo and tacos that much worse? She doesn’t have a problem with foreign people and their cultures. She has a problem with foreign
brown
people and their cultures. In her vision of America, Reagan’s “city on a hill” has become a gated community designed to keep out “undesirable” elements.