President Me (30 page)

Then I'll take them to the miniature train. “Like the horses, we just send this in a circle for the fuck of it. Unlike your trains, we don't have people riding on top clinging for dear life hoping not to get scraped off on an overpass so they can get to the next village for a sack of grain the UN dropped off.”

Griffith Park has a giant fountain which would be my pièce de résistance in the third-world shitbag shaming. “Here's what we do with our clean potable water. That's right. We have so much that we shoot it into the sky until it evaporates just for the fuck of it. And then if we get bored enough watching that, just for good luck we'll take some money out of our pockets and throw it in there. We have that much extra water and extra wealth. But anyway, that wraps up our tour. Good luck with your well.”

10

THE DEPARTMENT
OF EDUCATION
 

Every
president declares that he is going to be “The Education President.” The one who fixes our completely broken educational system. Well, I am the man for that job. Longtime fans of mine know my educational history—after being named valedictorian at Harvard Westlake Prep School in L.A., I did my undergraduate studies at Brown then my Ph.D. thesis on gas chromatography at Caltech. Or . . . ​my hippie mom applied the “drop out” part of “turn on, tune in, drop out” to parenting, sent me to a free-range commune school where I learned nothing, and then had that nothing reinforced in the series of warehouses known as the L.A. Unified School District.

I hated school. I used to hope for an earthquake every morning instead of going in. Education has meant nothing to me. I'm a self-made millionaire and it had nothing to do with the prestigious preschool my parents fought to get me into or having one really great teacher who believed in me. It all came from a little something called grit. That “dust yourself off and try again,” “power through the pain” attitude that we seem so desperate in our current system to do away with. So as president, my plan is to help American kids buck up, get tough, and show a little respect.

BULLYING AND SELF-ESTEEM

That's why as president, my first directive to my Secretary of Education will be to cease all of the antibullying bullshit. This administration is staunchly pro-bullying. We're spending so much time and energy protecting kids from having hurt feelings we don't recognize that we're hurting their future.

First off, the definition of bullying has changed. Everything is bullying now. My boy came home one day and told me he was bullied at school. I gave him a once-over and said, “I don't see any bruises. What happened?” He said, “I was telling a story and Declan put both fingers in his ears.” That's bullying now. By that definition, I've been bullying my parents for years. The word doesn't mean anything anymore. It's the boy who cried he was bullied by the wolf. Sonny is going to come home someday and say he was bullied and I'm not going to even look up from TMZ. It's like the words “hate” and “discrimination.” They get tossed out so frequently that we're numb to them.

Last year in Texas the father of a kid on a football team that got beaten ninety-one to zero filed a formal complaint about bullying because the coach of the winning team didn't tell his players to lay off. If that is a form of bullying, our country is in big trouble. This would be like telling Dale Earnhardt Jr. not to lap another driver.

First off, this was in a suburb of Fort Worth. I think in Texas they don't even know what bullying is. I bet they thought an actual bull got on the field. The principal was like, “Rob, what's going on? Parents are complaining about bullying. Did a cow get on the field? I knew this would happen someday.” Clearly this dad had just moved there from Portland.

More importantly, it's football. The entire sport is based on the concept of bullying the other team. A guy lines up across from you and then you bull-rush him. The word “bull” is right in there. That is the whole point. You can beat a team before the first kickoff if you intimidate them. If you get in their head they'll start making mistakes. It's part of the sport.

And as for the guys who lost ninety-one to zip, not only will they get over it, it will be a great story. They'll be telling that one in bars for years. Every time they crack a beer, that's going to be the story they tell.

Please, let's stop working so hard to make sure our kids are pussies. What kind of a father files a bullying complaint because his kid's football team got their asses righteously handed to them? What message does that send? This cycle is just going to repeat and expand and eventually our country will no longer defend itself when attacked. Do you think the generation that's being told that every name they're called is an assault would have stood up to Hitler? Do you think my kids' generation would have won the Cold War? They would have said the Russians were mean but they were going to ignore them or report them to the UN. I wanted to teach Sonny some boxing to defend himself in the case of real bullying and he told me he didn't want to because if he hit the kid back, he'd get in trouble.

When it's not pussy parents, the ACLU gets involved. In 2012, the ACLU sued a school board in Rhode Island over “gender-based” events for kids. That's right, no more Daddy-Daughter dances in Rhode Island because it might hurt the feelings of the kid whose dad skipped town. We're now penalizing all the other children to protect one kid from the feeling of envy. I'm sorry Pops jumped ship and moved to Florida but you should be pissed at him about that, not all the other kids with intact families.

This is an even more disturbing trend. The definition of bullying has expanded to include simply having something someone else doesn't. By that rationale
Dallas
should get pulled off the air because it shows people in private jets having a great lifestyle. I'm sorry but I think envy is a good thing. We should all look at the people who have more than us—whether it's a bigger house, a better body, or a nicer car—and think, “What am I doing that is preventing me from having that? How can I improve?” That's the real learning that should be happening in schools.

The news girl on my podcast, Alison Rosen, brought up a story a year ago where the principal at a high school in Massachusetts canceled “Honors Night” because it might hurt the self-esteem of the kids who didn't receive an honor. I would like to honor that principal with my foot up his ass. All we have is competition; this is what makes us get better. What if there was no competition in the cell-phone business, what if the government just took it over in 1987? We'd all be walking around holding beige bricks with long antennas. That's how progress happens. Samsung and Motorola battle it out and we benefit. Things get smaller, faster, more efficient. Competition breeds competence.

This is going to make failures out of our kids. There is competition in the world. Kids need to fail, they need to know that they're not doing well, but that if they work hard they can recover. Right now we're heaping praise on everyone for just walking through the door and minimizing the accomplishments of kids who do bust their asses. Our kids are going to look back on us and be pissed we didn't give them the skills to go out in the real world and thrive. I know they talk about the three
R
s in school but we need to add a fourth and most important one—Resiliency—the ability to know that you're not perfect but that you can get better if you look within, internalize the struggle, and work harder, instead of bringing everyone else down.

This is the real bullying that's going on in schools. It's the parents, the school boards, and the ACLU telling kids they can't handle shit, lowering the bar and softening them up. When you work with your hands repeatedly you build up calluses that protect you from splinters, sparks, and shards. There needs to be an emotional callus built up in high school before you go out and face the real world.

That's why I'm naming as Secretary of Education R. Lee Ermey. We need a drill sergeant to get in there and toughen up all these kids. Someone who's not afraid to get in your son's face and shout, “YOUR LAST EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY, YOU WORTHLESS MAGGOT! YOU MAKE ME WANT TO PUKE! YOU'LL KNOW WHAT BULLYING IS WHEN I RIP YOUR HEAD OFF AND SHIT DOWN YOUR NECK HOLE!”

I'm not saying there's no violence in schools. It's a fucking pathetic state of affairs that we now need cameras on every school bus (but still no seat belts). A month doesn't go by without some black-and-white footage of two kids kicking the shit out of another kid on a bus, or worse, a parent coming on to the bus and smacking around the girl who called her kid fat on Facebook. We've created such a shitty society that those kids would be a hell of a lot better off if that bus just drove through a guardrail and into a reservoir. Imagine trying to explain this phenomenon to someone from the fifties. It would be confusing to them, and not just because the black kids are sitting up front.

Every now and again you see the bus driver getting involved. But other times you see them helplessly witnessing it because we've built a system where they're afraid to break up the fight because the parents of the delinquents will sue them. Well, as president, I'm going to enact the Bus Driver Protection Act. Any driver can break up a fight on a bus and smack those little shits around himself. In fact I'm going to arm them with Mace and a cattle prod. As long as we're raising a bunch of animals, then our bus drivers are going to have to be zookeepers. This is the sad new reality. We have to accept it.

It's the least we can do for these people. Bus driver is a gig with zero upside and a ton of downside. There's not even tipping. The parents don't give you a bottle of scotch around Christmastime. This person gets your kid to and from school safely every day, yet the guy at the Starbucks gets more tips. Being a bus driver is as bad as being a mover as far as appreciation. They can move ten thousand square feet of home, but one dent in one leg on one end table and the chick who hired you will say it's a disaster and try to get her money back. There's no good day as a mover or bus driver. Bus driver is the most “something went wrong” job. No one sets out to be a school bus driver. The story of how one becomes a bus driver always begins, “I got out of rehab, finished my community service, and now . . .”

PARENT INVOLVEMENT

I guaran-fucking-tee that the problem with all those li'l criminals on the bus is absent fathers. In certain communities there is a pervasive lack of fathers and thus a pervasive lack of discipline. If kids don't have a father to grow up being afraid of, they don't fear any authority figures like teachers or cops and thus treat the world like a RadioShack during a riot.

This is going to be the undoing of our society and I'm the only one with the balls to say something about it. I was incensed during the 2013 State of the Union when President Obama said his administration would do more to “encourage fatherhood,” adding “because what makes you a man isn't having the ability to conceive a child but having the courage to raise one.”

The courage?! It's not storming the beaches of Normandy. It's hanging and paying some rent while Mama raises the kid. It's not courage, it's a fucking obligation. That would be like saying, “What makes you a man isn't eating at IHOP, it's having the courage to pay the bill.”

We've lowered the bar
that
much? If raising your kid is now a bridge too far, it's time to just light off all the nukes we have, let the winter go on for a couple thousand years, and start fresh. Because if you don't raise your kids, the government is going to, and guess what? They fuck up everything they touch. And not only that, but they're going to raise them with
my
money. If you're going to have a kid I'm going to pay for, I should get to fuck your wife.

Why is sticking around and raising your kid such a tall order in some communities? Why does the president have to take time in the State of the Union to tell black guys that fatherhood extends beyond the moment of orgasm? There was a story about a thirty-three-year-old guy in Tennessee named Orlando Shaw who had twenty-two kids by fourteen women and refused to pay child support.

My Justice Department will put a Denver boot on this guy's junk and that of anyone like him. He should never be able to have sex again. It will be like one of those collars that you put around a dog's neck when they have stitches. Just a big cone around this guy's dong so he could never again penetrate any of his gaggle of bitches. But that's only the first step. Then I would like to parade him around the country as an example of the world's worst father and possibly world's worst human being.

Think I'm being hyperbolic? Let's do the math on this. A little side-by-side with Charles Manson. How many kids does Manson have? Zero. How many people are dead as a result of him? Nine. Now let's look at Orlando Shaw. How many kids? Twenty-two. How many people are dead as a result? Well, statistically the twenty-two kids that he crapped out that are going to grow up in poverty without a father will be in gangs or pregnant or both by the time they're seventeen. Even if half of them escape their fate, you've still got a higher death toll when the dust settles, especially when you factor in that a percentage of the kids will go down the same broken, fatherless road. And look at the cost to society, between the food stamps, social workers, cops, graffiti cleanup, Child Protective Services, etc. Think about the potential price tag vs. what it cost to house Manson and put on a show parole hearing every couple of years. This guy could do far more damage than Chuck ever did.