The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (12 page)

PHARMERS MARKET

 

New Rule:
If you believe you need to take all the pills the pharmaceutical industry says you do, then you’re already on drugs. Yes, it’s that time in the campaign where all the candidates are presenting their health-care proposals. But none of the plans address the real problem: We won’t stop being sick until we stop making ourselves sick.

Because there is a point where even the most universal government health program can’t help you. They can’t outlaw unhealthy food or alcohol or cigarettes. Just pot, sadly. The government isn’t your nanny. They’re your dealer. And they subsidize illness in America. They have to; there’s too much money in it. There’s no money in healthy people. And there’s no money in dead people. The money is in the middle—people who are alive, sort of, but with one or more chronic conditions that put them in need of Celebrex or Nasonex or Valtrex or Lunesta.

Fifty years ago, children didn’t even get type 2 diabetes. Now it’s an emerging epidemic, as are a long list of ailments that used to be rare and now have been mainstreamed—things like asthma and autism and acid reflux . . . arthritis, allergies, adult acne, attention deficit disorder—and that’s just the A’s.

Doesn’t anyone wonder why we live with all this illness? I’ll tell you why: At the L.A. County Fair, they were serving something called “fried Coke.” My first thought was, “Gosh, what a waste of a perfectly good eight ball.” But no. They actually pour the Coca-Cola syrup into the deep fryer, then put it in a cup, and top it with sugar and whipped cream, and a cherry—you know, because fruit is good for you. Would it really be that much more unhealthy to get molested by one of the carnies?

In Hillary Clinton’s health plan, the words “nutrition” and “exercise” appeared once. The word “drugs”?
Fourteen
times. Just as the pharmaceutical companies want it. Their ad weasels love to say, “When diet and exercise fail . . .” Well, diet and exercise
don’t
fail, a fact brought home by a new Duke University study that showed exercise—yes, exercise—to be just as effective a cure for depression as Paxil and Zoloft. So,
ask
your doctor if Getting Off
Your
Ass is right for you.

 

 

—September 28, 2007

 

LEVI ON A JET PLANE

 

New Rule:
If we can’t, after all is said and done, make this election go the right way, at least we can save one man. I’m talking about young Master Levi Johnston. He’s the eighteen-year-old Alaskan hockey enthusiast who knocked up Sarah Palin’s daughter, and the
National Enquirer
describes him as “a boozing pot-smoker who doesn’t want to get married”—and John McCain thinks he found
his
soul mate!

We’ve all seen how evil henchmen of the Republican party captured this poor innocent out of his natural habitat and forced him into a shotgun engagement because when the seventeen-year-old daughter of the vice presidential candidate is “out to here,” it’s just better that Levi was introduced as the “fiancé.” Looks a little less white-trashy.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Levi is America’s number-one political prisoner. But, Levi, you don’t have to be—this is the twenty-first century, at least in the blue states. You don’t have to do this—you have options. You can pull a
Juno
—fuck, you live in Juneau! Or you could do what most people do with an unwanted child: Give it to Angelina Jolie.

And if you’re worried about the baby, don’t. Let’s get real, dude, the way you are at eighteen, a baby’s better off not being around you—you’ll wind up losing it, or shooting it, or it’ll be on the bottom of your skate or something. Just let the Palin womenfolk look after it for a while. One more infant in that Mormon compound they call a house won’t bother anybody—they’ll barely notice another kid at the table, and soon they won’t even remember whose seed it was that produced young Trink or Truck or Puck, or whatever fucked-up redneck name they give him.

In any event, we here at
Real Time
have taken the liberty of purchasing the website
FreeLevi.org
. It’s yours if you want to use it to get folks to contribute to some sort of liberty fund so you can get enough money to get out of that frozen meth lab they call a town. And even if the money doesn’t come in, it’s not too late: Just grab your skull bong, climb out the window, and get on the highway. I can’t actually come get you, or even let you stay at my place, because I’m pretty sure you’d smoke all my weed, but just call me from a pay phone, I know of a safe house you can stay in till after the election; it’s like the witness protection program for baby daddies.

And remember, Levi: California knows how to party. Trust me, the girls out here are going to love a big, high-sticking farm boy like you. If you play your cards right, in a couple weeks you could be screwing the lesbian right out of Lindsay Lohan.

 

 

—September 19, 2008