The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (16 page)

SENIOR MOMENT

 

New Rule:
Stop making college students sit through commencement speeches. You’ve just gone years in debt for a worthless diploma, now here’s your reward: twenty minutes of motivational bullshit from Coach Bobby Knight. I firmly believe if college students wanted to hear more drivel they’re never going to use again, they could go to class. So I would tell this graduating class exactly what they have to look forward to: working at Starbucks. I’m joking, of course. Starbucks isn’t hiring. Here’s the speech I would give.

Graduates, faculty, alumni, and guests, I am truly honored to speak at your university, mostly because it’s a great place to score cheap weed. I’ve been asked by your dean to keep it brief, and by your feminist studies club to keep it humorless. So class of 2009, as you go out in the world, here is my message for you: Give up. You’re about to enter the worst job market since Adam and Eve hired the very first employee, a Mexican to tend their garden. On top of that, you went through the American educational system. You wrote “Hi, Mom!” on your cap, and you spelled “Hi” wrong.

And if all that wasn’t enough, you are the first generation to inherit an environment that’s probably already toast, but, hey, maybe you can make a few bucks smearing sunscreen on old people. Just remember, there’s more to life than work. Maybe now’s the time to appreciate the little things. A flower. A sunset. A shopping cart full of cans.

So I say to you as you embark on your new adult life, take a moment to look back and honor your parents. Because they’re the ones who paid for your education; they’re the ones who stood by you the whole time. And they’re the ones you’ll be moving back in with in the fall.

So look at them—look at your parents right now. Or, more likely, your dad and his new wife, who’s your age, and your mom and her new boyfriend, whom she met on Myspace. And after the ceremony, I want you to take them aside and say something very important to them: “This is your fault!” Who do you think it was who tanked the economy and spent all the money and melted the planet and let the schools rot? Yes, it was us, but at least I hope we taught you that in life, there really is no such thing as failure, because if there were, we wouldn’t be seeing Dick Cheney on TV every day. In closing, remember above all that no matter where life takes you, you will always have something deep inside you of great value: plasma.

 

 

—May 15, 2009

 

 

LEFT, RIGHT, AND VENTER

 

New Rule:
He’s your president, not your boyfriend. Last week I criticized President Obama for not fighting corporate influence enough, and it made some liberals very angry. My phone rang off the hook, my e-mail filled up, and Nancy Pelosi got so mad, her face moved. Look, I like Obama, too, I’m just saying, let’s not make it a religion. And as far as you folks on the right who think we’re somehow now in league . . . We’re not in league. I was criticizing Obama for not being hard
enough
on the corporate douche bags you live to defend. I don’t want to be on your team; pick another kid. So I stand by my words, but there is another side to the story, and that is that every time Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, there’s a major political party standing in his way. The Democrats.

People talk a lot about a third political party in America. We don’t need a third party, we need a
first
party.

This is because we don’t have a left and a right party in this country anymore. We have a center-right party, and a crazy party. Over the last thirty-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge-fund managers, credit-card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture, and the pharmaceutical lobby—that’s the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat earthers, and Civil War reenactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans, and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He’s not even a liberal.

I know he’s not, because he’s on TV. And while I see Democrats on television, I don’t see actual liberals. And if occasionally you do get to hear Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky or Dennis Kucinich, they’re treated like buffoons. Okay, these are not three of the world’s most charismatic men, but then nobody’s ever going to confuse Newt Gingrich for Zac Efron, and I have to look at his fat face on TV more often than that “free credit report” song.

Shouldn’t there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget? A party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot, and steep, direct taxing of polluters?

These aren’t radical ideas. A majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended. And what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats. Because bottom line: Democrats are the new Republicans. It’s like when some Chinese company buys the name of a great old American brand and slaps it on some cheap crap. You buy it out of reflex, and it’s only later that you think, “Wow, I didn’t even know Woolworth’s made dildos.”

 

 

—June 19, 2009