The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (27 page)

IRRITABLE BOWL SYNDROME

 

New Rule:
Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That’s right, the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer ones . . . just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers. Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of one hundred thousand. Yet this sleepy little town on the banks of the Fuck-if-I-know River has just as much of a chance of making it to the Super Bowl as the New York Jets—who next year need to just shut the hell up and play.

Now, me personally, I haven’t watched a Super Bowl since 2004, when Janet Jackson’s nipple popped out during halftime, and that split-second glimpse of an unrestrained black titty burned my eyes and offended me as a Christian. But I get it—who doesn’t love the spectacle of juiced-up millionaires giving one another brain damage on a giant flat-screen TV with a picture so real it feels like Ben Roethlisberger is in your living room, grabbing your sister?

It’s no surprise that some one hundred million Americans will watch the Super Bowl—that’s forty million more than go to church on Christmas—suck on that, Jesus! It’s also eighty-five million more than watched the last game of the World Series, and in that is an economic lesson for America. Because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity, and baseball is built on a model where the rich almost always win and the poor usually have no chance. The World Series is like
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
You have to be a rich bitch just to play. The Super Bowl is like Tila Tequila. Anyone can get in.

Or to put it another way, football is more like the Democratic philosophy. Democrats don’t want to eliminate capitalism or competition, but they’d like it if some kids didn’t have to go to a crummy school in a rotten neighborhood while others get to go to a great school and their dad gets them into Harvard. Because when that happens, “achieving the American dream” is easy for some and just a fantasy for others.

That’s why the NFL literally shares the wealth—TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it thirty-two ways. Because they don’t want anyone to fall too far behind. That’s why the team that wins the Super Bowl picks last in the next draft. Or what the Republicans would call “punishing success.”

Baseball, on the other hand, is exactly like the Republicans, and I don’t just mean it’s incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small-market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Super Bowl more than anybody—but the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow up and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is $40 million; the Yankees’ is $206 million. The Pirates have about as much chance at getting in the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton.

So you kind of have to laugh—the same angry white males who hate Obama because he’s “redistributing wealth” just love football, a sport that succeeds economically because it does just that. To them, the NFL is as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet, apple pie, and a second, giant helping of apple pie.

 

 

—January 29, 2011

 

CAKE BOSS

 

New Rule:
If you think Michelle Obama is after your freedom because she merely suggests that our kids should exercise more and eat a little broccoli along with their lard, you don’t deserve a place in the free market of ideas. You belong at the Cheesecake Factory. She’s not Stalin because she notices your kids sweat Mountain Dew.

And yet this is bigger than America’s ass—hard to believe, but indulge me. This is about the Tea Baggers’ fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between freedom and the freedom to never be told anything—like avoid food served in a bucket. It’s just a tradition that first ladies get to pick some mundane—and up until now, noncontroversial—cause to promote. Lady Bird Johnson: beautifying America. Barbara Bush had literacy. Betty Ford’s was no hard liquor before ten a.m. Our previous first lady, Laura Bush, worked tirelessly against illiteracy, so between her efforts and her husband’s, it was a tie. Hillary Clinton did pioneering work in looking the other way. I’m just saying, if your husband can convince you that the bra in the bed probably fell in at the mattress factory, you can overlook Hosni Mubarak.

When I look at a moon pie, I just see sugar and trans fat, not my constitutional freedoms. But Sarah Palin recently brought sugar cookies to a school as a protest against the government telling the school what to eat. Which of course it wasn’t doing. Sean Hannity warned that we’d soon be paying fines for eating salt. Which isn’t a problem for Hannity, who eats mostly boogers. When did the right wing become Joe Pesci over every little thing: “You sayin’ I use too much salt? What am I, salty? Fuck you, I use too much salt—here, take some salt right down your throat!”

Forty years ago, when Lady Bird Johnson suggested we plant wildflowers to beautify the highways, the reaction was “Sounds like a neat idea!” not “Don’t tell me what I can plant, bitch!”

I’m not saying the right objects to Mrs. Obama’s efforts because the Tea Baggers are stupid, or because they’re hysterical, or because they hate black people. Though all of that is true. But what does it say about America that even a first lady suggestion has to be controversial—especially when she purposefully picked something no one could disagree with: Maybe we should send our kids outside to play. You know who else liked to send people places? Hitler. Rush Limbaugh makes a crack about this every week. Because who better to get your health advice from than a drug-addicted fat man. Rush, I have proof that no one in the government is forcing you to eat right and exercise: you.

 

 

—February 4, 2011

 

THREE FLOG NIGHT

 

New Rule:
If your wife says, “Hurry up, we’re going to be late for our Valentine’s dinner,” and you reply, “Just a minute, honey, I’m almost finished masturbating”—you might have a porn problem. I bring this up because there is a crisis in America: a full ninety-one percent of men can no longer get an erection without hearing the sound of a Mac booting up.

I made that statistic up, because statistics on porn are hard to come by, mainly because when you do a Google search for them you wind up looking at porn, and suddenly it’s three hours later and the dog is starving. But it is true that in far too many marriages these days, the husband comes home from work and goes straight to the den to look at porn, while the poor wife is alone upstairs . . . Between him masturbating at his keyboard and her crying herself to sleep, who can keep that much Kleenex in the house?

I know what you’re thinking: Bill Maher, anti-porn? No, I’m not anti-porn, I’m just saying, masturbation has its place—and that place should be plan B, when you can’t get the real thing. For me, that was college. It filled the hole in me when I had no hole to fill. But now psychologists are telling us that for a sizable percentage of the men in America, masturbating to porn is plan A; doing it with your wife or girlfriend is more like a fallback option for when the power goes out.

What’s worse, when someone spends twelve hours a day looking at porn, you build up a tolerance and you need more to get the same high. So you move on to fetish sites, and then weird Japanese porn, where a schoolgirl’s being molested on a bullet train by Godzilla, and before you know it you’re into the stuff that Germans like. Horrifying, slimy, violent ideas punctuated by the sounds of womanly sobbing. Like an interview with John Boehner.

And to be honest about our porn addiction—it’s not that Americans are oversexed, it’s that we are catastrophically lazy. We’d rather sit on the sofa and show our wing-wang to strangers on Chatroulette than go schlep out to Houlihan’s and try to pick up a secretary who’s had one too many mai tais. We’ve become a nation of cooch potatoes.

I’m getting action and I don’t even have to brush my teeth! Real, actual sex? Not tonight, honey—I’m horny! It’s amazing—for men, it took only a couple of decades between discovering that women can have orgasms and deciding that giving them one is just too much trouble.

 

 

—February 11, 2011