by Adam Carolla
SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAMS
People say, “Oh, Adam. You’re so heartless because you’re not for giving free lunches at school.” Yes, I want the parents to cook their kids a fucking meal. I don’t want them to have a free corn dog at school. I want the parents to boil some beans and make their kid a goddamn lunch. It’s the superliberal a-holes who grew up with silver sporks in their mouths who think, Oh, they’re incapable of doing it. Yes they can.
Nowadays food is practically free. Nobody is so poor that they can’t go down to the Food for Less, get a huge sack of rice, throw in a couple of chicken bouillon cubes, and whip it up. And believe me, that shit will be healthier than whatever mystery meat and Korean War–surplus canned green beans the school is cooking up. You’ll hear the Tim Robbinses of the world defending this garbage by saying, “These kids need a hot meal every day.” That’s bullshit. Kids don’t need a hot meal, they need a nutritious meal. Your kid would be better off having an apple and a hard-boiled egg than fried fish sticks, canned corn, and a box of purple sugar water. And the dickheads who are complaining about not getting a hot meal are the same ones who are complaining that the meals are not nutritious. I feel qualified to speak on this subject because I was a recipient of the meal-ticket program. It was a delightful trifecta of deep-fried empty calories combined with a soul-crushing “I guess my parents don’t love me enough to pack me a fucking lunch” followed by a dignity-robbing “What’s wrong with your loser family?” So mission accomplished, L.A. Unified.
And if you can’t accomplish the simple act of feeding your kids, they need to go into foster care. If you can’t provide an orange and a Triscuit with a piece of cheese on it, shouldn’t your kids be taken away? It’s literally pennies a day. Isn’t that the most important yardstick to measure parents by? Providing food is the most basic of parenting requirements. In nature, if a mama bird can’t feed her chicks, she is unfit and it’s time for Darwin to take out the trash. Education and health care come well below feeding your kids. And if you can’t muster the drive to provide sustenance for your children, God knows what other kinds of neglect and abuse are happening in that house.
One evening I was having a conversation with Olga, my Guatemalan nanny, about her past. She told me that she was at one time a struggling single mother and that all her friends told her to get on welfare and put her daughter on the free-lunch program. She told me that she didn’t think it was right to take money without working for it, and more important, she wanted the dignity of feeding her own daughter. She didn’t think that should be someone else’s responsibility, and if it meant waking up a little bit earlier or putting a little more effort in the night before, it was worth it to say she was taking care of her child. I said how much I respected her and then told her to finish feeding my kids, I’d be in the den watching SportsCenter. My point is, nobody who’s receiving free lunches is any worse off financially than Olga was at that time in her life. Yet we didn’t rob her of her dignity by feeding her kid for her.
How did people get along before the school lunch program? We didn’t have poor people at the turn of the century? How did those people feed themselves before the fucking food tickets? The goddamn parents cooked goddamn food.
TAXES
I’ve had an impacted assful of people on the left who bitch and moan about how the rich don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes. You may not know who Maxine Waters is. She’s a representative out here in California. Imagine Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son but stupid. I saw her on Bill Maher’s show a few years ago saying it’s time the rich paid their fair share and I thought, “Hey, bitch. I paid almost a million bucks last year and I use nothing. What do you mean ‘fair share’?” I pay seventy-five times as much as a shop teacher. Should we make it 175? We already have the top one percent paying 40 percent of the taxes. I paid more last year than my entire family paid in their entire lives since their parents got here from fucking Italy.
Imagine there are two groups: a group with five people and a group with ninety-five people. The five people are paying for everything, but all hundred people get one vote each. So the five people who are paying for everything get five votes and the ninety-five who aren’t paying for anything get ninety-five votes. If I asked, “Who thinks the five percent should be paying more?” of course the group of ninety-five will raise their hands and say, “Hell yeah, they should pay more.” And because everyone gets one vote, the group of five would have to pay more. Fuck that. That sounds like a democracy, but it’s not.
I’d like a system where you got one vote for every ten grand you put in. If you’re a cop, schoolteacher, garbage man, or fireman, you essentially get one vote. If you pay a hundred thousand dollars a year, you get ten votes. Bill Gates would get two million votes. And why shouldn’t he get more votes? He’s paying for that many more roads, that many more M1 Abrams tanks, that many more schools. Bill Gates gets the same vote that my mom gets? She’ll just use her vote to make him pay more taxes.
And if you don’t pay taxes, you shouldn’t get to vote at all. Criminals aren’t allowed to vote. Why? Because they are no longer considered members of our society. If you don’t pay taxes, you are not contributing to society. You can use the roads, the parks, or go to those places where they hide the books. (What are those called again? Libraries?) But you don’t get to vote in shareholder meetings at companies where you don’t own stock.
Every one of those people who says I don’t pay my “fair share” thinks that every rich person got that way because of Daddy’s money. My dad didn’t own a tobacco plantation. I fucking earned my way to this tax bracket. I have more because I worked for it. And contrary to popular belief, the lion’s share of people in my bracket and beyond are self-starters who busted their ass to get where they are, not one of the Hilton sisters. It’s a convenient, uninformed view of our society that makes it easy for people to put their hand out.
So let’s call it what it is. Envy. What they’re really saying is “Why do you have so much stuff? Why do you need ten cars?” People used to look up to rich guys and aspire to be like them. Now they resent them because they feel shamed. Those guys used to wear ascots and monocles to flaunt their success; now they dress down to conceal it.
This is entirely what terrorism is about. They can’t stand our lifestyle, they can’t stand our prosperity, and they can’t believe that their god is letting us prosper over here while they live on a dirt floor and use goat-flavored toothpaste. So what they do is pray to Allah. But Allah’s not there, so what happens? Our skyscrapers get taller, our limousines get longer, our chicks’ tits get bigger, and these guys get more pissed and fly planes into our buildings. It’s all based on envy turned into resentment turned into low self-esteem turned into rage.
I probably wouldn’t even mind paying more if I thought for a second the government was using my tax money effectively. I once talked to Heidi Fleiss about how much manpower it took to take her out and nearly lost my mind. How many hours can the cops waste on things we don’t care about? If J.Lo hires security, they do whatever the fuck J.Lo tells them to do because she pays them. We’re J.Lo. We pay the cops, so they should do what the fuck we tell them to do. We don’t want them busting prostitution rings and cannabis shops. And I’ll have to send my kids to private school because Maxine Waters and her buddies in the teachers’ union fucked up our public schools so bad that they’re unusable. If there was any direct link between the money I give you and my life, I’d gladly turn it over. But if you dial 911 you get a busy signal, and the only thing in this town that doesn’t have graffiti on it is the potholes. I’d like them to focus on doing a better job with the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’m currently giving them instead of focusing on doing a better job extracting more money from me.
Why can’t we just go with a flat tax? I think the government likes that no one understands how the system works. That way, we just dump our money in a hole, never expecting to see it again. The government is a giant corporation with no com
petition that is constantly trying to keep you off balance so it can siphon more money from you.
THE ACLU AND “TORTURE”
The ACLU recently lobbied for some of the records about torture techniques to come out. And one technique that everyone on the left was appalled by is that some agents went into another room, fired a gun, and then told the guy who they thought bombed the U.S.S. Cole, “We just shot your partner.” They didn’t really shoot him; they just went into another room and fired the gun. Are we turning into such cock-chugging homos in this society that we’re really upset about this? If this was a Bruce Willis flick and he did this, you’d be cool with it, wouldn’t you? He’d still be the hero because he had to figure out where the guy planted the dirty bomb in Chicago. I always said that about waterboarding. When everyone was freaking out about it, I said, “Well, it doesn’t harm them.” And they’d reply, “But they think they’re going to drown.” You’ve seen those action movies where the guy hangs the kidnapper by his ankles off the twelfth-story balcony and he says, “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you where your daughter is,” and then he pulls the kidnapper back onto the balcony. Isn’t it like that? Have we turned into such a nation of pussies? Why do we have to act upset? I feel as if I’m being waterboarded by your tears. Why can’t we say, “That sounds like a good idea to me”? They’re not just fucking around; they’re trying to get information that will save lives. Why do we act as if we’re just trying to get a recipe for gazpacho out of these guys? We’re trying to prevent terrorist acts. What is your argument? The guy went into the other room and fired a gun and said, “We shot your partner.” To me that’s reason to say, “Nice job, CIA. You’re not killing anybody and you’re getting information.” I wish other countries interrogated that way. Wouldn’t it have been nice for our downed pilots who end up in some rathole in Tikrit to have their Republican Guard interrogators go shoot a gun and then come back in?
Things have quieted down lately now that we have a guy in office who shoots hoop instead of golf. But a few years ago when the golfer was in office, it was nonstop bellyaching about “enhanced interrogation techniques” and lots of assholes with bedazzled iPhones who couldn’t find the dipstick in their Prius explaining to the experts how torture doesn’t work. I’m no expert either, but here’s how I know torture does work. It’s been around for twenty thousand years. Shit that doesn’t work usually goes the way of the dodo after a few years. Think eight-tracks and waterbeds. Plus, in keeping with a rich tradition of bellyaching but offering no solutions, of course you dicks have no substitution for extracting information from people. Perhaps one of you ass-wipes could take some time out of your busy day and come up with a method that worked. Oh, that’s right, I forgot, you don’t do shit but complain.
These same experts are also telling us how “we’re creating more terrorists.” Of course, it’s just good sound math: Whether it’s terrorists or cockroaches, the more you kill, the more are created. Any exterminator would tell you that. This combined with the Patriot Act is why there have been so many terrorist attacks on our soil since 9/11. According to your retarded logic, the Marshall football team should have won the championship the season after the plane crash. Here’s my point: It seems counterintuitive to me that killing terrorists is creating more terrorists. I know your argument is that it’s being used as a recruiting tool. There’s only one small problem with your argument: You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Where are you getting your intel, and how is it getting funneled back to the Mac store you’re working at in Pasadena?
Of course after the Huffington Post crowd raises a stink, all this stuff comes out in the news. So now terrorists know we’re not shooting their collaborators in the next room. These people have this truth-for-everybody idea but are the same ones lying about your chances of getting AIDS and how many people die from secondhand smoke. They can justify lying about that stuff because in their minds, it’s going to save lives. They can just say that AIDS is an equal-opportunity killer, a heterosexual is just as likely to get it as a homosexual, and that fifty-three thousand people die a year from secondhand smoke. When are we going to realize these assholes are undoing this country? Where’s the class-action lawsuit against these guys? When Benny Laden and his Terrible Towels light off a dirty bomb in San Francisco and a bunch of your friends die, can we sue the ACLU because the NSA guys were scared to crack open Hamid’s hard drive? Hey ACLU, how about we let the CIA do their jobs so you can focus on more important matters, like struggling with your sexuality and deciding whether to confront your stepdad?
I’d like to direct this next portion to the terrorists reading the book. I think if you’re going to attack us again, you’re going to go for L.A. because you already hit New York. If you hit New York again, people are going to think you’re limited to the Northeast. But if you get both coasts, you’re going to scare the shit out of everyone in between. So I’m assuming you’re targeting L.A. On the other hand, some of your greatest supporters live here in L.A. Many of the actors whom I share this fine city with seem to be some of your biggest sympathizers. So I don’t know if you want to piss off Barbra Streisand or Susan Sarandon. More important, if you blow up Los Angeles all you’re going to do is kill a bunch of Mexicans. If you want to get the blue-eyed devil, you won’t find him here. I’m just saying, focus on a red state. For instance, do we need a North Dakota and a South Dakota? Or the Carolinas. We’ve got two of those.
Go somewhere John Cougar sings about, where they shoot Chevy commercials. I don’t know what town they filmed Footloose in, but that’s the area you should be looking at. Then Oprah will come on TV the next day and say, “If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere,” we’ll all be officially terrified, and you can get back to the important work of throwing rocks at women who read.
IMMIGRATION
Second only to “torture doesn’t work” in the retarded-statement category is “fences don’t work.” So all those East Berliners who drove around in two-stroke cars and ate stale bread for forty years should have just strolled into West Berlin and gotten themselves a breakfast burrito? Boy, they must be embarrassed, having spent all those years trapped behind a fence that didn’t work. And what about all those crazy Jews in their concentration camps? You want to talk about suckers. I have a serious question for all you dipshits that say, “Fences don’t keep anyone out.” What if we just removed the fence around your fat kids’ private school so that any homeless guy or pedophile could wander onto campus willy-nilly? Would you have an issue with that? I’d love to torture one of these no-fence fucknuts until they admitted fences do work—and do it in front of one of those torture-doesn’t-work idiots to kill two birdbrains with one stone.
As far as immigration goes, I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but I do feel as though I’m well qualified to speak about California versus Mexico. First things first. There’s nothing magical about the topsoil in San Diego or cursed about the topsoil in Tijuana. The border is just an arbitrary stripe that runs along a patch of desert that eventually drowns in the Pacific Ocean. The reason San Diego is better than Tijuana is that we made it that way. And to be fair, although it’s going to sound unfair, Tijuana is a piece of shit because they made it that way. No matter how hard you lean to the left, or how much you agree with Al Franken, I think you’d have to admit that if your kid was picking out a college, or a dentist, or a place to have an emergency appendectomy, you would pick the U.S. over Mexico every time.
So far I don’t think I’ve said anything that couldn’t be construed as a universal truth, no matter what side of the aisle you are on. Now comes the part where you get to call me a bigot even though you know I’m right. I know that if you take a large enough group of anything—beavers, Mexicans, fire ants—and place them on the other side of an arbitrary line on the ground, it will be business as usual for them. And since we already agreed business as usual was not a great plan for our kids and their orthodontics, then something needs to be done. Mexicans aren�
�t bad people and they’re not good people. They’re just a culture. And at some point when there’s enough of them, our culture will be usurped by their culture. And somehow me not wanting that to happen makes me a grand wizard in the Klan. The problem is their skin color is darker than ours, and we’ve formed a culture where being called a racist is worse than being called a pedophile. People are afraid to speak up. So let’s remove the skin color for a minute and replace “Mexican” with “Polish.” The second-largest city in this nation, Los Angeles, has a Polish mayor. We have arguments over whether our teachers should instruct in both English and Polish. If you call information, the first five words you’ll hear are in English, and the next seven are in Polish telling you to say “Polish” if you want assistance in Polish. When you go to the ATM, you have to pick English over Polish. Chances are if you call a wrong number, the guy on the other end will have a thick Polish accent. The top three radio stations will all be Polish speaking—and I could go on for another ten pages.
Now all I’m saying is we don’t need another Polish restaurant. I’m not saying the Poles are bad people. I’m saying I don’t want my kids to be raised in Poland. I believe in their heart of hearts the super-lefty, open-borders people agree with me. The problem is the only time they take their boyfriend’s cock out of their mouth is to call me a bigot.
Now on to bash the right…
ANTIGAY POLITICIANS
A politician can say, “I’m against gay marriage. I’m traditional that way,” and I think, All right. But when the guy starts really digging in and introduces legislation to ban them from holding hands in public, he’s gay. He cares too much about something that doesn’t affect him. I don’t trust a guy who’s extremely interested in shit he shouldn’t care about. When my kid is old enough to go away camping, I want to get the group of dads in a room and say, “Who wants to take the kids up to Mount Pinos for the weekend?” And if one guy’s hand flies up, he’s out. I’ll say, “Sorry, Bert, you’re out. Your hand flew up too fast. I don’t trust you.”