Ranting Again

by Dennis Miller

Let's put some of America's bad habits under the microscope. New evidence is showing that cigarette manufacturers may have deliberately manipulated amounts of nicotine to make them even more addictive. Cigarettes with varying degrees of nicotine makes sense. Lights, for times when you're just out with friends having some shits and giggles. Mediums, for unexpected bills and family disagreements. Heavy, for when Dennis Rodman comes to pick up your daughter. And extra-heavy for when Dennis Rodman comes to pick up your son.

  One spiral out from smoking on the vice schematic are drugs. Now, I know that certain cultures use drugs to commune with the spirits of animal guardians and tap the wisdom of the elders who've gone before them—but not us, no no, not us. We use drugs in much the same way a dog licks its own balls. It feels good as long as you don't stop to think about what you're actually doing. I was going to say "a dog's ass" but I changed it because this is a family book. Dog balls, something the whole family can enjoy.

  And finally, America's most insidious and most pervasive vice, our eating habits. We buy our hamburgers by the pound, our chicken by the bucket, and our pizza by the foot.

  You've got bad eating habits if you use a grocery cart in 7-Eleven, okay?

  Now, I tend to think that bad habits are an inevitable side effect of prosperity. Only when a person's waking hours aren't devoted to finding food, clothing, and shelter can there be time for extraneous activities like picking your nose and gambling. And the more you have, the more you want, and since we here in America are lucky/cursed to have the most, our need for a jolt escalates exponentially with each passing generation.

  This explains why every year, the Six Flags amusement park unveils yet another ride designed for one reason and one reason only: to make me shit my pants and shame myself in front of my children. As a matter of fact, I understand that now Six Flags is working on a ride where you're elevated to 150 feet and then dropped headfirst onto a slab of concrete. And you just know that some Beaver Knievel kid is gonna complain that there were no poisoned spikes embedded into the cement.

  As a culture, we're trapped in a vicious cycle where we are so benumbed by a constant barrage of stimuli, the only thing that registers with us is more, bigger, better, louder stimuli. Tired of pot? Try cocaine. Tired of cocaine? Try crack. Tired of crack? Try driving cross country with Kramer and the guy from Shine.

  Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

  Lawyers

  You know, there's an old joke that goes "What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?" and the answer is "A good start." Uh ... well, no, it isn't a good start. Because you put a hundred lawyers on the bottom of the ocean and pretty soon every single fish and crustacean will be talked into a class action suit naming Mrs. Paul, Arthur Treacher, and the fucking Gorton's fisherman as defendants.

  Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but our country's once-venerable justice system has been taken over by a pack of grotesquely rapacious truth-pimps who, in the interest of lining their own custom-tailored Armani pockets, are more tort happy than Pavarotti turned loose in an Entenmann's factory.

  Okay, I'll grant you that there are still lawyers out there who are motivated by compassion and concern, lawyers like our guest tonight, Counselor Bugliosi, but they're about as easy to find as a dry spot on Billy Idol's futon.

  I'm talking about the lawyers who are paid huge fees to represent the most despicable people in the world— like drug dealers, O. J. Simpson, child molesters, rapists, O. J. Simpson, O. J. Simpson, and O. J. Simpson.

  We've all heard about the burglar who trips and falls while leaving the scene of the crime and then sues the guy whose house he broke into, or the woman who spills hot coffee on herself and sues the restaurant for serving it to her, or the moron college student who falls out of the window while mooning some of his friends and then sues the school.

  The reason that virtually any product in this country is ten times more expensive than it should be is that for every marble brain that either eats a silicon packet or decides to make toast in the bathtub, it becomes Sadie Hawkins Day for squadrons of ambulance-chasing legalis- tas peeling off from the main formation to bomb the shit out of our economy with no regard for the collateral damage they might wreak.

  It wasn't always this way. The word "lawyer" used to conjure up images of an upstanding, tireless advocate for the little guy. An Atticus Finch or Clarence Darrow, who was passionately dedicated to truth and justice. Lawyers were once regarded with respect bordering on reverence; now they're viewed with about the same amount of enthusiasm as Matt Helm at a radical feminist poetry reading.

  Like Pamela Anderson Lee, the legal profession started out with good intentions, just somewhere along the line it got really scary.

  Why the change? Why the change? When did the field of law attain the status of a pork chop at the Western Wall?

  Well, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is that the law has been bastardized by a band of hucksters who have made it so cryptic, so utterly puzzling and arcane that even Moses, Hammurabi, and Judge Judy working around the clock for twenty years could not understand it. Modern American lawyers employ English not spoken since the days of King George the Third and Latin that even Gloria Estefan couldn't grasp, all right, purposely making it impossible for even the wisest layman to interpret the true meaning of the law. We have gone from Thou shalt not kill to Thou shalt not deprive any or all persons of their inalienable right to absorb or dispense hereforth with any or all oxygen delivery and removal systems contained within or near said living configuration.

  It is often said that while our legal system is a flawed one, it's still the best in the world. Well, you know something? I think we're being a bit too easy on ourselves. I happen to think the American legal system sucks worse than a Celine Dion cover version of "Whole Lotta Love." You know it, and I know it. Americans walking into a courtroom have long abandoned any expectation of justice. Because the American legal system has been turned into nothing more than a baroque multitiered Vulcan chess game where the rules have become too intricate for the average citizen to play and where the loser is no longer the guilty party but rather the least clever of the two. Lack of wit shouldn't be a crime—unless of course you're Andy Rooney ... "You ever notice I'm dead? Why is that?"

  Most lawyers care about justice and what is right as much as MTV viewers care about Jenny McCarthy's Weltanschauung. No, no, I think you misinterpreted that. Weltanschauung is a German word for her world view. Her tits are hootershnapples.

  People ask, How can a lawyer deem himself or herself to be simultaneously an ethical person and a defender of pure evil? How can anyone stand before a jury knowing full well in his heart that the person they are defending is guilty? Well, the answer is very simple. Lawyers who defend scum are, in their minds, defending something more important than the person sitting to their left. They are defending the law of our land. And that's what we have to change.

  We have to change the idea that the lawyer can use the Bill of Rights as a pillow every night and sleep soundly because he feels in his heart even though he has defended subhumans and gotten them off he is just doing what is constitutionally dictated. We have to put the onus back on the lawyer as an individual. The lawyer must take responsibility for his actions. We make it too easy on them when we attach patriotism to handling animals like Lyle and Erik Menendez.

  And while we're talking about injustice in the world, how come Lyle always gets mentioned first? Lyle and Erik. Lyle and Erik. Lyle and Erik. I mean, come on, it's not even alphabetical. You know what I think? I think Erik should sue Lyle's ass. That is, if the other inmates can just stop cross-examining it for a few minutes.

  William Shakespeare once said, "The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers." Of course, he said that after he lost all of his sonnets in a nasty division of property settlement when he divorced Lady Anna Nicole of Smith. Well, obviously, no one's advocating that we kill all the lawyers. But it is time that we tighten the
choke chain and make these attack dogs more accountable. I say we make law school four years—the last year spent learning how to vaguely resemble a human being. And most important, if you get a bad guy off through a sleazy loophole, he bunks with you.

  Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

  Fashion

  Boy, imagine being an actress. You go to acting classes, you participate in some spectacularly embarrassing scene work with some kid from Hermosa Beach named Chaz, who's presently valet-parking at Tommy Tang's but who eventually wants to do a one- man salute to Liv Ullmann at halftime of the Clipper games, you finally break through Hollywood's notorious glass ceiling, you get nominated for the highest award your craft can bestow, but if you wear the wrong color gown, you got Joan Rivers's kid sticking her finger down her throat after you walk through the fucking press line. You know, Joan Rivers telling Lauren Bacall her dress is all wrong is like Carrot Top telling Lenny Bruce he needs to get an edge.

  Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but at this point fashion has been declared dead more times than a narcoleptic Jason Voorhees. Yet every season it manages to resurrect itself one more time to lurch down the runway in all of its irrelevant splendor.

  People have been obsessed with fashion ever since the Garden of Eden when Eve said to Adam, "You know, that fig leaf you have on is so last season."

  Fashion is the way humans provide what nature didn't. It's our plumage, our fur, our scales. The number- one reason people like to look good is to attract a mate. Now, since Our Maker, who by the way designs for the House of God, did not provide us with fancy tail feathers or a bulging throat sac, or that weird red thing that hangs out of a baboon's ass—since he didn't provide us with any of those, we wear clothing.

  During prehistoric times everyone wore the same thing every day. I mean, look at Wilma Flintstone. She's always sporting the same tight, short skirt with that shredded zigzag cut three inches above her knee. Oh, you know she knew she had a nice pair of gams there, she wasn't afraid to let you know. Thighs like a vise. So what's she doing staying home and just raising the family? You know she was frustrated. Someone like Wilma needed more. And there's Fred, stuffing his fat fuck-face, not giving her the attention she needed, and, might I add, deserved. Yeah, while you were busy fantasizing about Ginger, or Marsha Brady, I spotted the woman who really needed it. Needed it from me. Wilma. And maybe Betty would walk in on us and let out that nervous giggle when she saw my massive thickasaurus and Kazoo’s hovering over us with the prehistoric Martian equivalent of a camcorder, making a sick, Paleolithic Bob Crane film that he can take back to his home planet for parties and such. Oh, yeah, that's what I want. Oh, where was I ...

  Now, the problem here is that I don't have a clue as to the meaning of contemporary fashion. In fact, I thought pret-a-porter was where French construction workers went to the bathroom. But it appears to me that the fashion industry preys on our diametrically opposed needs to be different while at the same time fitting in.

  Fashion is commerce built on envy. Know why fashion magazines are always thicker than the Tokyo Donnelly directory? Because they're full of ads that are trying to make you think that if you use this raspberry/kiwi/placenta thigh cream, your life is going to change, and articles that are trying to make you believe that if you wear this Dolce & Gabbana dress, you're gonna look just like the ninety-five-pound heroin addict who's modeling it.

  I mean, fashion is brilliant from the seller's point of view: They tell you this is what you must buy to fit in, to be one of the "in" people. Then, a few months later, they tell you what you bought is now out, and you're an asshole, you're uncool, and now you have to buy this to fit in. The fashion industry, like the cigarette industry, actually creates both the supply and the demand.

  Now, men seem less susceptible to this sort of arrogance. And I'm not sure whether we're more insightful or just more oblivious when it comes to fashion. Yes, I am sure. We're more oblivious. As far as fashion is concerned, we are more out of it than Strom Thurmond on a little brown jug of NyQuil. Okay? As we all know, originally men's clothing served only two purposes: Sure, to keep us warm. But first and foremost clothes were invented to prevent women from seeing how small our penises were during the winter.

  If there is indeed a bottom line to this Mobius strip of parading clowns, it is to just slow down a little and look at yourself for a second. Here are some basic rules for fashion:

  1. When considering whether or not to have a metal stud put through your tongue, or your belly button or your genitalia, take lightning into account.

  2. Never wear a Budweiser cap with a Coors T-shirt. Commit.

  3. Hey, Levi Strauss. 501's? 505's? 509's? What am I, buying pants or catching a fucking train?

  4. If you walk around a mall with your baseball cap on backward, you better be black or a catcher.

  5. If you're going to murder your ex-wife and her male companion, don't wear incredibly rare designer shoes.

  6. When using a Magic Marker to color in your ankle to cover a hole in your socks, make sure the Magic Marker color matches the socks.

  And finally, men, if you have tits, don't walk around in a tight T-shirt. It confuses the children.

  Folks, fashion, this clever marketing ruse in the guise of cloaking oneself against the elements, has gone on long enough. Fashion is becoming, quite frankly, unfashionable, and it's time to stop allowing yourselves to be bullied by the whims of some out-of-touch, chain-smoking European drip whose only friend is Elsa Klensch. But I do understand the need to be chic, the need to be au courant, the need to make a statement, so let me offer my solution.

  I say we put heterosexual men in charge of fashion. Ladies, you'll never need to read Vogue magazine or do a wardrobe overhaul again. If we're in charge, here's the only outfit you'll ever need: miniskirt, high heels, midriff. Evening wear? Fishnet stockings and French-cut panties. Trust me, darlings, you'll be fabulous.

  Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

  Bad TV

  As with any other recreational drug, television, when used judiciously, can be a pleasant experience. I know I'm gonna get death threats from William Bennett for saying this, but TV is responsible for a lot of spontaneous education. How many times have you been channel surfing, when suddenly you click onto a special on the Discovery channel about giant squids fucking and for the next hour you're completely spellbound and oddly stimulated?

  But I'm not talking about good television. The topic here is bad television and America's insatiable thirst for it. It's easy to figure out. We all work hard during the day and TV is our main source of entertainment. Did you hear me? Entertainment. Most people don't watch TV for enlightenment, they just want a giggle as they doze off.

  Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but America's jones for bad TV is growing faster than your penis while watching that squid thing I mentioned earlier.

  Television is the most important invention since the wheel, and I might add most of us first learned about the wheel from television. Every night millions of Americans Krazy Glue down the scan button on their clickers and strobe past great, great stuff like HBO's Larry Sanders, HBO's Tracey Takes On, HBO's Tales from the Crypt, HBO's Dream On, and HBO's original movies to settle in to an evening of albinos wrestling in a steel cage.

  You know, a man can work up a powerful lip parch kissing that much ass.

  TV is the great equalizer. Bill Clinton may be making decisions on our nation's security during the day, but at night he is laughing his ass off at some guy getting hit in the nuts with a rake on America's Funniest Home Videos.

  To assure that everyone's going to "get it," the three major networks have to make certain their programs are about as challenging as bowling during a 7.4 on the Rich- ter scale. Their job is to make sure that the only thing that goes over our collective heads is the hat that holds two beer cans with the Styrofoam tits on the front. Thus, they give us shows that are blander than Strom Thurmond's diet. />
  And any show that doesn't pull numbers like a bingo caller on methamphetamines is immediately snuffed.

  A perfect example of how imperfect the TV rating system is is the fact that a few years ago the show M.A.N.T.I.S. was taken off the air. One of the greatest shows ever, it was about a guy that was half man, half praying mantis, and he fought crime. And they cancel it! A regular guy who, when trouble reared its ugly head, half of him would turn into a praying mantis!

  Don't you see the beauty of that, for chrissakes? Why didn't any of you fuckers watch ... why? Sorry, but I guess there's a little mantis inside all of us. Manty, we hardly knew ye.

  It's true, everybody watches bad TV. Now they are talking about five hundred channels. I can't wait to see what kind of brilliantly horrific programs are out there when we get up to half a thou. Hey, I'd give the "cat box" channel a chance if it came with basic cable.

  And the cat box channel would be only one short step in front of daytime talk shows on the dolt meter.

  If there's one thing that these shows have done, it's given overweight, big-haired southern women a forum in which to air their grievances.

  Yeah. Let's face it, what are the chances that Ted Koppel is going to devote a half hour to helping fifteen-year- old Kimmy understand why her twenty-seven-year-old mother, Kimmy Senior, will date only Jamaican Siamese twins?