And you know, the guy that takes his shirt off at the football game is always the guy that really really shouldn't, okay. Not only should this guy be wearing a shirt, he should be wearing a bra. He is why shirts were invented in the first place. He's a huge fat guy with big tits, folks, and he's standing on his chair with a giant beer in one hand and a pile of nachos in the other, no plate, just nachos in his hand, and he's screaming Thurman Thomas's name for sixty straight minutes. And you know what? I don't even think he knows Thurman Thomas. And the announcers say, "There's a real Bills fan, he's painted his body Buffalo Blue." Hey, that's not paint, the guy's dying of exposure. How can the fans enjoy the game when a huge fat guy with big tits is turning blue and dying right in front of them? They can't! At least, not like they could if a huge fat guy with big tits turning blue and dying right in front of them wasn't there.
An ends-justifies-the-means mentality seems to have infected all aspects of American life. We're fixated on success at any price, even if it means winning uglier than Charles Laughton after a chemical peel. Sportsmanship, decency, honesty, and fair play are all paid about as much attention as Moneypenny at a Bond girls' reunion.
If we look at society as a huge dysfunctional family, then the relationship we have with our professional athletes resembles one between a codependent spouse and the abuser. In our minds, despite all we've accomplished as adults, we're still the pathetic little twerps who got picked last for all the dodge-ball games, and we're still so desperate to be accepted by the jocks that we're willing to let them sit on us during lunch and fart right in our faces. We take their abuse because that way, we're sure that they know we love them.
And we continue to buy the double-decker tacos and antiperspirant they hawk, and allow ourselves to be gouged ever deeper on ticket prices, and condone the kind of off-the-field misconduct that would get you 86'd from Caligula's mailing list.
What does it say about us when we confer hero status on a guy just because he can play a game. Why wasn't O.J. properly disciplined the first time he ever slapped his wife around? What about the second time or the third? The fortieth or the fiftieth? It's time to wake up and smell the overpriced peanuts, the fossilized popcorn, and the syrup-needs-adjusting lukewarm soda and realize that the same standards for behavior apply to everyone, and that a wife-beating thug is a wife-beating thug whether he lives in a mobile home full of bowling trophies or a mansion full of Heisman Trophies.
We've given these monsters life, and we cut them more slack than the jaws of the studio audience at a taping of Hee-Haw, and you know something? It has got to stop. If these guys are to be treated like heroes and paid like heroes, well, then, goddammit, they should act like heroes. Wealth and adulation carry a price.
So, let me propose some very simple rules, rules we're all supposed to adhere to but somehow, just like in high school when the guys on the football team got to skip assembly on the day of the big game, pro athletes seem to be oftentimes immune to:
When you're on the clock, give it all you've got, be a magnanimous winner and a gracious loser. When you're off the clock, don't carry weapons, don't get into fistfights with fans, don't expose yourself in public, get your blowjobs from people who are of legal age, don't drive recklessly, stay away from the Bolivian marching powder, don't pull a gun on civilians, don't gamble illegally, and pay your fucking taxes.
All right, that takes care of the Dallas Cowboys.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The Prison System
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but our prison system is as out of control as Billy Idol on Ecstasy at the Hawaiian Tropic finals. The day a convicted child murderer can give the family of the victim the finger is the day our system of punishment is as worthless as the man who gave it.
Premium cable, weight rooms, basketball courts, and conjugal visits, amazingly enough, have not thrown a paralyzing fear of returning to prison into the habitual offender. No. Criminals don't fear prison for the simple fact that life there is often the same if not, for some of them, better than the life outside.
Prison is getting way too costly. It has been estimated that keeping a guy behind bars can cost upward of $20,000 a year. You know, it would be a lot cheaper just to put him in a Motel 6.
Because of the current Get Tough on Crime campaign, policies like Three Strikes and You're Out, and the fact that many of the Clintons' friends have recently been getting caught, overcrowding has become epidemic in our prisons, with two men often sharing an eight-by-ten-foot cell. Well, you know what? People in New York City pay handsomely to live in similar conditions, except in Manhattan, when you don't even get the courtesy of a pack of cigarettes for your trouble, all right?
Our system actually lets inmates sue if they don't like the guards or the food or the work or the reception on the giant screen TV. Why are they able to sue? They broke the law, they shouldn't get to use it anymore.
The purpose of a prison is to protect the community from bad people. And let's get that cleared up too. These are bad people. There comes a time in your life when you just don't have time for excuses and you have to cut through all the bullshit and say there is good and there is evil and some people choose to be good and some people choose to be evil. Many people who are sent to prison, even though they may have been molested, beaten, and deprived of the recommended daily dose of folic acid when they were kids still made a choice to be evil. And it's very easy under the guise of compassion to say that these prisoners should be given perks.
But where, may I ask, is the compassion for the victim? My compassion begins and ends with the person wearing the toe tag. And trust me, you out there who have yet to lose your Billy Jack cherry, your sense of compassion is going to change dramatically once you're staring down the business end of a sawed-off shotgun while some foul-smelling extra-Y-chromosomed feral Gary Killmore wanna-be is demanding a week's salary out of your cash register. Suddenly all bets are off. And you're changing your tune faster than Elvis Costello on Saturday Night Live. You'll want that guy convicted, and when he gets to prison you'll want him passed around like a joint at the Dennis Hopper estate.
You know, there's a big brouhaha over bringing back chain gangs. The ACLU says chain gangs violate the human rights of prisoners. Oh, yeah?
Where was the ACLU when the prisoner was violating the human rights of the guy whose head he cut off with an ax? You've got upward of a thousand men in a confined space with energy to burn... I say you put 'em to work. Our infrastructure's crumbling, our beaches are filthy, public buildings are in disrepair, my koi pond needs a good skimming ... We are ignoring a valuable source of free labor. Hell, think of how many Kathie Lee Gifford jogging suits the population of Sing Sing could sew in one day.
You know, the problem with liberal prison-reform advocates is they confuse "tough" with "inhumane." Denying prisoners privileges like cable TV and Penthouse magazine and feeding them crappy food isn't inhumane.
For God's sake, those are the kind of conditions I faced every week when I was a comic on the road. Look, prison is not supposed to be fun. It's not supposed to be pleasant. It is prison!
All right, don't put minor drug offenders in prison, I'll grant you that. Putting someone in prison for possession of drugs is like putting Tommy in a sensory dep-tank. It doesn't make sense. There are more drugs in prison than there are at a potluck at William Burroughs's house. And marijuana offenders should definitely not be put in with the most violent criminals. Have a separate pothead wing where they can gather and watch cartoons all day or play hacky-sack in the yard.
And I don't believe in just warehousing people.
Don't get me wrong, it would be great if we could, but they aren't square enough to stack well. Perhaps we should look into a system like the dry cleaners have. We just put 'em on hangers in alphabetical order, after a while we go in with a claim ticket, the line whizzes around till we get to the right one, we check carefully to see if they got the stain out, and
if not, back into the fucking dryer.
I believe in affording options, just don't be stupid about it. There should be a pathway out for people who want to follow it, but it should be straight and narrow and every time you divert from it, even minimally, you get a swift kick in the ass, not another cookie.
You think prisoners should have privileges? Okay, but let's compromise. They want cable television? Fine, give 'em a twenty-four-hour feed of the security cam at the convenience store they knocked off.
Conjugal visits? Sure. Doesn't Leona Helmsley still have some community service to work off? Movies? Well, put your best black and white striped Wonderbra on, Richard Speck, because we just got the director's cut of Nell. You want a weight room? You got a weight room. It's spelled w-a-i-t. It's your cell, assface. Now get in it and wait.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The Death of Common Sense
You know, lately I find myself recurringly gripped by an overwhelming desire to smack our entire country upside its collective head.
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but common sense in this country isn't just dead, it's been cremated and Woody Harrelson is smoking his ashes in his lucky skull bong. There is so little common sense today that Thomas Paine is spinning over in his grave so rapidly that they are thinking of hooking him up to a turbine to light up the Vegas strip.
You can't get to your office in the morning without colliding with some idiot who is trying to spawn upstream onto the elevator while everyone else is trying to get off.
You can't get in your car and not run into another idiot who pulls into the gas station with his fuel tank on the wrong side and then has to get instructions from a NASA team at Houston Control to figure out how to maneuver his car so that the tank is on the correct side. And you can't open a paper without reading about a mondo idiot who gets hurt or killed at a railroad crossing because they had to try and beat the train to get home in time to watch Charlene Tilton's salute to porcelain clowns on QVC.
Now, what the fuck has happened to us? A chalk outline is slowly being drawn around common sense and most Americans can't even identify the victim. We've gone from a nation of practical-minded, can-do Johnny- Get-Your-Guns and Rosie the Riveters to a bunch of sniveling crybabies who can't take it on the chin without running whining to our lawyers.
Christ, we're so bogged down in procedure, we make Radar O'Reilly look like Henry David Thoreau. You couple that with a Blanche DuBois-like denial of personal responsibility for the crap in our lives, and it's no wonder we're in a malaise that makes a bout of Epstein-Barr seem like a Laker Girl doing the Watusi after four triple lattes with a Dexatrim chaser.
You know, there's 800,000 lawyers in our country, and many of their livelihoods depend on the fact that we have got no common sense. My theory is that intelligence, like every other resource on this planet, has a finite amount. And as the population increases, the intelligence resource is being stretched thinner than the elastic in Marge Schott's G-string.
For instance, some old lady burns herself on a cup of coffee at McDonald's and sues for three million dollars because it's not her fault. And she wins. She wins! We have trouble convicting people who actually confess to murder, but this woman is able to take three mil off of McDonald's? If the judge had any common sense, the trial should have gone like "Will the plaintiff please rise? Yeah, it is your fault. You're stupid. Coffee is supposed to be hot. Why didn't you blow on it before you chugged it down like a pledge having his first beer? Get out of my courtroom, you stupid, stupid woman and take your pin-striped parasite lawyer with you. Next case.
Common sense has been defined as the quality of judgment necessary to know the simplest of truths. Well, nowadays simple truths are sighted about as often as Mary Hart on Crossfire.
In the last twenty years we seem to have completely lost the ability to obey the natural laws around us. We no longer recognize things that are shockingly wrong anymore. We can't tell up from down, right from left, absolutely one hundred percent not guilty from double-murdering scumbag guilty. And we are getting stupider. Are we stupid or were we always this stupid?
I watch these TV evangelists on late-night cable channel 66 and see the stadium full of people giving hard- earned money away to some chrome-head, sweat-covered barking con man dangling eternal salvation in front of these poor bastards like a leash in front of a chihuahua with one kidney.
Well, I'm just shocked at our lack of our common sense. Clearly, this crook couldn't be more full of shit if he were a Porta Potti at the Lollapalooza festival.
Now, to many people the government is the main foundry of not-know-how, turning the raw ore sent to it by votes and tax dollars into cold-rolled sheets of incompetence, which are then used in every aspect of our societal infrastructure. Reports on reports of subcommittees of commissions create a sea of paper that could float Rush Limbaugh's butter dish. All in all, practicality has about as much chance of being served by the federal government as a loud Texan does by a French waiter.
Folks, we don't need more government, we don't need more colleges; we need more schools that teach common sense. We don't need any more Einsteins who can tell you the principle of microwave cooking but can't figure out how to plug one in. I've always said, "Give someone a fish and they'll eat for a day, teach someone not to run a bass lure through their testicle and they will be able to fish for the rest of their life."
Where does common sense come from? It's slapped into the back of your head by your mother when you try and touch the hot stove. It's the Oldsmobile crest branded onto your forehead for all of eternity because you didn't want the seat belt to wrinkle your new shirt. Common sense is what gores you in the ass in Pamplona when you dress up like Topo Gigio and run in front of the bulls down a street that's narrower than Newt Gingrich's mind.
And most important, common sense is admitting when you don't have a big closer. I don't have a big closer.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
L'Affaire 0.J. 5/10/96
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but it's about time to put the Bronco in reverse and take a long, slow look back at the Trial of the Century.
Since October 3, 1995, the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial has reverberated in America's consciousness like the last chord of "A Day in the Life" played on a perpetual tape loop inside a squash court.
No amount of psychic sorbet seems to be able to cleanse our collective palate of the nasty taste left by l'Affaire Simpson. It lingers as stubbornly and unpleasantly as a drunken party guest passed out on the couch with an open bottle of Hai Karate in his pocket, and the questions that it's raised nag at us like Norman Bates's mom on a rainy Sunday.
You know, the Simpson jury didn't really "hand down" their decision, it's more like they pulled its pin and lobbed it at us. When the verdict was read, people did more double takes than Professor Irwin Corey at a Hawaiian Tropic competition.
And what have we learned from the trial now that we've chewed it over like Bob Dole gumming a wad of month-old saltwater taffy. Well? That the only way you'll ever get a trial by a jury of your peers in this country is if you happen to be ill informed and predisposed. I think some of these people made their minds up before the murder even happened. We also learned that if you're a black lawyer and you take a case where you are prosecuting a black man for a crime that you know in your heart he committed, it automatically makes you a sellout to your race. And we learned that if you're a convicted wife beater, it's okay to disgrace your dead spouse's memory by giving a sworn deposition where you say "She hit me first."
We also learned that empirical evidence doesn't seem to matter anymore. The sea of blood on the killer's hands and Bronco was so deep that it had its own undertow. The evidence was more overwhelming than a New York City taxi in August with all the windows shut. And how did Team O.J. combat that K-2-sized mound of proof? Well, their defense strategy involved more smoke and mirrors than a tire fire in
a brothel.
Well, you know something, they didn't convince me. Because even if you Martinize away all the blood, you are still left with a womanizing, wife-beating, egotistical, drug-using, possessive bully. And just for that I think he should be locked away tighter than Gordon Elliott's cummerbund at the Daytime Emmy Awards.
You know, I blame a lot of what happened at the trial on Lance Ito. I mean, a judge is supposed to control a trial, but Ito had about as much command of the room as Kathie Lee Gifford singing "You Light Up My Life" at the Apollo Theater.
Oh, well, Ito's gone. There's a new ringmaster now that the circus has died down but not completely pulled out of the station. O. J. Simpson is currently embroiled in a wrongful-death civil suit that could eat up whatever money he's got left from the last trial and his jackals-for- the-defense didn't make off with. The videotape he was hawking to help pay his legal fees netted about as much as the Philly cheese-steak concession at a k. d. lang concert. His lame attempts at reviving his flagging career and his destroyed credibility are as transparent as a Vargas girl's nightgown. So what's an O.J. to do?
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