Ranting Again Read online

  All right, so much for the dispassionate sarcasm. On the other side of the menu, I mean ledger, I don't think it's right to test cosmetics by trying them on animals first. Bugs Bunny's proclivity for dressing in drag to dupe Elmer Fudd notwithstanding, rabbits as a species aren't especially fond of being forced to wear more makeup than RuPaul at Mardi Gras. However, if we're talking essential medical research that will save human lives, well, I don't give a rat's ass about ... a rat's ass. You know, if it's between my heart or a gorilla's ... sorry, Koko. It's been nice signing with you.

  The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. That's from Trek. Pretty cool, huh?

  As long as there are Pomeranians in this country who live better than segments of the two-legged population, the animal rights activists' arguments are about as watertight as the set of A Night to Remember.

  Call it karma, call it luck of the biological draw, call it whatever you want to call it, Dr. Doolittle, but in the interspecies battle of the bands, humans rock the hardest. Now, get over it.

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

  Family

  In Washington recently, a special twelve-person committee was formed to address the problem or teenage pregnancy. You know, there used to be a two- person committee that handled that, it was called parents.

  Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but family life has never been the Saturday Evening Post cover the conservative right would have us believe it once was. I mean, where's the Norman Rockwell painting entitled "Son Announces He's Gay over Easter Ham," or "I Saw Mommy Soul-kissing the Sparkletts Guy," or the classic "Menendez Brothers Give Their Parents a .22-Caliber Explanation As to Why They Didn't Want to Eat Their Vegetables?”

  Face it, it ain't the old days. Lucy and Ricky have pushed their beds together and they're doin' it right in front of little Ricky now.

  What can I say about today's families? I can say that many inflict the kind of psychic damage on one another that would make John Cassavetes wince.

  We've all had that Thanksgiving dinner where your mother regales your date with the story of how difficult you were to toilet-train while you look down at the table and mutter, "You know I'm more fucked than this turkey." Christ, just thinking about it sends me screaming to my therapist for a double session of extended Jungian throw- down.

  You know, the American family is more unstable than a hostage situation being negotiated by Crispin Glover. The concept of family is constantly changing. It has been altered more times than Luther Vandross's tuxedo.

  My family was literally a nuclear family. I don't know about you, but my clan was so dysfunctional, MCI had an administrator on call twenty-four hours a day just to update our Friends and Family package.

  Why are families so screwed up? Because for many people, trying to raise children in this economy is like Tom Joad trying to pay the utility bills at San Simeon.

  They're struggling because just to stay afloat both parents have to work longer hours. Consequently, children have parents who are more exhausted than Paul Prudhomme bending over to tie his shoelaces.

  Y'know, when we look to politicians for answers, what do we get? They parrot the phrase "family values." "Family values" has become a bigger catchall than the front of Rush Limbaugh's shirt after an all-you-can-eat nacho blowout. It's been pounced on to promote school prayer and decry film and TV violence and end the welfare state and attack single mothers. Interestingly enough, the dogs who bark the loudest about family values—Dole, Gingrich, Gramm—all left their first wives. Put that little nugget in your irony hookah and smoke it. These people should pay more attention to their own lives and stop trying to run the lives of others.

  Newt Gingrich had an affair while married to his first wife, who had been his high school math teacher, a woman he divorced while she was recuperating from cancer surgery, and then he had to be pursued for adequate child support. Talk about the putz calling the kettle black.

  Y'know, we've become a country of "don't do as I do, do as I say." We live in a society where people do more finger-pointing than Bill Clinton at a Dunkin' Donut.

  Of course I'm oversimplifying, but that's what I'm paid to do. Look, folks, as troubled as families are, and as troubling as they can be, this essential societal unit must be preserved at all costs. For, you see, the human being is a social creature. Oh, some of us like to think that we're independent loners who enjoy the lives of craggy solitude that we've carved out for ourselves, but then we surround ourselves with a little tribe of like-minded curmudgeons that we can bitch to about what assholes everybody else is.

  All I'm saying is never take sides against the family, Fredo. 'Cause it's lonely out there in the rowboat.

  Even if your wrists and ankles are raw and chafed from your family ties, just remember, without them, well, who are you?

  Your family are the people who cut you the most slack and give you the most chances. I mean, when Richard Dawson says "Name something you find in a refrigerator" and you say "A dictionary" and the rest of America is screaming "You moron" at their TV sets, who's clapping and saying "Good answer! Good answer!"? Your family, that's who.

  Families keep everything in perspective. You can grow up, get out in the world, become a big success. You can control fortunes, corner the market, forecast financial trends, steer your company into the twenty-first century and beyond, but you go home to your family and you know who you are? You're just the kid who got tricked by his brothers into drinking a glass of pee.

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

  Ethnicity

  You know, this country is ethnically subdividing faster than the uranium-235 atoms in Fat Man and Little Boy. Our pleasantly bubbling societal jambalaya has boiled over into a provincial brew of suspicion, intolerance, and plain old not-niceness. Now, I'm not saying life has to be a fucking Coke commercial, but it would be great if I could tell a Polish joke once in a while without a horde of them descending on my house and unscrewing all my fucking lightbulbs, all right?

  Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but when did the contents of our melting pot go from creamy to super chunk?

  You know, if you're going to insist on telling me it's natural for all people of all races and all ethnicities to get along, well, you're living in a fantasy world full of elves and fairies. And, incidentally, elves and fairies didn't get along either.

  They hate each other. Elves refer to fairies as "flying Tinker Bell nancy boys," and fairies call elves "rainbow- humping suck pots." You know, really, it should be a constant source of amazement that our country does work on a daily basis and doesn't simply burst into a hundred million separate fistfights. So step out of the Hands Across America line and realize the brutal truth that human beings always have and always will actively look for people to not get along with.

  And this is true even within groups—northern Cali- fornians don't get along with southern Californians, Irish Catholics don't get along with Irish Protestants, circus clowns fight with birthday party clowns. Begrudging someone else's existence just happens to be the most convenient way to validate your own.

  And nowhere are these ego-driven prairie skirmishes more prevalent than in the Tigris and Euphrates of immigration, good old America.

  Now, listen, I am all for legal immigration. But I am unequivocally against illegal immigration. You know why? It's illegal, all right? Where is it written that you can la-di-da across the border at nine A.M. and get your teeth capped for free that afternoon? Fuckin' Canadians.

  In addition to immigration, our country also plays host to the United Nations, where the American taxpayer

  gladly foots the bill for sons of foreign leaders to escape date-rape charges through diplomatic immunity. I must admit, when people from other countries do abuse our largess, I just want to hire a welder to go up the Statue of Liberty and turn that welcoming torch into a giant middle finger.

  So I guess I am a little possessive about this great
big lug of a country that I call my own. But just a little possessive ... I'm not gonna play Pin the Blame on the Immigrants for all our country's problems. As a matter of fact, I believe America, much like Keith Richards, thrives on new blood.

  Foreigners do not come to this country and take our jobs. Face it, you don't want to be a busboy, or a maid, or the roadside Linus Pauling hawking citrus on the traffic island, or working the overnight shift at the Unocal station breathing gasoline fumes in a booth that's so small it makes the tiger cage in The Deer Hunter look like the Taj Mahal. These people are doing jobs that you would never dream of doing.

  So get off the immigrants. Truth be told, if you check everybody's family tree, you'd realize that everybody in this nation is an immigrant except for the Indians.

  I'm sorry, they're not called Indians anymore, they're called Casino Owner Americans. You know, we are all imported goods, it's just that from day one, people who came here by boat looked down on the people who came here by foot. Why so judgmental, comrades?

  Well, America's trivial mentality seems to be made up of equal parts of self-loathing and mistrust of others. Not surprising when you consider that most of us are only a generation or two removed from ancestors who escaped religious and political persecution to find themselves fighting their way up from being the designated bottom- feeders in the New World koi pond of opportunity. But now it's gotten silly. Now we are all isolated in pissed-off little cul-de-sacs of paranoia, guarding our precious wedge of pie from foreign nibbles so jealously that we have lost our ability to enjoy it.

  Bottom line. America is a polyglot, bastardized culture. It's been settled by wave after wave of immigrants who assimilated and became part of the establishment so that they could look down their noses at the next wave of immigrants. Therein lies the paradox of this great land of ours: Freedom of belief also means freedom to make fun of the 7-Eleven guy's sandals, all right?

  But poking fun is one thing and exclusionary discrimination another, and if we're not gonna walk the walk, it's time to take down Lady Liberty, which, by the way, was a gift from the stinky French, and replace her with the doorman from the Roxbury. Remember, xenophobia doesn't benefit anybody unless you're playing high-stakes Scrabble.

  On the other side of the coin, be it rupee, the drachma, the peso, baksheesh, or wampum, the favor of inclusion deserves the courtesy of assimilation.

  Make the effort. It's poor party manners to come to live in this country and then have a hissy fit because the parking signs aren't posted in Hmong, okay? And, uh, don't get uptight because your college is teaching courses on Emerson and Thoreau instead of seventeenth-century Javanese goatherd poets, all right? Don't take your kid out of school because her third-grade class made colored Easter eggs but didn't conduct any druid rituals. You're in America now, so open the closet door and start hanging up your pants and shirts.

  Yeah, this country's founding fathers are a bunch of dead rich white men, but they did set things up so you could come and sit at the table, so don't piss in the finger bowls, all right? Thank you. In return for unfettered economic opportunity and no government death squads, try to get along with your new stepmotherland, and don't be resentful if there's a set of house rules already in place.

  Go with the flow. Pay your taxes. Speak the language. Garlic is not a cologne. And for Christ's sake, left lane fast, right lane slow.

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

  Are Movies Getting Worse?

  Well, I see my film Murder at 1600 is now playing at the hudget theater across the street on a double bill with Benji Gets Stuck on a Leg. And my other opus, Bordello of Blood, you may remember, was in theaters for one weekend and then hopped on a turbo-rocket sled to the ninety-nine-cent bin. So, uh, who better than me to dim the lights, part the velvet curtains, and project some flickering images about the current state of the movies. And, hopefully, the audience will be listening.

  Now, 1 don't want to get off on a rant here, but between test audiences, exit polls, and focus groups, the creative filmmaking process is now about as spontaneous and inspired as a Jesse Helms bowel movement.

  Be honest, how many times have you gone to a multiscreen theater complex and just stood there, looking up at the marquees, trying to decide which movie sucked the least?

  And today's moviegoing experience is no joy itself. To all the moviegoers out there who think the term "talkie" refers to them, shut your blathering pie hole. Okay? Just because coincidentally the first time you ever told the actor up on the screen "Don't go in there," the actor didn't go in there ... that doesn't mean the actor actually heard you, okay. It would have happened anyway. I can guarantee you nowhere in the film's script does it say "Jerkoff in the audience who everybody hates decides what happens next." All right? So just sit back, stuff your fat fuck face with popcorn, and watch the film.

  And what's with the dancing candy film they run before the movie starts, huh? If the candy can dance, and, for that matter, play musical instruments, why should I get up, go to the snack bar, and buy the candy? Why can't it just walk down the fucking aisle and meet me at my seat, okay? Let's go, goobers, put down the trombone, come here, and let me eat you. And this is the nineties. Can't we get a condom on that hot dog that jumps into the bun, for Christ's sake, okay?

  And why is it that the Coke costs more than the tickets? You see, that's how they get you. They serve you a cup of Coke so large, Ted Kennedy could drop a fucking Oldsmobile into it, which means halfway through the movie you're so bloated you have to step outside for twenty minutes of dialysis, which means you have to come back the next day and see the movie again to find out the part you missed.

  And unless the rating of the movie I'm watching contains more Xs than Dick Weber's bowling score sheet, the floor should not be sticky. Okay? I've been to some theaters where before you sit down you have to decide where you want your feet to be throughout the movie, because once you set them on that floor, that's where they're at, okay. And at the end of the movie it's just easier to step out of your shoes and leave them behind.

  And have you noticed that as the popcorn bags get bigger, the screens get smaller? You know what I think? I think they ought to make the entire plane out of the stuff they make the black box out of.

  I leave a movie now, I'm in the lobby buying T-shirts, coffee mugs, videos, beach towels, and Willem Dafoe bendable, live-action figures. You know, the only part of the movie I'm not buying is the plot.

  And that leads us to the films themselves. These days, by the time a story is actually made into a movie, it has been passed around like a goatskin flask at a Blue Oyster Cult concert. The script has been exposed to more secondhand guessing than schizophrenics week on Jeopardy!

  And you know something? Hollywood's solution is to always throw more money at the problem. Now, last year, a lot of low-budget films were up for the Academy Awards, so you know what that means. That means this year Hollywood will be making a lot of low-budget films ... for a hundred million dollars.

  But here are some much simpler ways Hollywood can make better films.

  First up, instead of twenty independent films coming out each year that make us feel guilty because we can't see them all, save us the hassle, make one huge movie. Like last year, wouldn't it have been so much better if there was one big film about a retarded chain-smoking burn victim who crashed his plane in the desert then has a nervous breakdown after trying to learn how to play the piano and eat french fried potaters at the same time so he moves to Fargo, North Dakota, and befriends a young boy by stuffing his abusive stepfather into a wood chipper and then at the end of the film he is shown the money?

  Secondly, the end of every Merchant-Ivory film should be accompanied by the following announcement: All right, ladies, you now owe your man some head.

  And finally, the most moronic thing about modern movies has to be the catch phrase, the little signature line a performer feels he needs to use as a Pavlovian pork chop to wave in front of his devoted a
udience. It's just disrespectful to use some tired old hackneyed phrase as a lame crutch.

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

  The Armed Forces

  Does anybody remember how innocent being in the service was in Gomer's days, huh?

  Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but it appears our military has become an overpriced 4-H Club rife with hazing, homophobia, harassment, and hypocrisy and a hopeless money pit dug ever deeper with million-dollar shovels and billion-dollar buckets.

  I know we need the military. I know that without them, America has enemies who'd be down on us like Luciano Pavarotti on a ballpark frank. And when I talk about the military, I am not speaking about the regular Joes, the men and women who have given their lives for this country or the millions who have served honorably. I have to speak to the people who run the military—the generals, the Congress, and the squares in the Pentagon.