Where The Rubber Meets The Road

It happened while I was on the line with the Charter Communications automated tech support.

The stilted, creepily cheery faux-female voice was droning on in the usual blend of dumbed-down legalese and unhelpful suggestions when I grew irritated enough with the lack of results that I spoke the magic word.
I’ve learned to use the word, since most of those automated “help” systems are not remotely helpful. The magic word is, “person”. It is the word which will whisk you away from the horribly stunted, electronic options and sends you to a living, breathing human being who understands at least six or seven words of English.

Here’s a tip: learn Hindi. You’ll get so much more out of your tech support experience.

But my saying the magic word wasn’t the “it” that happened. This was:

Creepy Automated Voice: Okay. I. Have. The. Account. Information. What. Is. The. Nature. Of. Your. Call? If. It. Is. Tech. Support. Say. “Tech”. “Supp-”
Me (interrupting): Person.
Creepy Automated Voice: No. I. Think. We. Are. Doing. Fine.

After visions Emilio Estevez cleared from my head, I said, “WHAT?!? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!? YOU DON’T THINK, YOU PIECE OF ELECTRONIC SHIT!”
Okay, that’s not what I said. It’s what I thought. Actually, I hung up, and called another line to talk to someone in tech support.

“No, I think we are doing fine.”
That’s what they think of us.
Fuck Charter Communications. Their product is shoddy, their “service” is a joke, and if there was a God, they would have disappeared from existence after they went bankrupt. If I ever find out who made the decision to authorize a fucking machine to refuse to help me, I’m going to make his/her life a living hell. I’ve got the time. Ask the dude from the Sprint Call Center in Omaha, Nebraska, who, assured of his anonymity, lied to me about refunding money they’d illegally taken from my bank account for a bill that had already been paid. Anonymity? Not in the information age, dude.
He regretted his lie. A lot. I have gigs in Omaha.

It’s begun, people. They’re teaching machines to hate us. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be at your door – soon.

I hear it all too often: “What’s wrong with making money?!?”

Of course, this little bit of misdirection is usually delivered in an angry tone by someone who is oblivious to the nonsensical non sequitur it is. Whenever the argument is made that perhaps those who have benefited greatly from the past 30 years of deregulation, massive decrease in taxation, massive public subsidy, criminal refusal to enforce laws protecting labor, the environment, public interest – you get the idea; you’ll be treated to a rousing chorus of that dogmatic propaganda line so inextricably driven into the public consciousness:

“What’s wrong with making money?”

As if (insert any of the following: a national health care plan, tax cuts or subsidies or services or any help whatsoever for the poor, returning taxes on the superwealthy to a minute fraction of their pre-Reaganomics levels, etc) has any effect on the Working Joe who so vigorously defends the very people who keep him poor and wretched – save possibly a positive one.

So, listen, Working Joe: There’s nothing wrong with you making money. But then, you are not a global corporate CEO with a multimillion dollar golden parachute, who feeds off the public trough.

Yes, that’s right, the public trough. You see, we pay taxes, and that money is funneled into research and development in the state/Pentagon system. This R&D eventually produces technological breakthroughs, which then the public again pays private institutions to apply in the marketplace (which, not incidentally, is full of even more subsidies, tax breaks, and protections, all at the expense of guess who), with all the profit channeled back into those private corporations, further enriching the superwealthy.

What’s wrong with making money? The wrong people are making it. You pay in, and someone else gets richer. Isn’t that your whole objection to welfare? Because that’s what it is: welfare for those who couldn’t possibly need it less.

Nobody’s asking for redistribution of wealth, class warfare, or any of the other buzz phrases kicked out by the monumental public “relations” machine that greases the gears of the monumental high-tech feudalism machine. At best, it’s a re-redistribution of wealth, where in the people (that means you) are allowed to reap a tiny measure of benefit for all the money they give to that fragile, teetering-on-the-edge, barely-making-ends-meet class known as The Top 1%.

Turn Faux News back on and get fed another line of propaganda; yours is getting old.

More so than any election I can remember, the 2008 Presidential race exhausted the public’s interest in politics. I know I took a break from sifting through the mountains of total horseshit being spewed by both sides (and their shills), even if I kept up with major happenings.

So it was a novelty when I flipped through the talk radio stations, listening to hacks thump their mics with clumsy talking points, until I overhead this next bit on The Thom Hartmann Show:

To be fair to Mr. Hartmann, he wasn’t exactly agreeing with his guest. But he was far from the contemptuous denunciation said guest deserved. Apparently an apologist for the coal industry, the guest listened patiently to Thom Hartmann’s citation of evidence that burning coal has a negative effect on the environment, and mentioned that the polar ice caps were melting faster than ever. His guest replied that other scientists have claimed otherwise, and in fact, we may be headed for a cooling period should we decide to “go green”.

Really? Really?!?

Are you really suggesting that if we stop burning coal, we’ll hurt the environment? Do you understand that you’re actually saying these words out loud, and people can hear them?
Listen, lady, this is our very survival as a species we’re talking about, not some cute fucking game of public opinion. You don’t spin environmental disaster, and you don’t play chicken with Mother Nature, because Mother Nature doesn’t flinch. She drives a mailbox through your cranium, and drowns your whole fucking family, and if you don’t believe me, ask the city of New Orleans.
If you’re so lacking any semblance of a survival instinct, just scrub your molars with buckshot and get it over with.

These are the moments that fill the foundation of hate upon which I stand and shake an enraged and impotent finger at corporate America.

I’ve just about had it with stupid people today. To be fair, I don’t blanket name all people who say or do stupid things as stupid. No, I discriminate. There are people who say or do stupid things out of simple ignorance, for instance.

I have (usually) no problem with ignorance. I know, it begets racism, class warfare, religion, ad nauseum, but ignorance isn’t a fixed or permanent thing. It is a condition we all find ourselves in at one time or another, and it’s usually closely associated with embarrassment. I find myself ignorant of something nearly every day, and reflexively shoot up with the only antidote: information. I learn.

Sadly, others do not. There is a brand of ignorance that has become so pervasive over the past, say, 30 years that you can’t swing a fiberglass axe handle without hitting one of the sufferers of such ignorance – and perhaps that should be the law. I call it willful ignorance. And I’ve about reached my tolerance limit for these fucking people.

You’ve seen them. You saw one when John McCain took the microphone away from her in 2008 because what she said was so completely at odds with reality that even his campaign couldn’t spin it. And they somehow spun Sarah Palin, for fuck’s sake.

Willful ignorance differs from the garden variety in a number of ways, but chief among them is that sufferers of willful ignorance know they are ignorant and refuse to learn. Oftentimes – when presented with factual information that proves their ignorant belief wrong – these people react angrily, violently, and disproportinately so. There is an actual psychological disorder that describes this: Delusional Disorder, the indicators of which are:

1. The patient expresses an idea or belief with unusual persistence or force.
2. That idea appears to exert an undue influence on his or her life, and the way of life is often altered to an inexplicable extent.
3. Despite his/her profound conviction, there is often a quality of secretiveness or suspicion when the patient is questioned about it.
4. The individual tends to be humorless and oversensitive, especially about the belief.
5. There is a quality of centrality: no matter how unlikely it is that these strange things are happening to him, the patient accepts them relatively unquestioningly.
6. An attempt to contradict the belief is likely to arouse an inappropriately strong emotional reaction, often with irritability and hostility.
7. The belief is, at the least, unlikely.
8. The patient is emotionally over-invested in the idea and it overwhelms other elements of his psyche.
9. The delusion, if acted out, often leads to behaviors which are abnormal and/or out of character, although perhaps understandable in the light of the delusional beliefs.
10. Individuals who know the patient will observe that his belief and behavior are uncharacteristic and alien.

– Munro, A. (1999) Delusional Disorder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58180-X

Does this sound like someone you know? Someone, for instance, who believes that homosexuality is a choice, or that climate change isn’t happening, or that Seinfeld is funny?

But let me get to the subgroup of people who are really pissing me off: The Willfully Ignorant People With No Sense Of Irony Or Hypocrisy. I meet them, see them, hear them, and/or bury one of their bodies almost weekly. Here are a few typical (if made up) examples:

Idiot: The fucking immigrants are ruining everything.
Me, stealing from Bobcat Goldthwait: That didn’t sound like Navajo to me.
Idiot: My name is Lou Dobbs.

Complete Idiot: My favorite comedian is Dane Cook.
Me: You mean you like Louis C.K., Emo Phillips, and Demetri Martin, since Cook ripped off their material. Also, he’s reportedly a gi-normous asshat.
Complete Idiot: He makes more money than you.
Me: And I make more money than Lenny Bruce did; does that make me better?
Complete Idiot: Who’s Lenny Bruce?
Me: (Stab)

Complete Fucking Idiot: I’m not racist or anything, but-
Me: (Stab)

In this respect, we have lost the Culture War. America isn’t being “dumbed down”. It’s already happened, and I see the result every day. Every time someone falsely accuses me of the very thing they just did. Every time I have to explain to someone what they just read. Every time they try to legislate “good” behavior. Every time I’m forced to watch the next big piece of shit Hollywood production – or even when I’m not forced to watch.

Every time I fail to reason with someone because they don’t even have the semantic tools to understand not just what I’m saying, but what they are saying, I hate them a little more. And I’m tired of being nice about it.

I didn’t just get married. I inherited a family. A wife, a boy, and a girl.

For most of my life, however, I’ve been Single Guy™ – Uncle Randy. (Now I owe Larry Reeb ten bucks.) Anyway, being Single Guy has forced me to listen to an unending stream of complete and total horseshit about parenting. There is no class or group of people quite so arrogant, full of themselves, and bullshit prone as parents. Except comics. But we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about you, parents.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

It’s. Not. That. Hard.

Yes, you lose your free time. Yes, they’re demanding. Yes, your finances are drained, your house is a mess, the back seat of your car is now a developed civilization comprised of beings evolved from french fries, cookie crumbs, chocolate milk, and adolescent saliva, and your household blazes through three hundred seventy-seven thousand, four hundred and sixteen kid-sized cups per hour.

And? Is that the best you have, parents?

Because it doesn’t sound like it’s hard to me. It sounds like it’s inconvenient. Let’s change a few of the oft-repeated lines by smug, condescending parents by replacing the word “hard” with “inconvenient”, and see how they sound:

“Man, you have no idea how [inconvenient] being a parent is. Raising kids is so [inconvenient]. It’s [inconvenient] to get up so early and spend all day taking care of them. You get to go off and do whatever you want, but it’s [inconvenient] for me. My dick hasn’t been [inconvenient] in years.”

Okay, the last one doesn’t count. But does this sound like the noble work of long-suffering-yet-steadfast people? Or does it sound like the whining of thin-skinned, infantile narcissists who’s lives have been disrupted by their own decisions?

And forget “sounds like”, I know. I live it. Every day, I spend my free time teaching, feeding, cleaning up, correcting bad behavior, breaking up fights, thinking of more enriching activities than watching The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, checking homework, ad infinitum. None of which gets into the emotional drain. My life has been drastically altered; no more are the days of being able to sleep until noon, play Grand Theft Auto for six straight hours, say “fuck” any time I felt like it, get naked and try to pick up a nickel with my dickhole – you get the idea.

And yet, it’s still not that hard. You had one life before; you have another now. Is it really any less your life? And if so, doesn’t that say more about you than it does the Single Guy/Gal next to you?

Shut your pie hole and try to enjoy the life you have. That’s a little tip from your Uncle Lar Randy.

And that reminds me of the time I gave Mila Kunis a pedicure with Adam West’s femur.