New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (17 page)

Win One for the Groper

 

NEW RULE

 

L
et the two men America really wants to see run for president run for president. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher has introduced a constitutional amendment suggesting immigrants like—oh, I don’t know—Arnold Schwarzenegger be allowed to run for president. Fine, but then you have to let Democrats run Bill Clinton again. Each tribe gets its greatest warrior. Why aren’t we doing that anyway?

Where is the twisted logic to the 22nd Amendment, which says you can’t be president if you’ve done it twice? Reese Witherspoon’s done two
Legally Blonde
movies—next time, does it have to be Lil’ Kim?

And in a nation of immigrants, we tell immigrants they can’t run? Sorry, Amie, you can take that what-a-country, immigrant‘s-dream, anything’s-possible crap and put it where it belongs—in a speech nominating a former town drunk from Texas.

Not to be cruel to the fine candidates who are already running for president in 2008, but why are we preventing ourselves from selecting from the top of our political gene pool? Even under general anesthesia, Clinton is more exciting than anyone else the Democrats have. A debate between Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger? You could put that on Pay-Per-View. Hell, you could put it on the Spice Channel.

And that’s the beauty of this matchup: They’d have to stick to the issues because the personal stuff would just be too devastating. The mudslinging would have to get very nuanced: “I never lied
under oath
about the asses I grabbed!” We’re talking about two dudes who’ve smoked pot and love cigars and hummers. It would be the “you don’t want to go there” election. So that’s my proposal: The 22nd Amendment, for Article II, and then we can bring it on—the Terminator versus the Sperminator. Conan versus Onan.
Alien
versus
Predator.

The Crying Games

 

NEW RULE

 

O
ne of the guy networks like ESPN has to broadcast an old-school version of the Olympics that leaves out all the “Hallmark moments” and just shows sports.

Adolf Hitler once used the Olympics to demonstrate that Aryans were strong; NBC uses them to show the world that Americans like to cry a lot. Look, I understand that everything nowadays has to be rendered bloated, syrupy, dumbed down, and sentimental—this is America, after all. But for those of you out there who may be too young to remember a time before Oprah ruined everything: In the old days when we watched the Olympics, it wasn’t continuous sob-sister profiles interrupted by the occasional sporting event—it was just the events. There was none of this stuff about the heartbreak and pain it took to become the best damn kayaker a man can be. It was enough just to watch a man throw a long stick or a big iron ball. His mom’s chemotherapy, his sister’s glass eye, and his dog, a wounded combat vet—they never entered into it. We weren’t told whose grandpa was paralyzed in a tractor accident or that the decathlon guy has a cleft palate and overcame a lifetime of bed-wetting to go for the gold, because if someone had told us that, we would have said, “Hey, if I wanted to sit through hours of melodramatic personal backstory, I’d pay attention to my date.”

Take Nancy Pitts of the US women’s wrestling team. Two years ago, the unthinkable happened to Nancy—she was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Happily, it was caught in time, and she was able to go back to her usual training regimen: 3 hours of weight lifting, followed by an hour of shaving.

Somehow the press now gives the Olympics the sort of coverage once reserved for a war, though actual wars are treated like sporting events. NBC aired 1,200 hours of Olympic coverage, 400 times more than they gave the Democratic convention, but what the heck, that was just about war and peace in the nuclear age—the Olympics are about swimming. Oh, if only they were! If only we could get the swimming without the three-hankie immigrant parents, the latchkey kids, the single moms, and all the brave athletes who rose before dawn and traveled hours in the frosty silence of the Iowa winter just to meet their drug dealers.

The Olympic Games are that rarest of events, a coalition of a great variety of nations coming together for a purpose other than killing Iraqis. So please, media barons, just give us one channel where it’s simply about the competition and the belief that how high a man can hop is also a measure of who has the best country.

And this way you can keep the focus-group-approved drivel disguised as in-depth analysis where it belongs: in the coverage of presidential elections.