New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (19 page)

 
Potty Pooper
 
NEW RULE
 
Get rid of the “baby changing station” in the men’s room. Let’s stop pretending that it has been, or ever will be, used. You’re only tempting a short homeless man to use it as a Murphy bed.
Puck Off
 
NEW RULE
 
The National Hockey League must tell us the moment their hockey strike is settled—so we know exactly when we can all stop not caring.
Pyramid Scheme
 
 
NEW RULE
 
The USDA must create a food pyramid designed by someone whose brain hasn’t been ravaged by malnutrition. Recently, they unveiled the official new food pyramid, in which they replaced the foods I’m supposed to eat with a color code. Judging from this, I can’t tell if I’m supposed to have more broccoli or the CIA is picking up chatter in Tora Bora.
Electile Dysfunction
 
NEW RULE
 
P
olitical conventions are important, and therefore they deserve to be broadcast and viewed in their entirety. You can’t call everyone in Washington morons if you don’t know exactly what it is that makes them morons.
The conventional wisdom about conventions is that they’re no longer worthy of our attention because they’re too “produced” and there’s no “drama.” You want drama? Hitch a ride home with Ted Kennedy. We’re picking a president here, not the last comic standing. The media treats these conventions like pointless interruptions of their real job, which seems to be covering LA’s latest celebrity murder trial. No surprises, no excitement. Hey, you know what’s exciting? It’s exciting when politicians get drunk with power because people aren’t keeping an eye on them. No one expected we’d retaliate for 9/11 by attacking ... Iraq! Whoo, unpredictable, exciting!
And the reason the conventions are so “produced” is because if they weren’t, the networks wouldn’t air them at all. To me, the sight of John Kerry rushing through his 2004 acceptance speech in a cold sweat so that he wouldn’t go overtime and force viewers to miss the first 2 minutes of
Elimidate
was one of the saddest moments in the history of democracy. The man is laying out his plan for ruling the globe, and we’re treating him like it’s audition night at the Improv and he just got the light.
I’m not saying everyone has to pore over issues and read everything that’s out there—we can’t even get our president to do that. But the conventions are one of the only times when the election isn’t reduced to sound bites and attack ads, when you can get to know these people a little. It’s not exciting enough just to hear Teresa Heinz Kerry? Sorry, next time we’ll get Justin Timberlake to whip out her tit.
Maybe the conventions aren’t boring; maybe it’s the people who don’t participate in their own society who are boring. Once every 4 years, the two parties put on a pageant for you: “These are our faces; these are our voices; this is our vision of America’s future.”You’d think that would be a little more interesting than reruns of
Yes, Dear
.
 
BILL MAHER
R
 
NEW RULES
 
Racy Language
 
 
NEW RULE
 
Don’t punish rednecks for being rednecks. NASCAR fined Dale Earnhardt Jr. for publicly saying the words “It don’t mean shit.” You can’t fine a redneck for that. That’s not just an expression to them; it’s the entire redneck philosophy. Lost your job? It don’t mean shit. Wife run off with the UPS man? It don’t mean shit. The entire rationale for a war proves to be false? It don’t mean shit. That’s the beauty of the lifestyle. If rednecks had to pretend they cared about stuff, they’d be yuppies.
Ranch Dressing
 
 
NEW RULE
 
Skip the truck. President Bush is down on the ranch, and we all know what that means—lots of pictures of him in that pickup truck, as if he’s going into town to pick up a bale of hay. Okay, we get it. You’re a “rancher.” You’re “clearing brush.” You’re a “Washington outsider.” You’re a huge country fan. Unfortunately, that country is Saudi Arabia.
 
Rat Patrol
 
NEW RULE
 
No paying kids to tattle. A high school in Georgia says it will pay kids up to $100 to rat out friends who steal, cheat, or drink. Just like the Bible says. Because it’s never too early to look into your own heart and ask yourself: What would Judas do?
Red Carpet Munching
 
 
NEW RULE
 
If you think the idea of Angelina Jolie sleeping with another woman is an abomination, you’re gay. Normally I don’t go for the idea that people who really hate gays are just closeted gays themselves, but allow me to make an exception. If you can’t see the beauty in that sapphic scenario, you’ve got more unresolved gay issues than that dude from
Silence of the Lambs.
This is what the pope thinks of when he masturbates. It’s not an abomination. It’s what should be replacing baseball as our national pastime.
Reel Time
 
NEW RULE
 
Stop giving awards to movies just because they’re long. It only encourages them. While I was watching
The Hours,
my popcorn actually grew into a stalk. Remember, if I wanted to be bored shitless, I’d read.
REM Job
 
NEW RULE
 
Don’t try to talk to me about any dream you’ve had that I wasn’t in. There’s a very limited audience of people interested in your dreams. That’s why they’re only showing in your head.
Residential Library
 
NEW RULE
 
You can throw someone out of the library for how they sound but not for how they smell. A new law in San Luis Obispo says librarians can evict homeless people for their smell. Hey, lonely librarians—don’t think of them as homeless; think of them as single. I know most librarians won’t see much of a future with some babbling drunk with a drug habit and a messiah complex, but hey, it worked for Laura Bush.
Roidian Slip
 
NEW RULE
 
If you’re surprised to find out that baseball players use steroids, we need to find out what drugs
you’re
on. It was a dead giveaway when Jason Giambi gained 24 pounds in his mandible. It’s time to get the performance-enhancing drugs out of baseball and back where they belong—in some octogenarian’s testicles.
Row v. Wave
 
NEW RULE
 
God hates cruise ships. After years of punishing them with simple fires and plagues, he finally hit one with a tidal wave—a personal tsunami. Folks, climb off. They’re filth. You could get the clap from their postcards. If cruise ships weren’t damned by God and all that’s holy, why would Disney own one?
Rx Shun
 
NEW RULE
 
Enough with the boner pill ads. These pills were intended to be marketed toward those with a medical necessity, not as Love Potion #9. If you have occasional trouble getting it up for the wife, try the natural method: Close your eyes and pretend she’s the babysitter.
Hypocratic Growth
 
NEW RULE
 
N
o one has their shit together at age 22.
Yes, like many others, George Bush avoided serving in Vietnam, but the truth is, I don’t really care if our president showed up for all of his National Guard jumping jacks in 1973. We all made mistakes when young and chasing a buzz—Bush blew off his calisthenics, Saddam gassed his own people, I bought the John and Yoko album where they just farted for an hour into a tape recorder.
The phrase “youthful indiscretions” is redundant because how many discreet young people do you know? The people you need to worry about are not the ones who
sowed their
wild oats but the ones who
didn’t.
Michael Jackson had to wait till he was an adult to have a childhood, and I think we all see how well that turned out.
Go back far enough in any great man’s life, and you will eventually get to the stuff he did or said before he was great or even a man. Don King started out life in Cleveland as a corrupt, murderous thug, but then—okay, bad example.
But the point remains: Trying to define a person’s current self by their past self is the worst kind of gotcha. Our mistakes from the past are just that—mistakes, and most of the time it was necessary to make them in order to become the wiser person we then became.
You
never got drunk and pissed yourself? Or sold drugs to schoolchildren? Or panicked when you couldn’t get it up at a bachelor party and killed a hooker?
Yes, if only hindsight could come without having to mess up first. And believe me, I have the platform shoes to prove that one. But to exploit youthful mistakes for political gain is—well, let’s just say, when you get older, you might look back and regret it.

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