New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (22 page)

Topps and Bottoms
 
NEW RULE
 
If you need to shave, and you still collect baseball cards, you’re gay. If you’re a kid, the cards are keepsakes of your idols. If you’re a grown man, they’re pictures of men.
Trial Separation
 
 
NEW RULE
 
Whenever a woman is missing, arrest her husband. Who else would want her dead? She’s a housewife in Salt Lake City; she didn’t double-cross the Medellin cartel. Marriage is a blessed union of souls. It’s also Motive One. In fact, at weddings, the preacher should just say, “I now pronounce you person-of-interest and wife.”
Truck Stop
 
NEW RULE
 
Buying a car with an outdoorsy name doesn’t make you Daniel Boone. Explorer, Navigator, Mountaineer, Forester—why don’t we just call it what it is, a giant Ford Fuck-You-Mobile.
Crude Awakening
 
NEW RULE
 
S
top whining about gas prices. Gas costs a lot because we have to find it, bribe or kill the people who live on top of it, extract it, refine it, ship it, and pump it. You’ll pay $2 a gallon and you’ll like it because you know what the alternative is: riding on the bus with poor people.
How come we have cars with global positioning systems, satellite radio, and voice-activated Web access, and we still power them with the black goop that you have to suck out of the ground? Hate to tell you this, folks, but gas doesn’t cost too much, it costs too little.
I know, you hear about gas prices being over $2 a gallon, and it makes you nearly choke on your $4 latte. We bitch about gas, but adjusted for inflation, it’s the same price it was back when the pope was a Nazi. And it’s not the fault of ExxonMobil, either. That’s like Kirstie Alley saying her problem is that Arabs control all the fudge.
Anyone who’s been to Europe knows that the price of gas over there is just a picture of an arm and a leg. That’s because they tax it heavily, and we don’t. How come we Americans accept that you can overtax cigarettes just because they are bad, but that somehow burning oil into the atmosphere is okay? You can’t smoke in a bar, but you can drive through a restaurant. A little smoke from a cigar is intolerable, but a lot from a Hummer is no problem.
Of course, the Hummer is made by General Motors, the owner of other gas-guzzling fuck-you-mobiles like the Escalade and the Suburban, and they just lost a billion dollars in one quarter because it suddenly got a lot less sexy to drive one of those fake macho vehicles when it started to cost a hundred bucks to fill it up. Nobody’s dick is that small.
Plus, does anybody remember the ’70s? GM has been down this road before: They got filthy rich selling giant cars that suddenly people didn’t want after gas prices went up. Cut to the Japanese gloating. Now they’re back to gloating because they own the patent for the hybrid car. GM could have had a piece of it, but they said it didn’t make “economic sense.” Hey, you just lost a billion dollars in 3 months. You don’t have any economic sense!
So, let me remind everyone of this: The most vulnerable point of the Earth is the atmosphere, which acts like a giant mirror, absorbing 95 percent of the sun’s energy. When I heard that, I said, “Honey, that sounds important!” And I’m not even married.
If we don’t protect the atmosphere, ultraviolet radiation will fry us like ants under a magnifying glass. I know these kind of facts aren’t in the Bible, but maybe we should think about them anyway. After all, this could even affect Tom and Katie. It’s not a real threat, like an activist judge, but it’s kind of important—because, in the last half century, this precious atmosphere of ours has thinned by 40 percent. And this worries me because in the exact same time frame, my hair has thinned by 40 percent.
It worked out for me, but the Earth may not be so lucky.
 
BILL MAHER
U
 
NEW RULES
 
Unchained Malady
 
NEW RULE
 
Stop scaring us with diseases we’ll never get. First it was SARS, then it was monkeypox, West Nile, and now Asian bird flu, which doesn’t scare me because I’m not a sparrow in Thailand. Mysterious Asian diseases don’t just come knocking on your door. Unless you’re Neil Bush.
Giving Till It Hurts
 
NEW RULE
 
T
errorist organizations can’t also be charities. You can’t spend half your time building hospitals and schools and the other half blowing them up. For one thing, it will confuse President Bush, who won’t know if you’re with us, against us, or faith-based.
As the government report on 9/11 made clear—especially if you can read through a black Sharpie—claiming you’re a “charitable organization” is second only to saying “religion” when you want to make people lie down and let you get away with something criminal. People like the Saudis can get away with giving money to people like Hamas by saying “Hey, they’re a charity, too.” Yeah, Habitat for
In
humanity
.
Groups like Hamas say, “Don’t judge us because, besides bombings and murder, we also provide valuable community services.” Yes, and Mc-Donald’s has salads now, but that doesn’t make it a health food restaurant. It’s like how John Gotti’s neighborhood in Queens loved him because he threw a nice block party. You can’t claim you’re part of the Make-A-Wish Foundation if the wish is to drive every Jew in the world into the sea. Mothers Against Drunk Driving can’t also be a ring of call girls—although we’ve all heard the rumors.
The point is, you can’t do and be everything at the same time. That’s why President Bush always waits a week between wars before he proposes another tax cut for the rich. To far too many Muslims in the world, feeding children and knocking down the World Trade Center can both be considered “good works,” which is also how Hamas stays in business.
But we in the rest of the world don’t have to buy into this insane contradiction. If we don’t take a stand now, people will come to believe Hamas really is a legitimate charity, and then we’ll start getting come-ons from them in the mail, and Pam Anderson will have to start showing up at their fund-raisers with her tits hanging out. No one wants to see Joan Rivers on the red carpet with Zarqawi.
So, come on—we broke up the phone companies, can’t we separate “charity” from “bad-ass murder club”? Wouldn’t that be a start? And if we can accomplish that, then I predict that one day in the future, when Palestinians and Jews are living side by side in harmony, all of us sitting here today... will have been dead for 1,200 years.
 
BILL MAHER
V
 
NEW RULES
 
Vegetable Beef
 
 
NEW RULE
 
I don’t care how big your pumpkin is. It doesn’t reflect on anything you did. It just grew, like a brightly colored garden tumor. It’s not a personal achievement; it’s Bruce Vilanch in gourd form.
 
Vidal Tycoon
 
 
NEW RULE
 
Donald Trump must go even further with his hair and comb it completely over his face.
Vow Movement
 
NEW RULE
 
If gays aren’t allowed to redefine marriage, then neither can right-wing Christian zealots. Arkansas has a new marriage called “covenant marriage” that requires counseling beforehand and is harder to get out of. It’s a lot like regular marriage, only instead of saying “I do,” you say “I double-dog swear.” There’s a word for couples who believe that the feelings they share now are the feelings they’ll share forever: delusional. If you must enter a relationship that’s bound to turn sour and is almost impossible to get out of, look into a time-share.
Hasta la Visa
 
 
NEW RULE
 
O
nly foreigners can run for president.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has stated that, when it comes to constitutional amendments, he’s for one allowing foreign-born Americans to reach the highest office. At first I was puzzled by his interest in this issue, but then I discovered a little-known fact about the man: He was actually born in Austria. You’d never know it from hearing him talk, but then, he is a highly skilled actor.

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