I Hate to Spoil the Fun, but Things Aren’t Really That Bad
On the odd chance that I sit down to write something even marginally political, I do so reluctantly. Say anything that smacks of politics, and it’s a dead lock certainty that you’re going to cheese off at least 40% of the population. Say something nice about this guy and someone gets in your face and says you want to take food out of his kids’ mouths and give it to illegal aliens. Compliment the other guy and somebody else accuses you of wanting to cut the polar ice caps into cubes and put them in your bourbon. You can’t win. Which part of the reason I like sports. I hate the New York Yankees and their fans with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. Yet Pete Manzo, an avowed Yankee fan, is one of my favorite people in the world. And there’s no contradiction in that whatsoever. At least Yankee fans’ irrational zealotry entertains me.
That’s one of many reasons why I, and the rest of the world, are better off if I don’t get involved in the political process. Another more practical reason is I’m just not smart enough. Say what you want about the people running for office, but they’re smarter, more successful, and lord knows better looking than me. So too are the people who pay close attention to what’s going on. I caught some of the “Town Meeting” style presidential debate where they had common, ordinary people (as opposed to the uncommon, extraordinary candidates, I guess) asking the questions. All of which were intelligent, well thought-out and showed a grasp of the issues. Listening to them I realized if someone asked me to come up with a question, the best I could do is, “Senators, would you care to comment on taste of a refreshing, cold Coors Light?” while the Secret Service came after me, tazers first. It was at that point that I decided that for all the good this was doing me I might as well put on my DVR recording of “Survivor” and pour myself a bourbon on the rocks.
But no matter how hard you try to avoid this stuff, you can’t live in America during an election cycle without having some of the campaign penetrate your defense perimeter. And here’s what I’ve gleaned from the people running for office. All the people, every office:
We’re screwed. Bad. Things have never been worse. We’re suffering terribly, and it’s only by acts of ferocious courage and sheer bravery on the order of Curt Schilling in the Bloody Sock Game that we make it through each day.
The economy is in shambles. Our lives are in ruins. We’re all flat broke. We sit at the kitchen table every night deciding whether to heat the house, buy groceries, or sell grandma off for medical experiments to make ends meet. (Politicians love to say we do these things “at the kitchen table,” on the assumption that we’re too stupid to pay bills online and we sold the dinette set last month to keep the kids in Pop Tarts and GoGurts.) We’re all desperate, starving and hoping to live to see the morning. And oh, by the way, vote for them so they can come into our lives, save the day, and keep Nana away from the pre-Med students. I mean, I’m barely paying attention, and still more than a few times lately I’ve heard some of these guys actually say that we’re in the midst of another Great Depression.
So... conceding that I’m not as smart or well-informed as these people... my response is: Really? This is what a Great Depression is like? These are the times of hopelessness and despair my mother and grandmother talked about? I know old people tend to exaggerate, but when my sainted mom told us about the Thanksgiving that her widowed mother took her and my mildly retarded uncle down to Boston City Hall and asked random strangers to help feed her kids, I didn’t realize that it was because Grammy was down 25% percent on her 401K.
In the first Great Depression, weren’t the skies over Wall Street black with the bodies of CEOs jumping out their office windows out of desperation? Because last week I read about a bunch of executives from a bankrupt company racking up an $80,000 retreat at some 5-star hotel & spa. What kind of a Depression is it when guys, down to their last $100 million, hit the elliptical machine and the hot tub instead of the sidewalk?
I’m not saying money isn’t tight. I know the stock market is collapsing like the Patriots pass protection against the Giants. But is there anyone among us who’s saying “Sorry kids, all our cash was tied up in AIG stock. So grab your Charlie Tickets; we’re heading down to City Hall Plaza to see if anyone’s got leftover turkey”? Not hardly.
Believe me, I’m also not saying this as some kind of a “You should all be self-made millionaires like me.” I’m as middle class as they come. My Loving Trophy Wife works and I need to keep writing for Barstool and working the comedy circuit in order to stay ahead of things financially. It’s not like I looked at my last heating oil bill and danced around with it like Mr. Parker in “Christmas Story” when he won the leg lamp. But when you’re raised by a woman who didn’t know where her next meal was coming from, it’s a little hard to work yourself into a lather over having to shell out for a Nintendo Wii for Christmas. If we are in The Great Depression II, what am I supposed to say to my grandkids about it? “When your parents were your age, I had to scrape by telling jokes and blogging pictures of Charlize Theron’s bikinied ass...” isn’t going to engender a lot of sympathy.
What I’m asking is, are things really so terrible, or have we become a nation of Whiney McBitchys, feeling sorry for ourselves and letting politicians convince us that we’re suffering horribly and they need to ride into our lives and save us? In “Cinderella Man” Russell Crowe plays former heavyweight champ Jim Braddock who in ‘29 got wiped out in the stock market crash and was living in a squalid basement apartment watching his wife water down their baby’s milk because there was no work to be had. Are any former boxing champs living like that now? OK, bad example. A lot of them are; but that’s because of Don King, not economic collapse.
Where’s all the deprivation we keep hearing about? Tickets to a Red Sox game average about $100 bucks, if you can get them for that price. In reality, you’ve got to be prepared to fork over twice that to have any shot of getting in the park. Plus parking, plus food, and so on. And they haven’t had an empty seat in the place since early 2003. The Patriots have the priciest tickets in the NFL and still have a waiting list so long that the last name on the list won’t live to make it to the top unless he happens to be a non-smoking Galapagos tortoise. Jimmy Buffett comes to town every year and sells out two shows at $150 a pop so people can “Margaritaville” for the 10,000th time.
Last weekend there was some decent Fall weather for a change, so we took the kids to one of those cornfield mazes. It cost us around $50 bucks, but we figured, what the hell; it’s only once a year. And there was a line for this thing around the farm. There had to be tens of thousands of dollars a day going into this thing just so people could wander around aimlessly listening to me do “Field of Dreams,” “Signs” and “Children of the Corn” references until my family begged me to stop. On the way back, I drove by no less than fifty different houses whose front yards were strewn with giant tacky Halloween decorations.
All of which is fine. It’s your money, spend it as you wish. More power to you. Just spare me the Pity Party and the griping about how these are the darkest times since Feudalism. When we’ve got money to spend on games, concerts, mazes, plastic grave stones and giant inflatable Jack O’Lanterns with black cats and ghosts inside their mouths, we’re not yet down to our last dime.
Sometimes in my day job (the one I work so tirelessly at because I’m the backbone of the country and, by gosh, America has the best workforce in the world) I find myself in a courtroom listening to people explain to a judge why they haven’t paid their child support, rent, court fines or whatever. And whenever they get into listing their expenses it invariably goes like this: “I’ve got electric, gas, water, phone, cable...” Cable? Trust me, I love my cable. They’ll have to pry cable from between my cold dead fingers. But since when is cable a basic human need? I’m waiting for the first candidate to pull at our heartstrings with a story about a couple sitting at the kitchen table struggling to decide between HBO or the Gold Sports Package so they can have NFL Network.
I can especially do without true believers telling me how Candidate Concern feels my pain and if I vote for him/her he or she will show up at my door with a big Dominos delivery of Prosperity with extra Abundance. Like anyone, I do like the idea of them telling me how I’m really brilliant, talented and hard working and the reason I’m not rich is the fault of the suits in Washington and those non-suicidal Greed Heads on Wall St. Because it beats the hell out of me hearing the truth, which is things would be better if I’d spend more time earning money and less time watching “Survivor” and drinking bourbon on the rocks.
I’m not saying everything is just super swell so we should all stop being such big Mr. Grumpypants. Just that if there was some magical time a while ago where life was all happy elves dancing with unicorns on the tops of shimmering rainbows, I must’ve missed it. This is the first generation in history who didn’t wait until they were Early Bird Dinner Specials age before they started bitching about how bad they used to have it. We all do it now and pardon me if I’m just not seeing where all this “Great Depression” is. If anything, maybe we’re in the middle of a “Great General Feeling of Crappiness,” but that’s as far as it goes Though if whomever gets to be president takes away my cable and bourbon on the rocks, I’m prepared to take this all back.