Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Paranoia
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but America has become more paranoid than Ross Perot watching Three Days of the Condor after a seventy-two-hour crack binge.
You know, the word "paranoia" is a clinical term describing the feeling of imminent annihilation by a dark conspiratorial force. I believe in right wing politics, it's known as "vision."
Are you paranoid? Yeah, you. When you leave work, do you think people move your stuff and then put it back exactly where it was? More to the point, did you just react to that question by saying, "How does he know that about me?"
Hey, I believe we live in a time where it's all right to be a little paranoid. With sweeping technological advances that permit spy satellites to spot precancerous moles on our inner thighs, it has become increasingly evident that the only way to not feel you're being watched is by starring in a sitcom on UPN.
Be that as it may, no one has greater faith in Man's innate goodness than yours truly. From the time my lead-reinforced Brinks truck drops me off inside this heavily fortified studio bunker, sixty floors below HBO World Headquarters, to the time my tenth-degree red-belt manservant Drago tucks me in and I fall asleep inside my titanium vault, watching Ice Station Zebra on a perpetual loop, well, I am just brimming with nothing but trust in my fellow man's commitment to the higher good.
You know what makes me paranoid? People who say, "Oh, you're just being paranoid." Actually, I have performer's paranoia. I worry that Jay Leno's phone is more tapped than mine.
If you want to see just how paranoid our culture has become, then take a cybercruise down the information Highway 51 known as the Internet. What is it about the Internet that draws the paranoid like Asian businessmen to blonde lap dancers?
Well, the World Wide Web provides a lushly fertile petri dish in which sweaty paranoia and wacky conspiracy theories thrive like a dose of clap at a biker rally.
With a few strokes on a keyboard, you can hook up with fellow crackpots who will not only concur with your theory that President Clinton faked a knee injury to cover having his dick straightened at Bethesda Naval Hospital by the renowned Flemish dick straightener Dr. Claude Ballz.
Conspiracy theories come from a natural human desire to see the world as an ordered place. If everything bad that happens to you is the result of a complicated plot involving the Freemasons, the Rockefellers, and Joey Lawrence, you become the center of the universe. But if you bump into a guy in a bar and he beats the crap out of you not because he is a subagent sent by the Trilateral Commission on behalf of the Illuminati but merely because he drives a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that reads: SHIT HAPPENS ...
Well, in that case, you realize that you are just a single random Ping-Pong ball in the great lottery popper that we call life.
So why are we paranoid? Well, looking nervously over our shoulder, we see that our generation was shaped by paranoid men like Richard Nixon and suspicious women like J. Edgar Hoover.
Therefore, when it comes to paranoia, most folks train their night-vision goggles on the federal government. And I admit, every time I butt heads with government buttheads, I get the feeling it's personal, too. But I'm made more paranoid by corporations: car companies that lie about their safety records; chemical firms selling toxic weed killers that wind up in our food—you never see Scully and Mulder take on these guys because, quite frankly, these guys advertise on the fucking "X-Files."
Come on, really, let's face it. The idiots in Washington, D.C., can't even investigate a conspiracy let alone create one. Do you really think A1 D'Amato could be in charge of anything other than the flavor of the pudding cup in his lunch box and keep quiet about it? D'Amato would be panicking like Barney Fife at Iwo Jima.
You know, conspiracy has always been a part of American life. And why not? It makes us feel more important to think we're special enough for the infamous "they" to take the time to put one over on us. Hey, the biggest conspiracy has always been the fact that there is no conspiracy. No one's out to get you. No one even gives a shit whether you live or die. There. You feel better now?
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Network News
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but the line between news and entertainment has become a border so often crossed, it makes Brownsville, Texas, look like Cold War Berlin. But if you don't mind, I'd like my news with a little more substance than my dream I had last night about the lactating leprechaun. Okay?
All the network evening news shows are exactly alike. An interchangeable animatronic anchor and thirty minutes of the same big blur: Who's Clinton shagging, what'd my stocks do, look how crazy those foreigners are, and I can't believe that squirrel can actually water-ski. And because of that similarity, the only way for them to differentiate themselves is by drawing deeper and deeper from the should-be offlimits wellspring of human pain and suffering. And in doing so, TV journalists have become nothing more than millionaire carnival barkers with good diction and so much hair spray on, they make Margaret Thatcher look like Tori Amos.
And while we're on the subject of stiff, could there be a more appropriate moniker in the business than Stone Phillips? This guy makes Mount Rushmore look like a fucking episode of "The Monkees."
But all criticisms aside, there's still no denying the clear demarcation between national network news and local news programs. If network news is crap, local news is crap concentrate.
First of all, just the basic production values on some of these programs give a hint as to the quality of their content. The cheap, fluorescent lighting creates all the warmth of a porn-shoot in a K-Mart, while the ever-present tacky sky blue background is always the exact color of the rented tuxedo you wore to your sexless prom in 1976.
Local news will entice you with uplifting fare like an eight-part series on the special challenges facing immigrant midgets, then some Sears undie model with a cutesy name, like Kent Tsunami or Stormy Wetdry, comes in to do the weather, before throwing it back to some Hitler Youth anchor clone, who, if teeth were brains, would rule the planet.
You know, if Velveeta ever morphs into a human form, it will become a local newscaster. I like watching these nozzleheads try to give some depth and insight to the news stories. They get that same blank expression on their face as my dog does when I put him on the phone.
In L.A., there are about six to eight different news shows every night, all vying for your attention with the exact same story. Their helicopters are stacked on top of each other like a sleeve of Ritz crackers and you can use the remote at home like a director trying to get all sorts of different camera angles on the Malibu mud slides. You know what I think causes mud slides? The vibrations from fucking helicopters, okay?
The I-Team investigative story is also known for drumming up high local ratings. Especially when the overzealous Anglo member of the I-Team Krazy Glues his eyes back and goes undercover in a Chinese restaurant kitchen to tell you that it's not all that clean. Hey, guess what? We know it's not an operating theater back there, but we like the food anyway. Okay? So shut up, before they start raising the prices to buy new mops.
Now, the scary teaser is one tactic news stations use to lure viewers. Reporting some infinitesimal possibility of a terror in your home that you don't know about. Is there a deadly microbe in your kids' milk? Tune in tonight at six o'clock and find out. Hey, what about the milk our kids are drinking between now and six o'clock? Okay? Could you maybe cut into "She's the Sheriff" and give us a little preview from the poison center on that one, Sparky McDowner?
And then, there's the local news trump card, the highspeed freeway chase. Now sure, I know that the only thing more inane than trying to outrun a squadron of police cruisers running at warp speed in a four-cylinder lime green '71 Gremlin is actually watching it and taping it to watch again until Fox puts it out on laserdisc, but isn't that really what television news is all about? The sudd
en realization that we, the voyeuristic viewers, are no better than they, the gratuitous gatekeepers? And they're no better than we are?
That all of us, you, me, Carol Anne, Mike, Rock with the sports, and Flip with the weather, are all participating in a big pseudo-journalistic circle jerk? Huh? The networks get rich, and we—we are temporarily reassured that there are lives way more fucked up than ours. Sounds like a pretty fair deal to me.
Look, I'm all for making money. But just don't call it the news. Because it's not. You'd see a tighter grip on reality watching Michael Jackson preening in front of a fun house mirror than you do watching television news. So don't call it news. Let's call it what it is. Let's call it "The Six O'clock Shit Thankfully Not Happening to You."
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Talk Radio
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but up and down America's radio dial today, you're likely to hear about as much rational discourse as you would watching Charles Manson and Charles Nelson Reilly trying to put together a bicycle on Christmas morning. Marconi has got to be oscillating in his grave.
If talk radio proves anything, it's that humans sitting in traffic would rather listen to Fran Drescher screaming the Sanskrit alphabet than be left alone with their own thoughts.
All this being said, I love talk radio. Where else can the entire situation in China be summed up with the simplistic generalization: "Jang Zemin is a jag-off"? You know, other than, of course, my show.
You know, we used to listen to music in our cars to relax. Now we love to eavesdrop on submutants arguing over psychotic deal points and having their fights refereed by an embittered host who used to spin records on the A.M. station in Utica, New York, from where, he constantly reminds us, he got fired by "the suits" for refusing to play "Mandy." Don't enter into the morning zoo unless your backpack's fully loaded, mi amigo.
As a matter of fact, getting a radio talk show in America appears to be easier than Caribbean Med School. All you need is a mouth that works and an audience that doesn't.
Hey, the only thing greater than America's love affair with talk radio is the love affair the hosts seem to have with themselves. And no one is more full of himself, or, for that matter, more full, than Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh articulates the blindingly white anger of every short-sleeved WalMart assistant manager in America who's outraged because a black kid called him by his first name.
Now, quite frankly, I don't have all that much to say about Rush Limbaugh, because Al Franken already wrote a book that cut him into ten million pieces, each of which weighed roughly half a pound.
Limbaugh is emblematic of what's wrong with the medium. It rarely educates, but only reinforces and reaffirms the narrow-minded prejudices of both host and listener. Let's face it, only somebody who already believes that sunlight is an international conspiracy is going to listen to a program called "Dr. Gary Grimm's Sunlight Is an International Conspiracy Show."
Many talk radio hosts are so misinformed, and play so fast and loose with the truth, they make Mein Kampf read like The Farmer's Almanac. I've been berated by homeless squeegee guys who have a better line of reasoning.
That said, there are many programs being broadcast today that help people from all walks of life, with all types of problems. Personally, I like listening to "Car Talk with Click and Clack," the Tappet brothers. It's not only entertaining, but informative. Like when my cousin Ace and I rebuilt the 396 in my '68 El Camino. We bored the cylinders 30 over, put in a hotter cam, and topped it all off with a duo of Holley double-pumpers perched on a high-rise manifold. While we were at it, we tweaked the Turbo-400 tranny, popped in a low-ratio rear end, and stitched all that torque to the asphalt with a new set of Mickey Thompson 50 series comp street meat. Well, I don't have to tell you, we expected that sumbitch to light up like a Christmas tree and flat-out walk the dog. But it didn't. No matter what we tried, we couldn't get it to crack 16 in the quarter. Then we called "Car Talk." Turns out the new orange shag carpet I'd put on the floor was so thick it was keeping the cool "barefoot" gas pedal I'd installed from going all the way down! Thanks, Click! And thanks, Clack! You guys fucking rock, man!
Without a doubt, the most irritating format on talk radio today is the drive-time psychiatry show... thirty-second diagnoses for thirty-year-old problems. Callers with maladies ranging from manic depression to chronic masturbation seek the wisdom of an oracle whose pool of psychiatric knowledge is filled by the tributaries of eighteen credit hours assisting in the Overdose Tent at the Pomona County Fair. By the way, in listening to these programs, I've noticed that chronic masturbators always seem to call in on a speaker phone.
Now, Dr. Laura Schlessinger is the current top dog, or should I say the alpha bitch, of the high-frequency shrink pack. Dr. Laura, a shrieking harpy with all the compassion of Charlie Starkweather with a thorn in his paw, harangues her listeners to be strong, stop whining, behave, don't be a slut, wise up, and stand on your own two feet.
Hey, thanks for the comforting insight, Doc, and oh, sorry about that house falling out of the sky onto your sister. With three books published which she endlessly hypes and a nationally syndicated talk show, Dr. Laura heads a virtual one-shrew empire and yet has the gall to tell women that if they work they're bad mothers. Well, let me ask you this, Aimee Simple McPherson, howzabout settin' an example by prying your bony digits off the lucrative business end of that microphone you're sitting behind and putting a sock in your pie hole? Hey, listeners, you wanna know what the first step in taking charge of your own life is? Hang up on Dr. Fucking Laura, okay?
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The Space Program
You know something? I'm sick of technological advances. And I'm sick of that space shuttle taking off more frequently than Strom Thurmond has to pee.
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but in post-Cold War America, isn't the space program a quaint relic of a bygone era? A time when two hostile superpowers competed to see who could launch a bigger rocket that would penetrate deeper and last longer, thrusting farther and farther into the yielding, virginal, mysterious depths of the fickle, man-eating bitch that was outer space.
Now, whether or not you feel the space program was worth the money, you have to admit: Astronauts are genuine heroes, no joke here, men and women so brave they make Edmund Hillary look like Shaggy from "Scooby-Doo." When it comes to astronauts, the word "hero" pops up as readily as a Bob Seger song on a strip club jukebox. Anybody who would strap themselves onto a giant deodorant spray can, set off a series of explosions under their ass until they've been blasted into the icy vacuum of deep space, and then step outside to take a walk must have more balls than a twenty-four-hour Tokyo driving range.
Growing up, I was enthralled by these brave men who risked their lives to explore the universe: Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Tony Nelson, Major Healy...
But that was over thirty years ago. Do you realize a third of us weren't even alive yet to watch Neil Armstrong leave the most recognizable footprint this side of Bruno Magli?
Personally, my biggest hero had to be Armstrong and I thank him for bringing out the latent patriot in me. Because when he planted that flag in the Sea of Tranquillity, well, I'll tell you, I was weeping like Richard Simmons at Streisand's wedding.
I also admired him because I know if the entire planet were hanging on the very first words I uttered after setting foot onto the moon, I would have screamed, "Who's the loser now, Susie Cooperman? Who's the loser now? Why don't you kiss my moon-walking ass, baby?"
The fact is, the space program was originally fueled by the desire to beat the Communists. Well, now that Russia's run by a Slavic version of W. C. Fields and it's 2.2 trillion pesos to the ruble, I mean, isn't our continued obsession with conquering the heavens the political equivalent of piling on? You know what? We've won. The Russians aren't going to the moon unless they climb there on a stack of empties.
&nb
sp; In fact, America's space program, even in its current downsized condition, runs like a Lamborghini when compared to the Tom Joad shitwagon that is the Russian space program. As a matter of fact, I am beginning to think that Mir is the Russian word for "duct tape." This thing is so lowrent, the only thing that's missing is a pink flamingo and a clothes dryer on the porch.
Hey, at best, our space program is mankind's boldest effort to explore the universe. At worst, it is just another bloated government spending project, except with NASA, you can actually watch your money disappear into thin air.
And this is not to say I'm not appreciative of some of the peripheral benefits to space exploration. Listen, I'm as grateful as the next guy for the daily miracle that is Tang, but the fact is, if you spend billions and billions of dollars on any massive project, you're bound to come up with some byproducts. So why not use that money to cure cancer and see if maybe space flight just happens to spin off from that breakthrough? Huh? What about that, Mr. Peabody?
Hey, exploring the universe is a laudable goal, but even if the Martian Land Rover beamed back a picture of God struggling with the childproof cap on a bottle of Mylanta, I'm not sure what we paid for that cosmic Kodak moment wouldn't have been better spent on a couple of thousand new inner-city math teachers.
I mean, if you want to observe a bleak, dust-covered, rock-strewn landscape with no detectable signs of life, can't you just buy a bus ticket to Bakersfield, for Christ's sake?
You want to know something? Boosting our knowledge of the cosmos is great for our self-esteem. And I think we should go back to it somewhere down the line. But right now, this planet is going to hell in a handbasket and I think we ought to just take a breather. I believe the next great breakthrough in space travel will probably come from some ubernerd who's germinating out there right now and will someday make a quantum leap and instantaneously transport us to the next level while doodling on a "Far Side" notepad.
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