America, You Sexy Bitch

by Meghan McCain, Michael Black

  The next morning we head to the swamps for a tour. A friend of mine had gone on one recently and insisted that I must also do it when in New Orleans. I figure it is as good a way as any to get to know the local color, so we get up really early. The swampy air is about 900 percent humidity on top of all the rising heat and mist. I can’t help feeling that the whole idea is quickly becoming a recipe for disaster.

  Boat seats confirmed, we load onto an air-conditioned tour bus for the sticky ride to God knows where or why. I’m in no mood, so of course the minute my butt hits the cushiony blue seats, Michael starts spewing some nonsense about health care and we begin the morning by bickering like an old married couple. By now he must be fully aware that health care and national defense are possibly the two issues that I am most conservative and he is most liberal about.

  Well, even though I’m pretty sure there’s a big brick wall in my future, we start discussing Obamacare on the bus on the way to the swamp tour. Michael’s argument starts with Republicans being heartless, and that we all need “to give a little more for the common good,” and that “health care should be free to every American.” I naturally feel like Uncle Scrooge when I say that universal health care would bankrupt this country if enacted into law. Of course I think all Americans should have access to health care, however, the concept of free health care is unrealistic. I wish I could be so idealistic as to think that if we “all just gave a little more,” then everyone could have the same level of amazing health care, but it’s just not that simple. It makes me feel like I come off sounding heartless, when in reality I think I am simply being pragmatic about the kind of world we live in and what our country can afford.

  In reality, Republicans and Democrats will continue to argue about how many Americans are completely uninsured. One of the main reasons our health care costs have gotten so out of control is the outrageous cost of malpractice insurance premiums doctors have to pay. In reality, Republicans have often looked for affordable ways to provide health care for people, but the truth is we cannot just simply give everything away. Republicans have long advocated tort reform, which would put some reasonable caps on things that people can sue for. If a doctor operates on you and causes harm to you, you should absolutely be able to sue for it. But the truth is, there are a lot of people getting really rich off of irrelevant lawsuits. This is not simply a Republican problem; we have to take a red pen to programs that do not work in order to be able to afford health care for all Americans. Until we are ready to do the hard work of looking at programs that are quite simply broken, we should not be moving forward.

  Beyond that, no one, not even Michael Ian Black, has been able to convince me that the quality of health care in this country would not suffer if we went so far as to enact free health care into law in America, which is my biggest problem with “universal health care.” Anytime you give something away for free, the quality will inevitably suffer. The idea of universal health care seems very much like a first step towards radically socializing medicine in a country that is too large and complicated to support such a drastic move. Yes, I will concede that insurance and pharmaceutical companies are making money hand over fist, but I do not think you can penalize big business for doing what our democratic capitalist system is designed to do. Also, take into consideration that much of that money goes back into research and improving the outstanding level of care that we already have—so why should an award-winning hospital like the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, have to risk becoming less of a leader in finding new solutions to medical problems by making it cater to anyone who walks in the door? I think it’s pretty telling that world leaders and dignitaries from other countries come here for their care when the situation calls for it—we have the best health care in the entire world.

  This is not to say that I don’t think health care needs reforming; I think any individual with half a brain would agree to that. No one can deny that our health care system is badly broken and people in lower economic brackets have suffered. That is an embarrassment, and our government should be working harder to reform the system. That does not mean, however, that we swing the pendulum so far in the other direction that we give health care away for “free” and the overall quality starts to suffer.

  I tell Michael, “At the end of the day, there is nothing in this world that comes for free.”

  “It’s not like you could ever understand not having health care,” Michael angrily replies.

  This is not the way to argue with me. I’ve spent a significantly large part of my life trying to combat any bullshit “poor little rich girl couldn’t possibly understand real life” stereotypes, and I’m in no mood to do so with Michael on a damp bus on its way to the swamps.

  “Don’t say anything like that when you meet my father. I’m still trying to explain to him exactly who you are,” I say, even though I know it’s an argument ender.

  Michael curls his lip and snaps back, “Well, I mean he is really old.”

  I lift up my sunglasses and say in a very high-pitched mocking tone, “Oooo.”

  Michael and Stephie mock me right back in a Valley Girl accent, “Ohhheewww!”

  I am furious. I feel my face getting hot and turn my head away from both of them and look out the window. We pull into the swamp boat tour and I pick up my purse, pushing over Michael and storming off the bus. I walk right across the gravel road into the swamplands. I take out my phone and text one of my girlfriends from Arizona: “I wish there was another Republican on this trip with me!!!!”

  Michael: If you ever want to piss off Meghan McCain, the quickest and easiest way to do it is to imply that she is, in any way, spoiled. She hates that. HATES that. When we were in Vegas, she didn’t speak to me for hours because I told her she “walks like a rich girl.”

  So when we get into one of our tiffs about health care, I am ashamed to say that my emotions get the better of me and I pull out that particular ace card. I tell her she can’t understand what it’s like to worry about health care because she’s never had to worry about anything. It is an ugly thing to say and I regret it before the words are out of my mouth.

  Even more shameful is that I (kind of, sort of) mean it.

  She’s never had to worry that a sore throat might mean an unaffordable trip to the emergency room, that taking sick days might cost her her job, that a serious illness might mean losing her house.

  In truth, I haven’t either, but there have been times in my life when I could not afford health insurance. Times when I had no plan for what would happen to me if I ever got sick. That was when I was young and single. Now that I’m a married father of two, the thought of going without health insurance fills me with panic. What would happen if one of my kids got sick? What would I do? Where would I turn? The entertainment business is notoriously fickle. At the moment, I have money in the bank I could use to take care of them, but it’s easy to envision a scenario in which my occupational prospects dry up, and I deplete my savings to take care of a loved one. This is happening to people from every walk of life every single day. If you come from a wealthy family, as Meghan does, I do not know if it’s possible to understand the fear that these circumstances might provoke.

  Regardless, I shouldn’t have called her out on her privileged life. She may be a rich bitch, but she’s the most grounded rich bitch I’ve ever met. And I didn’t call her father “old.” I flatly deny that. I never said it. Although, to be fair, he is really old.

  By the time Meghan emerges with her pout still on, the tour has assembled. Our guide looks like Larry the Cable Guy minus the charm. His name is Tater or Bubba or Gumbo or something ridiculously trite. It’s probably not even his real name. He ladles on the Creole accent pretty thick as we skim along the swampy bayou waterways. Every few minutes we slow down and he tosses marshmallows into the water. I’m surprised that this is the alligator food of choice, but he explains, “Alligators are scavengers and they like to see what they’re eatin’ so we use marshmallows. Besides that they�
��re marsh animals.” I think we’re supposed to laugh. When nobody does he says under his breath, “They like marshmallows.”

  He tosses handfuls into the water but no alligators come.

  “C’mon! C’mon! Yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh!” he calls.

  The alligators don’t seem to be out, so he takes us to another spot. Tossing more marshmallows into the water, he calls again. “Yeh! Yeh! Yeh!” Then we see it, a squiggling hump in the water attached to a pair of eyes.

  “There he is,” Tater says with evident satisfaction. The gator snakes through the water to the bobbing marshmallow, opens its jaws and swallows. Soon other gators join the first, surrounding the boat in all directions. We gawk and take pictures. They’re smaller than I would have preferred, averaging about six feet long. I wanted to see some prehistoric gator shit, oversized and preferably rabid. I want the boat to be attacked. I want dismembered limbs in need of quality, affordable health care. I want lives to be lost. But instead we just sit in our little boat and watch these shy, placid creatures swim for their marshmallows. They’re about as scary as cockatoos.

  “The only bad part about feedin’ ’em is it’s like havin’ ’em on the payroll,” Tater says.

  Yeah, they’re like goddamned Democrats, these gators, depending on the largesse of strangers!

  Once in a while Tater gets out of the airboat and into the water, which raises the alarming and thrilling prospect that he will get chomped on, but of course nothing like that happens. These reptiles know better than to devour the hand that feeds them.

  He’s a good guy, passionate about gators. He tells us how the gators almost became extinct in the 1960s due to hunting and trapping. But then people like his family started a program of raiding the alligator eggs from the nests and bringing them to alligator farms where they could control the eventual gender of the babies through temperature. Then they toe tag them and release them back into the waters. Today, he says, there are 1.4 million. Good for the gators, good for the marshmallow industry. So that’s a happy ending to our airboat ride.

  Over the course of the tour, Meghan’s temperature cools to the point where she will look at me and, eventually, speak to me. I should apologize, but I don’t because sometimes I’m an asshole.

  Meghan: By the time we finally make it back to our hotel, I am over it. O-V-E-R. I-T. To the point where I actually think this trip might have been a mistake. I am over Michael, over Stephie, over fighting about health care, over feeding marshmallows to reptiles. The constant in my relationship with Michael is that we seem to push each other’s buttons on purpose and fight like brother and sister. Meaning that when Michael is angry with me, I’m just an overindulged rich girl who doesn’t know anything about the world outside of my fancy shelter. When I’m angry with Michael, he’s just an entitled, delusional liberal hipster who couldn’t possibly understand the concept of “live free or die.” None of that is true at all, but even the two of us at times fall victim to slinging stereotypes in place of understanding.

  Unfortunately most of America behaves like this, especially when it comes to politics. There is a culture war infecting this country right now that seems to only be getting stronger. You are a red stater or a blue stater. You are a liberal, socialist, Obama acolyte, or a redneck entitled Republican who is scared of the changing face of America. Once again, neither of these descriptions is true or fair, but it’s the world we’re living in right now, and at times I’m worried that maybe Michael and I are just too different to come to some kind of an understanding, even if I am finally catching on to his dry sense of humor.

  My friend Liz’s friend Jonah has a friend, Glen, who is going to take us on a tour of the west bank of New Orleans and show us what “real” Nawlins is like. Any opportunity to get to experience a side of the city that tourists aren’t able to normally access is appealing. For some reason, Michael gets irritated anytime I get shy or quiet, which is happening now that I’m in a new situation, waiting to meet a perfect stranger. For the record, Michael is not the first person to be surprised by this fact. I think people assume, if you are a television commentator or personality, that you’re just as “on” in person and at parties as you are on a set, but with me that’s not the case. Especially if the day has been going as badly as this one.

  It is the kind of hot summer day that shuts me down, and in my haste to get out on the town dressed in something that could go anywhere, I threw on a long black maxi-dress with the hopes of being both cool and casual. While we wait for Glen, the back of my dress already feels soaked with sweat and I can feel both my eyeliner and confidence melting into the sticky early-evening air.

  Michael: We’re meeting a guy named Glen, one of the mysterious people Stephie has somehow found. He’s a friend of a friend (I think), a musician, and a New Orleans native. That’s all I know about him. Stephie and he have been trading text messages for a few days trying to arrange an evening of genuine New Orleans flava. I’m looking forward to it because the French Quarter wears thin pretty quick. Plus the whole area smells like somebody left a bunch of deli meat out overnight. That is the aroma you get when you cross stately Colonial French architecture with barf.

  A few hours later, we’re on the Canal Street Ferry, which connects the French Quarter with the Fifteenth Ward on the West Bank of the Mississippi. Glen is going to meet us on the boat. Actually we were supposed to meet him on the landing for the ferry, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Stephie’s been texting him. He keeps saying he’s five minutes away, but five minutes stretches to fifteen, the ferry arrives, and he tells Stephie that he’ll just meet us onboard.

  We pass the time talking to a couple of Teach for America volunteers. They’re young and earnest and doing it for all the right reasons. “It’s a really good way to go to a place that you really love and do good work.” They impress me, these two, in their desire to serve without it feeling pious or self-important. I’m reminded of Meghan’s brother Jimmy and his friends we met at the ranch in Prescott. At the time, I remember thinking how mature they seemed, how confident. I get a similar feeling from these two. They certainly seem more self-possessed than I did when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. Both groups, the military and Teach for America volunteers, have purposely put themselves in unfamiliar and challenging environments. I can’t help but feel a little jealous that I never went through a similar experience, unless you count theater camp, which I suppose you should not.

  I start thinking about the concept of national service. So many other countries have mandatory military service, which I don’t think we need, but I wonder whether some sort of mandatory national service wouldn’t be a good idea for our country. Whether it’s military or educational or mentoring or park service, the list of needs we have is great and we certainly don’t lack for bored young people. I also worry that our culture is slowly becoming so fragmented that our national identity might get irretrievably diluted along the way. National service would bring together young people from every region, every background, and give them useful, purposeful work. I recently heard an interview with Tom Brokaw, who was proposing something similar, the formation of six public-service academies. My idea is a little more far-reaching than that, because it would get everybody involved, but I’m glad to see that Tom Brokaw and I share more than just gorgeous speaking voices.

  Meghan: A few minutes later a very tall, handsome black man approaches and greets us with hugs, giving Michael the “guy hand shake,” and I can’t help but giggle because Michael clearly isn’t as used to giving other guys bro hugs as Glen is.

  “Hi, Michael, Meghan?” he asks and we nod. “Good to meet you. I’m Glen. Whose friend are you exactly?”

  “You know, my friend Liz’s friend Jonah,” I try to say casually.

  “Don’t know a Jonah but it doesn’t matter,” he says, and I like him immediately, knowing that he’s the guy to show us a good time. The ferry makes its way to the part of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi, and Glen takes us along a patchy road tha
t ebbs in and out of cobblestones. He talks about the history of his neighborhood and the racial tension that I am disappointed to learn still exists. Apparently there are still black and white sections of the areas that have not exactly been gentrified.

  “Is it getting better, yeah,” he says. “But do race issues still exist? Yeah, it’s New Orleans.”

  I don’t know why this is surprising, but I think there is some kind of cultural myth that because we now have elected our first black president that somehow all race issues have dissipated. As we make our way deeper and deeper into Glen’s neighborhood, he suggests a quick stop at his girlfriend’s house. She is apparently a professional boxer in training for the Olympics. We walk up to a modest-sized white porch leading to the door and he casually asks if we smoke weed. This is a loaded question for me, because there is no right answer to this in the political world. I am a truthful person and I hate liars, so saying no would be a lie. Saying yes in America basically makes me a scofflaw.

  Let me put it right out there. Yes, I have smoked marijuana a few times in the past. The first time was on a trip to Amsterdam in college and I was surprised by how mild of an experience marijuana was (and in my experience still is). It is a plant that makes me mellow and giggly and, quite frankly, tired. Yet, depending on where you are in the United States, smoking is possession, and that is either a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on how much and whether it’s your first time. Split that hair however you want, it’s still a crime.

  That being said, I believe that marijuana should be legalized in the United States. This is not a decision I have come to quickly or lightly. Over the course of the last four years, in discussions with friends pro and con, I believe the legal ramifications of possessing marijuana are egregious. For one reason, I think it is a substance that does no more damage than alcohol does, and second, if we legalized marijuana in this country and taxed the hell out of it, our economic problems would at least be temporarily helped a great deal. In fact, you could even use the revenue stream to pay for universal health care if you wanted.