by David Cross
Now here’s the best part—in your book you preface the above quote by saying, “but I guess I’m not as intellectual as David Cross. In that Rolling Stone article, he sure showed us what a deep thinker he is by sayin’ ‘America is in a stage of vague intellectual pride.’” Jesus Christ, can you even fucking read?! Whoever read that article to you butchered the actual quote. The quote that was right fucking in front of their face! I would fire your official reader and have them replaced with a Hooters Girl who doesn’t fart. That way you have something nice to look at while you are getting your misinformation.
As for “anti-intellectual pride,” that is Larry the Cable Guy in spades. Let me quote you again (from an online interview): “I consider my jokes to be very jeuvinille [sic]. Stuff a 14 year old would laugh at because that’s the sence [sic] of humor I have.” Hmmm, okay. That was easy. Well, I suppose I’ve already covered part of that in the above. But you also specifically dumb down your speech while making hundreds of purposefully grammatical errors. How do I know this? It’s on page 17 of your book, wherein you describe how you would “Larry” up your commentaries for radio.
What does it mean to “Larry” something up? Take a wild guess. The reason you feel the need to “Larry” something up? Because you are not that dumb. I mean you, Dan Whitney, the guy whose name the bank account is under. You were born and raised in Nebraska (hardly the South), went to private school, and moved to Florida when you were 16. This is when you developed your accent?! Not exactly the developmental years, are they? At age 16 that’s the kind of thing you have to make a concerted effort to adopt. Did you hire a voice coach? Or were you like one of those people who go to England for a week and come back sounding like an extra from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? As you said yourself in an interview once, “I can pop in and out of it pretty much whenever I want.” In your book on page 89 you say in reference to the “gee-shucks” millionaire comment, “see, to his [David’s] mind, bein’ well paid means I’m no longer real and I can’t be a country boy anymore. It’s just an act.” Hey, it’s always been an act!
That’s my fucking point! You admit it yourself, so cut the indignation shit. And I am in no way deriding your work ethic. You clearly have more fart jokes than most, and for that I applaud you. You go on to talk about how hard you work and life on the road and living on Waffle House and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I get it, we’ve all been there and played shitty, degrading gigs and sacrificed etc. etc. Then you say, “This [the personal attack] was different because David basically hammered my fans in that RS article by implying that they were ignorant. He crossed the line when he railed against them, so I had to tell ya what I felt about that. He can hammer me all he wants, but when he screwed with my fans, it was time for me to say something.”
Aww, that’s so sweet and egregious. I can’t stand that fan ass-kissing bullshit. You and Dane Cook ought to get together and have a “my-fans-are-the-greatest-people-on-earth-and-that’s-why-I-do-this” off. You could both sell a shitload of merch, too. But having said that, I would truly love to get some of your fans and my fans in a room together to debate some of the finer points on comedy, music, culture, the issues facing our country today, and just about anything else we might find worthy of discussion. My fans are pretty smart as well. They are also, I imagine, as “hardworking” as your fans. Not all of them, of course, but most. And I’m sure that they may come up with some genuinely interesting, insightful points (and would do so without spouting a bunch of meaningless Christian platitudes). And if you really, truly want to respect your fans, lower your ticket price as well as the price of your ubiquitous merchandise. I’m sure all those hardworking Americans could use the extra money now that the budgets are being cut drastically from Transportation, Education, Health and Human Services, HUD, Dept. of the Interior, EPA, Farm Service Agency, FEMA, Agricultural, FDA, VA, FHA, National Center for Environmental Health, and numerous other departments and agencies that they might directly rely on for help. All so that we can pay off this massive tax cut during “war” time that we’re all getting (them not so much, though). Oh, well. That’s just one of those “political” things that I think about occasionally.
Anyway, I just wanted to address the stuff you wrote about me and clear some things up. Mostly the air around here… I just farted!!!!!
Think-of-Something-to-Do-and-See-That-Task-to-Completion!!!!!
Fart,
David Cross
We Have Got to Stop Calling So Many People “Heroes”
PUT DOWN YOUR TUBE OF BED HEAD AND THINK ABOUT IT FOR just five seconds. How many people throughout history can you consider true “heroes”? One hundred? A thousand? Wrong. Science has proven that there have been literally millions of heroes throughout time and space. But of course the concept of what is heroic depends completely on the worshippers’ values. To many, Martin Luther was a hero, as was Martin Luther King. But to others the guy who shot Martin Luther King was a hero. And then to even others the guy who shot Martin Luther King—The Movie or the guy who designed the Martin Luther King ride out at Six Flags Over a State are heroes. I could go on and on if my editors weren’t such unfunny pricks. My point being that, one man’s hero is another man’s sworn and bitter enemy.
It was many a warm summer’s night that found Mother and I listing gently on the veranda, leisurely sipping on gin and biscuits and debating who was the truer hero, a real retarded manboy or Cuba Gooding Jr. as “Radio,” the fake retarded manboy. We never came to any satisfying answer, and we’ll just have to wait and see what the Academy thinks come Oscar time. But the “hero” debate continues to rage across this vast and innocent land of ours, stretching into the sea and back. Will we ever lay down our arms and see eye to eye? No, not as long as there is some lonely, overweight woman down in the basement heading up the Accounts Receivable office blubbering on and on about how Laci Peterson is a true American hero. But we can at least agree to severely narrow down the criteria for being a hero.
Four categories have to be quickly and violently tossed out before we can go any further: rich and pretty and fuckers and athletes. Nobody should make it onto the hero list solely by virtue of the fact that they are rich. This means that anyone who has ever said or even thought to himself, “Dude, that guy who came up with the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ series is my hero. He’s got his own helicopter and he gets to see drunk tits all the time!” cannot participate in this discussion that is not really a discussion.
Nor does being pretty make you a hero. What kind of pathetic loser thinks of a supermodel as qualifying for hero worship? Answer: either monumentally ugly people or other very attractive people, that’s it. It is absolutely the least deserving of all the hero factors. Also people who manage to have sex do not deserve the mantle of hero. (Unless you live in a car and smell like the third day of the Burning Man festival yet still managed to fuck all of The Donnas, in which case you actually are a hero, and I raise a Coors Light to you). And last, anybody who excels in sports. There is not now, nor will there ever be, a “hero of the gridiron.” Nobody in his or her right mind should give a fuck about some well-padded millionaire with the reading level of a twelve-year-old home-schooled by Kip Winger, just because he tackled another well-padded millionaire.
So agreed, they are all out. Especially if you consider the billions of people who have quietly, with no expectations of earthly or heavenly glory, sacrificed their lives for others. Whether the sacrifice was literally their life or just a given life of leisure, these are the only people who should be considered heroes. I don’t have any illusions that I will ever be even remotely like that kind of person. Selfishness, and a love of fine champagne and diamonds, combined with an ability to both ignore all the suffering that goes on around me and the talent to delude myself into thinking that when I do take some miniscule “action” that it actually makes some difference, ensure a life free of heroism. Jealous yet?
Yeah, it’s time to retire the word hero outside of the aforementioned use. Let’s s
ave it for the truly self-sacrificing. Firemen? Heroes. Lenny Bruce? Not a hero. An important, groundbreaking cultural icon to be sure, but hero? Nope, too egotistical. Joan of Arc? Hero. Joan Jett? No. In fact, there is only one artist that can be considered a true hero, and that is Whoopie Goldberg. No, of course not. When thinking of Whoopie Goldberg as your hero, please, stop to think of criminally underappreciated Glenn Hoffstetler—that fucker ate seven (!) hits of acid and had forgotten that his parents were flying in that day from a long trip to Africa and he was supposed to go pick them up at San Francisco Airport. And he fucking did it! Now there’s someone deserving of fame, fortune, and parades.
Oh, I Forgot You Could Do That
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE YOU SEE OR EXPERIENCE SOMETHING THAT jolts you from your narcoleptic existence of useless pleasures and missed opportunities. And you are simultaneously reminded of both what can be and also of just how lame we are as a people, as a culture. Maybe it’s an “art car,” where someone has done something like nailed a couple hundred bloody Barbie heads all over it (I’m not saying that it has to be particularly clever, just interesting) or you see some lady wearing a dress made up entirely of “Have You Seen Me?” missing-kid things from the back of milk cartons. You see that, and you’re reminded, “Oh… right, that’s possible. ” And I don’t mean in an “Oh yeah, I guess there could be black Chinese people, I never thought of that” way. More like, “Oh, that’s right, you can do that… I forgot.”
And that is very telling about just how boring we are. It takes some fucking dipshit dressed in a beekeeper’s outfit gluing used tampons all over his car to make us realize that our cars are boring. Ask yourself, “Why should I not paint my car? What’s so great about maroon, and only maroon? What am I afraid will happen? Will people not like me anymore? Will they think I’m some kind of lunatic? Will I be forcibly hospitalized? Will police arrest me? Will I never get laid again?” Well, I’ll tell you what. Next time you see something like that, check out little kids’ reactions to it. They fucking freak out. They start a contemplative journey that, if they’re not excessively Christian and thus too far gone, can only end one way.
“My parents are lame and boring. They have absolutely no sense of visual adventure, much less any sense of any adventure at all. Good God, please don’t let me end up like them, with their Mary Higgins Clark book reading, Will and Grace chuckling, “Doctor Caruthers’ Smart Popcorn Infused with Ginkgo Biloba” evenings. I know I’m only four years old, God, but if you save me from that life, I will fuck you forever when I get to Heaven, deal?”
We are always amused, from a distance, by the “eccentric” town characters that frequent our streets and provide us with a smile (though once they demonstrate the slightest desire to touch you, no matter how innocently intentioned, they’re “disappeared”). The “Walking Lady,” or the “Purple Man,” or the “Retarded Child,” or the “Post-It Note Guy.” They are the ones who we see, and they delight us, while they also freak us out. Usually because we are not children. Because, as noted earlier, children dig them. It has yet to be drilled into kids’ heads yet that this is not the way to behave/dress yourself/make a living. So, not knowing that making a hat out of Post-it notes or making lampshades out of X-rays is ridiculous and wrong, kids naturally gravitate toward these things.
Here’s a good example of what I am talking about: There is a musical act that I saw at the Bumbershoot Festival last year in Seattle (who have subsequently moved to New York City, where they are currently performing) called the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. They are brilliant (in both the English and American usage of the word brilliant). They are nothing if not love itself. They are the embodiment of everything I just wrote about. They are a father and a mother in their thirties and a daughter, about eight. They tour the country in their minivan (which is hand painted in many colors… why not?). They put on shows. They go to estate sales and buy the old slides of these various strangers and then write songs using the slides, in random order, as a guide. One of their songs is called “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959,” and that’s exactly what the slides and lyrics represent. The father plays guitar or piano. The mom runs the slide projector. The daughter plays drums. Father and daughter sing the funny lyrics. And they kick ass. Jesus, the closest I ever got to something like that was when my sister and I turned off the lights, stuck candles under our chins, and read “The Tell-Tale Heart” to our humoring mom.
When I first saw them I felt something that reminded me of the feeling you have when you’re like eleven or twelve and a not unattractive girl tells another girl to tell you that she might think you’re cute. Blood rushes to your heart, and invisible ghosts keep turning your mouth up. And if an eight-year-old playing drums and chastising her dad in front of an audience doesn’t make you smile, then something has gone terribly wrong in your life and you need to do one of those “Foxfire by Twilight” retreat-in-the-woods-type things with a bunch of aging, leathery hippies to find out what went wrong and help you get back on track.
“This is great!” I thought, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to articulate what was great about it. It wasn’t that it was “cute,” or “funny,” or “adorable,” or “precious.” It was what I’ve been talking about this entire time, you fucking moron. I was envious of that family. Now that’s a way to raise a family and conduct your life that most of us either haven’t thought of or simply lack the imagination and courage to carry out. They make every nutty home-schooling advocate look silly. And I’m not against the idea of home-schooling. I went to several (nine) different public schools up and down the East Coast and South, and the only things I remember from textbooks is that America is the greatest country the universe has ever seen and Abe Lincoln invented the tequila lollipop. I just get a little wary of most home-schooling advocates because they are more likely to engage in it not because of their lack of faith in public education but because, really, they’re racists or religious nuts who don’t want their precious little lambs exposed to reality.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. This mom, dad, and kid were getting into a crazy-painted van, driving cross-country, and doing shows about strangers’ vacations? That’s so much like the time my deadbeat dad pawned all of my shit so that he could afford to drive me back to Georgia from Arizona (where I went to live with him) because he had run out of people to scam money from and needed a new state’s worth of suckers… oh wait, no it’s not. I want her childhood. I want her mom and dad. I want to be eight and play drums with my family at nightclubs for hipsters who love me.
I hope when kids see them perform, that they have that same reaction as they do when they pass by the sculpture-strewn front yard of a house that has been altered to resemble a huge whale. You know, where they turn to their mom and dad and say, “Mom, Dad, look at that cool house!” and then when Mom and Dad, smiling, happily listening to Sting (“Something we can all agree on!”) as their SUV drives past the house, turn to the kid and reply, “Wow, look at that.” The kid will say, “Can we do that to our house?” And when Mom or Dad says, “No,” that the kid will say, “Why not?” But this time, when neither parent comes up with a satisfactory explanation and ultimately resorts to the time tested “Because I said so, that’s why,” that the kid will turn to them and say, “Pull over. I’m out of here. If I want any kind of halfway decent shot at not living the rest of my life in mind-numbing boredom, I gotta take off now while the gettin’s good. See ya later, losers!” Then, when that kid’s older, I’ll read his book.
For the Love of God!
I DON’T KNOW IF YOU’VE HEARD, BUT THE CATHOLIC PRIEST-hood just got a whole lot sexier! On February 21, the Reverend (Reverend—from Latin “reverendus,” “to revere”) John Geoghan was sentenced to nine to ten years in prison for fondling a ten-year-old boy. That might seem a bit harsh. Ten years for pulling down a kid’s swim trunks and squeezing an underdeveloped penis? Hell, I’ve let worse happen to me for a candy bar. But I was in my thirties; this kid was ten and scared. St
ill, ten years?
But wait, there’s more, as there most always is. Reading on you learn that this guy has over eighty civil lawsuits pending against him. One more time, in bold, eighty! More than 130 people have claimed various forms of molestation or RAPE. This guy must have thought he was invincible or something, maybe even divinely inspired. Perhaps protected by some like-minded force that would reward the good and punish the wicked. The wicked being nonbelievers or masturbators, of course. I don’t know what else you thought I could’ve meant. Then you find that the charge of rape was thrown out because the statute of limitations had expired.
There’s a statute of limitations on rape?! It’s rape! It’s not like you got ripped off by some online service and then you spent the next ten years thinking about whether you wanted to deal with all the hassle of reporting it and bringing it to trial. I would think rape would have a different set of rules. It is, perhaps aside from being tied up and forced to watch your children being eaten alive by your sworn enemy, one of the most life-altering acts of violence that can be perpetuated on another human being.
But maybe I’m overreacting. I suppose we should expect that any child, if raped, especially by an authority figure of unreproach, should act with the strength and moral outrage of an adult who, say, got overcharged for their dinner. They wouldn’t take it, and neither should that kid. If at the age of seven he doesn’t have the balls to make a formal charge, and it takes him fifteen years to get his “shit together,” then fuck him. The rapist walks.
And now we come to learn that the church has covered up (that’s right, actively engaged in a cover-up) and coddled and even helped relocate known pedophiles from parish to parish, all across the country, in cases too numerous to mention here. It truly is a “Brotherhood of Man,” huh. They’ve even tried to pay the victims off. Nice.
