“America has become a cruel and vicious place. We reward the shallowest, the dumbest, the meanest and the loudest. We no longer have any common sense of decency. No sense of shame. There is no right and wrong. The worst qualities in people are looked up to and celebrated. Lying and spreading fear is fine as long as you make money doing it. We’ve become a nation of slogan-saying, bile-spewing hate-mongers. We’ve lost our kindness. We’ve lost our soul. What have we become? We take the weakest in our society, we hold them up to be ridiculed, laughed at for our sport and entertainment.”
Many years ago, when our friendship was new, my friend Bill and I used to joke about who would be taken out and shot when we ran the world. With the typical arrogance of youth, we thought of ways to make the world better by “thinning the herd.”
It wasn’t a political thing or even a serious thing. Richard Nixon would not have been on the list, but Donald Trump would have. For all the bad things Nixon did, he never said anything about grabbing a woman by her genitals.
It wasn’t about things that were evil.
It was about things that were tacky.
Trump would make the list not for the horrific things he did as president; he would make it for coming awfully close to saying out loud that he would love to f**k his daughter Ivanka.
Mitt Romney wouldn’t have made the list for being a clueless wanker, but he would definitely have made it for making the family dog ride on top of the car on family trips.
The quote at the beginning of this piece is from Bob Goldthwait’s underrated 2012 film, “God Bless America,” in which the main character decides that our country has fallen so far into terminal tackiness that the only possible answer is to fight back by eliminating the tackiest of the tacky.
Along the way, he acquires a sidekick and the story builds to a climax on an “American Idol”-type show.
Ever since the late 1990s, when so-called “reality” TV shows first came onto the market, people have gone to greater and greater lengths to humiliate themselves in the name of fame and fortune. I never watched whichever show it was that made people eat some of the most disgusting thing imaginable, and I am convinced that eventually, people would have been offered the chance — for $1 million, of course — to eat human flesh.
Horrible, huh?
A million dollars, huh?
The picture above might make you nauseous, but this might be one of the easier ones. Millions of people who have practiced oral sex have swallowed human semen, so the one thing that might make this one truly horrific is if the donkey discharge has to be consumed from the source.
Horrible, huh?
A million dollars, huh?
Can we even call ourselves a culture anymore? If the only choices on a given evening are chamber music or donkey splooge, which one could charge the higher rates for its advertisements?
I’ll give you one scenario where culture might actually win. The choices would be between consuming an evening of chamber music or … wait for it … being the one who actually drinks the donkey semen.
Which would you choose?
A million dollars, huh?
Want double or nothing? You get $2 million dollars from your donkey shake, but your mom watches you consuming it.
You might be glad to see Frank and Roxy from Goldthwait’s movie show up.
Two million dollars, huh?
You want a better country? Start admiring people who won’t degrade themselves for money, not ones who don’t care what you think as long as the check clears.