Chapter 1: Parties1 PARTIES UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS Name almost any job: dental hygienist, rodeo clown, dog walker, mall Santa, chicken-sexer--they all demand some kind of definable skill set. The one exception is member of Congress. You can be in jail and get this job. You can be deranged and get this job. If you have a heart attack, they just let your wife start doing it. All you need is a smile and a flag pin. I'd say all you need is a pulse, but dead people have been elected to Congress; much more is required of an immigrant taking the citizenship test. In forty-eight states you can't vote if you're in prison, but in every state, you can run for Congress from prison. Unremarkable people can get a remarkable life in Congress, and that's what keeps the average backbencher sticking with party-dictated bullshit. It guarantees them something that's bigger than faith, family, country or objective reality: they get to keep the best job they could ever get with absolutely nothing to recommend their lazy, ignorant ass for it. College degree? You don't even need a high school degree. Lauren Boebert didn't get one, and she sits on the Budget Committee. If she wasn't in Congress, she could probably get a shift at a truck stop, dusting the jerky. But then she wouldn't have two paid-for offices, one in DC, one in her district. She wouldn't have a staff that answers the phone for her and kisses her ass all day. No one would put her on TV and ask her opinions. She couldn't go on exotic paid-for trips--I mean, fact-finding missions. If you want to know what is so great that it can make someone say anything they're told to say, it's this: the title, the office, the staff, the attention, the good table at the restaurant. "Congressperson" is literally the only job in the world you can get with so much prestige and so many perks while being a complete doofus with absolutely no skills, knowledge or qualifications. Mike Johnson, I guess, could mop up puke at the Sonic, but it would take him all day. But in Congress, puke-mopper Mike Johnson is a big deal. A man of respect. When he walks in and asks for the best table, they know what to say: "Sir, this is PetSmart, the Cheesecake Factory is next door." A job in Congress is just so much better than racking the weights at CrossFit, which is what Marjorie Taylor Greene did before she set her crazy eyes on the prize. And once you've got the gig, it's yours for life. The reelection rate in the House for incumbents in 2022 was 95 percent--that's better job security than a pedophile priest has. In 2022, a video went viral of a Walmart employee quitting her job very publicly. She got on the PA and let it all out: "Fuck this company, fuck this position, and fuck that big lazy bitch Chris Price, I fucking quit!" Texas representative Chip Roy also once told Congress to take his job and shove it. He said: "This institution is a sham. And we should adjourn and shut this place down." But Chip Roy will never quit. Because there are no other jobs where a moron gets paid to ride around in a limo. Chip gets paid a hundred and seventy-five grand a year, free medical, a great pension, with half the year off, plus a million-and-a-half-dollars-a-year "allowance" for decorating the office, or, um, "sundries." Oh, also: Lobbyists blow him. And he gets to be on TV for doing nothing, which as we all know, is the American dream. And by "doing nothing," I mean literally. Once you get elected, you don't have to actually do anything. There's no year-end performance review. Nobody calls you into an office and says, "I don't think this is working out." You have, essentially, no boss. Well, except for the voters. That's the one thing you must do to keep all these perks coming: if your district is full of people who think the election was rigged, or vaccines have microchips in them, or men can have babies, you have to agree, and then repeat it in Congress. And they do. Nancy Mace is a House member from South Carolina, the first woman to graduate from the Citadel. After January 6, she was outraged and stood up to her party, giving a dozen interviews in a single day condemning Trump. Soon after, she wouldn't even talk about it. Then she voted to oust Liz Cheney for making the exact same case she herself had made. A lot of people in America think she's a patriot, but she looks to me like a supplicant for the corner office. She supported an insurrection for the "likes." OWNING THE FIBS George Santos is the somehow-elected Republican House member from Long Island who represents a growing segment of American society: liars. Now, if you're sort of hazy on the details of Santos's life, don't worry, so's he. When they film his biography, it'll start with "Based on a false story." He lied about his schooling, his career, his sexuality, his charity work--what kind of family raises a person like this? We don't know because he lied about them too. He lies like a goose shits--if he's not doing it that very moment, he's about to. Santos said he attended the prestigious Horace Mann prep school; they have no record of him. Nor does NYU, where he said he got an MBA, or Baruch College, where he falsely claimed to have graduated in the top 1 percent of his class and starred on the volleyball team. I'd say you can't make this shit up, but he just made this shit up. And it raises a lot of questions, starting with: If you're going to lie, why volleyball? He also claimed he ran an animal charity that neutered three thousand stray cats. He didn't, but again, what a strange thing to brag about. OK, so it's easy to make fun of George Santos, but we shouldn't be missing the bigger picture with him--because this man has pioneered something completely new in American politics. Of course, we've seen liars before, but it was always about tacking from the fringes to the center of your own party--what Mitt Romney called "shaking the Etch A Sketch." Santos, however, is the first to realize that since we are all in our hermetically sealed media bubbles now, you can pretend to be everything to voters in both parties, and no one on either side will notice. Some of Santos's lies appeal to far-right Republicans, like being all in on Trump's election denying. Or making the white power sign in the halls of Congress. Or claiming he was a Wall Street wunderkind who made millions working at Goldman Sachs, which, of course, he didn't, or that he was a luxury yacht broker, which, of course, he wasn't. But Santos's district is not a Republican district: Biden won it by eight points. So how did a Trump-loving, election-denying white nationalist get elected in a Democrat-leaning district? Simple--he told them what they wanted to hear too. Liberals love identity politics and victimhood, so George said he had a brain tumor. He also said he was one of the first New Yorkers hospitalized for Covid. He said he lost four coworkers in the famous Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. George has said he's from Brazil, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, but when he ran in New York he said he was Jewish and that his grandparents fled Ukraine to escape the Nazis. That's right, his Jewish Ukrainian forefathers escaped the Holocaust by being born Catholic in Brazil. His immigration policy is "We must stop people like me from getting into this country." Also, he claims to be half Black, although I doubt it's the half that wears a blazer with a fleece vest. Oh--and he's gay. Or at least he is since he divorced the woman he was married to up until two weeks before the campaign started. Yes, George knows where the sweet spots are with Democrats too. He once said, "I'm very much gay." What does that mean, "very much gay"? You have a blue checkmark on Grindr? For Republicans, George bragged that he "personally attended the insurrection" on January 6 and tweeted hashtags like #DemsAreDestroyingAmerica. But that obviously didn't matter to plenty of Democrats in his district. What mattered is that he's a brave, sad, proudly gay, half-Black, Latino Holocaust victim. With a brain tumor. Vote for him? I'm surprised they didn't have him host the Oscars. Everybody keeps asking, "How could a guy like this happen?" I'll tell you how: because no one cares anymore about substance. It's all tribalism. The only thing that matters is "Is he on our team?" "Is he doing our schtick?" Santos is just the first one to realize you could do both sides' schtick and get away with it because people have completely tuned out anything that doesn't already fit their narrative. Republicans love a winner, and Democrats love someone whose life story makes you want to kill yourself. WORLD WAR ME America in our current age suffers acutely from a particular disease of the mind, which is: everything proves what we already believed, and everything goes back to the thing we already hate. All issues today, from pandemic to war, become a stress test for our reflexive partisanship: Can you take a vastly complex situation that is 100 percent not about your thing and somehow still make it about your thing? And our answer is: watch me. Americans will put anything new in our mouths and nothing new in our heads. So naturally Republicans blamed Putin's invasion of Ukraine on Biden being the worst president ever, and Democrats blamed it on Trump's being the worst president ever. Which he was; there is that. But I'm not sure I can follow Biden's logic all the way when he dragged January 6 into this by saying, "Look, how would you feel if you saw crowds storm and break down the doors of the British Parliament, kill five cops, injure a hundred and forty-five? Or the German Bundestag? Or the Italian parliament? I think you'd wonder." OK, but if Putin thought Trump was really that supportive of him, why didn't he invade when Trump was in office? It's at least worth asking that question if you're not locked into one intransigent thought. Nikole Hannah-Jones is the curator of the 1619 Project, which posits racism as the deciding factor in pretty much every single issue in America--or, apparently, anywhere. She said, "We should care about Ukraine. But not because the people appear white... all people deserve to be free and to be welcomed when their countries are at war." Of course. Agreed. And the people there don't appear white--they are. Maybe it should be a reminder that when two of the whitest people in the world fight each other, racism is bad, but other things are bad too. It's not like an avocado, you don't have to put it in everything. Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley knows why the mess in Ukraine happened: "The reason Ukraine is in this situation... is the United States has been completely and totally distracted... We have to stop this national self-loathing that's happening in our country." Of course! Self-loathing! I hate myself for not thinking of that! Can you guess what Pat Robertson thought was behind the war in Ukraine? I'll give you a hint: in 1980, 1990, 2006 and 2020, Pat predicted the end of the world due to some troubling story in the news. So it wasn't out of character for Pat to say, practically with his dying breath, that Putin "went into the Ukraine, but that wasn't his goal. His goal was to move against Israel." Because that's where the Bible says the world will end--in Israel. It's where Pat's flight to Jesusville departed from. By way of Ukraine. Who's booking this trip, Delta? And then it gets really strange: QAnon John says, "I don't see this 'invasion' of Ukraine as a 'bad' thing. I see it as a clearing out of a very corrupt center of operations for the Cabal." Ah yes, the Cabal, that's the pedophile ring of elitist baby-eaters that QAnon believes is the real problem in the world, and naturally when war breaks out, it's really about that. No wonder the government puts chips in the vaccine to track you people. Vanity Fair wants you to know that "the fight for Ukraine is also a fight for LGBTQ rights," and conversely Colonel Mitchell Swan, a Republican who ran for Congress in Georgia, said, "Allowing transgender individuals to serve sends a message to our adversaries that we are more focused on social experimentation than on the defense of our nation." I see. Transgender, that's the key to the Ukrainian situation. Yeah, Putin was on the fence about invading, and then one night he was watching a M*A*S*H rerun and saw Corporal Klinger in a dress and said, "Send in the tanks!" Fox News's Monica Crowley's obsession has always been cancel culture, and so naturally she said, "Between the fierce Ukrainian resistance and the sanctions... Russia is being canceled." Wait, the Ukrainians shouldn't resist an invasion because that makes them part of cancel culture? But isn't their country what's getting canceled? Justin Bieber once visited Anne Frank's attic in Amsterdam and wrote in the guest book: "Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber." That's what all these people sound like. Don't take this personally, but don't take everything personally. Ukraine is not mostly about your pet grievances--it's about Vladimir Putin's. And Putin is bad--very, very bad. He pushes people out of windows and cheats at hockey. But he's still better than the guy who brings every conversation back to Bitcoin. My pet cause is PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but I don't think Ukraine got invaded because we haven't neutered enough cats. And I guarantee you that right now, somewhere, some guy who can't get it up is telling a girl, "This never happened before Ukraine." PRUDE AWAKENING In 2021, CNN described a night out with Republican congressman Matt Gaetz this way: "The partygoers, at times dressed in formal wear from a political event they'd just left, mingled and shared drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. Some had sex." Wait a minute: Wild hotel-suite parties--shouldn't that be a Democratic thing? Shouldn't Democrats be the party of free love and fun and forgetting where you parked your car? Republicans can't be the "conservative," stick-up-your-ass party and then take our drugs and fuck our women. JFK used to have nude pool parties in the White House. Now the politician who comes closest to carrying on that legacy is Matt Gaetz? Republicans can't spend decades chastising liberals for being too permissive about sex and drugs and then be completely silent about their recent embrace of both. And Gaetz isn't the only one: former Republican House speaker John Boehner now sells pot for a living--my old job. Marjorie Taylor Greene was reportedly into "polyamorous tantric-sex," and Ashli Babbitt, the MAGA warrior who died storming the Capitol, turns out to have been in a throuple with her husband and another woman. And don't get me started on Trump. Even their spiritual advisers are freaks. Jerry Falwell Jr. apparently likes to relax after a hard day at Bible college by watching the pool boy do the missus. I know Republicans are lazy and they love outsourcing, but come on. This is a long way from when his father made it a national issue that one of the Teletubbies was purple = gay, duh. What happened? Republicans always sounded like Grover Norquist when he said of a Kansas congressman caught in a strip club: "Because Politico did an exposé on his lap dance with a naked lady in a strip club, he's not the kind of person you can ask your sister to vote for anymore." That's the Republican Party I know! So uptight they could grind diamonds in their ass. While liberals used their asses the way God intended: to smuggle drugs. You could always count on Republicans to be the fuddy-duddies, the wet blankets, the bores. The "Moral Majority." Nixon started the war on drugs, and Nancy Reagan never stopped spitting her stupid catchphrase "Just Say No" about it. Her husband had a commission to root out pornography. If it was fun, Republicans were against it. They got apoplectic over Clinton getting a blow job. They invented abstinence-only education. Mitt Romney has never seen himself naked. John Ashcroft once covered the tits on a statue. Rick Santorum wears a sweater vest. Newt Gingrich once said Democrats were "the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness." Well, on a good night, yes. And frankly, Newt, knowing that you believe what I did on an average Friday night was morally reprehensible just made it all the more fun. I don't want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the Right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. And now that's liberals? Yes, it is. We're the fun suckers now, sucking the fun out of everything: Halloween, the Oscars, childhood, Twitter, comedy. It's like woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist, and that's wrong. Because it's cultural appropriation. If Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they'd be down a lot of heroes: no FDR, no JFK or RFK, no LBJ, no Clinton, no Martin Luther King Jr. Democrats are now the party that can't tell the difference between Anthony Weiner and Al Franken. Or Katie Hill, an up-and-coming Democratic congresswoman from California who had to resign because, like Ashli Babbitt, she was found to be in a throuple. And pictured holding a bong, which was too much for our new puritanical Democratic Party. Quite the opposite, a woman in a throuple holding a bong should be the Democrats' logo: You're the throuple people, the bong people, the tantric sex gurus--not Matt Gaetz! You did fucking in the mud and bra burning and "turn on, tune in and drop out" before it was cool, and they're the party that won't bake wedding cakes for gay people. It's time to switch back. Because frankly, you're not good at being us, and being you sucks. PUNCH-DRUNK GOV When someday soon an actual brawl breaks out on the floor of Congress, don't say I didn't tell you it was coming. And oh yes, it's coming--the kind of thing we've seen many times from all over the world. It could be its own show called Parliament Fights , where a perfectly normal debate in some country's legislative house devolves into an actual brawl. When Americans see bad things happen overseas we always think, "It will never happen here." We thought that about terrorism, and mask-wearing, and being one of those countries where people shit in the street. And when we saw brawling in the very places where people are supposed to come together to work out their differences politely, we said, "Ha ha, foreigners are funny! Countries where democracy is barely a thing and men have too much hair on their knuckles--that will never be us!" Oh, it be us. It be us real soon. A recent study examined 365 incidents of physical fights in parliaments across the globe between 1990 and 2018 and discovered the key to where the fighting takes place. Here's who doesn't have parliament fights: countries with authoritarian rulers. Because they just wouldn't allow it. And also, because they're too busy clapping for the dictator. And the other kind of country that doesn't throw punches? Real democracies--like we used to be. The places where fights break out are the countries that aren't sure which one they are. That's where we're heading. And while I believe that, as citizens, we need to find a way to love and respect each other again, for Congress it's possible that bus has sailed. Which is why I'd like to suggest that our political leaders learn a lesson from the people who work in one of America's most successful industries--show business--and understand something very fundamental: you can get great things done and still hate each other's fucking guts. I say this because it would be easier to name great movies where the principals didn't hate each other. The editor of Mad Max: Fury Road said Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy "didn't want to touch each other, they didn't want to look at each other, they wouldn't face each other if the camera wasn't actively rolling." But the movie works! Director Roman Polanski hated his leading lady Faye Dunaway so much he refused to give her a bathroom break, so she pissed in a cup and threw it in his face. The movie they made together? Chinatown. Which ironically is about hoarding water. At the end of An Officer and a Gentleman , Richard Gere whisks Debra Winger away, but when the cameras stopped, he couldn't wait to drop her. And on Terms of Endearment , Winger hated Shirley MacLaine so much she farted in her face. Eddie Murphy and John Landis stuck it out on Coming to America , but when it was over Eddie said that Vic Morrow, who had been decapitated in a stunt gone wrong on a previous Landis movie, had "a better chance of working with Landis [again] than" he did. Actors have many times hated each other so much they refused to be on the set together at the same time, even in a scene they were both in. America loves Bill Murray. But you know who doesn't? Everyone who's ever worked with him. Well, everyone who's ever worked with Ted Cruz hates him--why can't this work for government? The list of people who sucked it up and said "I know we hate each other, but we've got a movie to make" is long and impressive. And it's not just movies: your favorite TV stars hate each other too! On Star Trek , Captain Kirk feuded constantly with Mr. Spock, and he's still feuding with Mr. Sulu. And it's no secret there was no love lost between Kim Cattrall and the other ladies on Sex and the City , and yet they just found a way to work together again on a show about how men are always the problem. Government needs to learn how to do the same thing. Yes, here in terrible, horrible, immoral show business, we hate each other, and yet we still do our jobs: turning your children communist and gay. DON'T TREAD ON FREE Many years ago, on a television network far, far away, I expressed support for libertarianism, because back then it meant that I didn't want big government in my bedroom or my medicine chest, and especially not in the second drawer of the nightstand on the left side of my bed. And I still believe that. But somewhere along the way libertarianism morphed into this creepy obsession with free-market capitalism based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged , a novel that's never been read all the way through by anyone with a girlfriend. Paul Ryan once said Ayn Rand taught him "what [his] value systems are." And I believe him, because her book has a strange appeal to people who are kind of smart but not really. She wrote things like "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue" and "The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me"--which sounds like something a Batman villain says. It's all stuff that seems very deep when you're nineteen years old, about how government is a dirty trick played by the weak on the strong. And I can see how if you're a privileged college kid, you read it and think, "Yeah, that's right--I don't need anything! So shut up, Dad, and pay my tuition." And then one day you graduate and pack up your things and realize that your copy of Atlas Shrugged belongs in the same milk crate as your beer helmet and the T-shirt that looks like a tuxedo. Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of people freeloading off the government, or that there aren't libertarian notions that I applaud, like reinstating Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure, and shutting down the American empire--but libertarians have to stop ruining libertarianism, or at least do a better job of explaining the difference between today's libertarian and just being a selfish prick. Like, when you see a stoplight your reaction should be "Great. An easy way to ensure we don't all crash into each other," not "How dare the government tell me when I can and cannot go!" "Seat belts? I refuse to live in a nanny state--I'm an individual, and I want to soar, free as an eagle, right through the windshield." Same thing with meat inspectors--who needs 'em? "People can sniff their own meat! And if a few die, the word will get around town: 'Don't order the T-bone at the Ponderosa,' and then the Ponderosa closes--problem solved, thanks to the free market!" Too many of today's libertarians don't believe the government should be regulating banks, or guns, or civil rights, or even helping out after natural disasters. And they're aggressively hostile to environmental protection. But I like air. And water. I'm practically addicted. Libertarians also hate Medicare and Social Security--and there are problems with those programs. But it beats stepping over lepers and watching human skeletons shit in the river, and I also like not seeing things like that. I guess I'm just selfish that way. What I'd really like to see is libertarianism restored to its proper place in the political firmament--because Americans retain a strong libertarian streak, and I think that's a good thing. Hollywood made a movie a few years ago about the evils of violence in football called Concussion , and it tanked, probably because when it comes to football, our view is: let's enjoy this national pastime instead of indulging in that other national pastime, which is telling strangers how to live their lives. Football is a body-crushing, brain-wrecking game--but we all know that now, so either ban it or shut up about it. And I say that as someone who is not callous to the suffering: when I see a receiver go over the middle and get hammered, I always think two things: one, "I hope that didn't cause permanent damage," and two, "Did he get enough for the first down? Because we needed that play... Oh, he didn't even hold on? Jesus Christ, what are we paying you for??" I would feel bad about the violence in football if the reason I watched the game was specifically to see injuries--you know, like NASCAR. But that's not the reason. I watch football because it's a great game, and an unfortunate side effect is young men smashing into each other like demolition derby cars full of meat. And loving it. Yes, they do seem to be loving it. This is a sport where the players love celebrating so much they have rules about penalizing that . Paul Walker died joyriding. I don't get car love; I don't think driving is like sex--I think it's like commuting. But that's me. He was doing what he loved. Some people smoke cigarettes, some ski too fast, some date Chris Brown. Americans spend a lot of their time working on relationships--unfortunately, they're other people's. If Rihanna wanted to get back with Chris Brown or Hillary wants to stay with Bill, that's their call, not yours. You don't get to stop strangers from doing what, or who, they love, even if it's not what, or who, you would do. Just days after David Bowie's death, someone dug up an old interview with a retired groupie named Lori Mattix where she revealed that she'd lost her virginity to Bowie when she was fifteen, in a hotel suite, on hash and champagne, which in 1972 was considered part of a complete breakfast. To hear Lori tell it, she was a more-than-willing partner, and he was a gentle and knowing lover. And he was wearing a kimono. And he was David fucking Bowie. Which is not a bad way to lose your virginity considering most deflowerings involve Michelob, a van and crying. If there's a victim here, it's the poor guy who had to fuck Lori Mattix next : How do you follow David Bowie in a kimono? Talk about "pressure, pushing down on me..." But according to the Internet's social justice warriors, this was horrible and Lori would be better off today if she'd lost her virginity to a loser named Dan from Algebra II class. Sure, Lori says she loved it, and still loves it, and has never regretted it for a second. But she's wrong, because she only asked herself; she should be asking a blogger or a women's collective in Winnipeg, because they know better than Lori how Lori should feel. I thought we'd all come to accept this mantra, "Live in the moment." I guess not. Sometimes, when you're young and in the moment, the moment includes recklessness. Who can say that when they were young and felt invincible they didn't do stuff that compromised their health later on? I certainly did. And I pity the fool in 1983 who would have tried to take the Jack Daniel's out of my hand. INTENTIONAL POUNDING One more thing about football... In January of 2023, an event happened on the football field in Cincinnati that seemed to capture everything that's wrong with our national psyche, and a few things that are right. It was a highly consequential meeting between two playoff-bound teams, the Bengals and the Bills, and the outcome would determine each team's standing going into the playoffs. For the players who worked so hard and sacrificed so much to get there, this game had to be played. But it wasn't. Because early in the game on a kickoff play, defensive back Damar Hamlin collapsed after a routine tackle. Paramedics rushed the field, and then an ambulance came, and everyone held their breath: this was no ordinary injury, and he could have died. What's good about what happened here is: he got the best, quickest medical care possible, and it saved his life; everyone agreed his life was the priority, not the game; and players didn't feel the need to be so macho they completely brushed it off. Here's what's bad: GROUPTHINK. Players get hurt all the time in football, even carted off the field. So when it happened, the announcers, the fans, the NFL brass, all seemed to be leaning toward continuing play--the players went back to the locker rooms to get their heads straight, but it seemed too important a game to just toss aside. And what about the fans? The ones who bleed for their teams all season long, and who suffered through years of losing, and who count on the football season for passion and relief in lives that are often lacking in both--the ones watching on TV, and the ones who made all those plans you have to make to get out to the stadium. It seemed cruel and unnecessary to just send them home with just the ticket stub. But about a half hour in, after a couple of camera shots of players on the sideline crying, the game was canceled, and in minutes it went from debatable to unthinkable that this game could be played. The next day, sports analyst Skip Bayless said he thought maybe it should have been played and he was practically canceled for just entertaining the idea. Because this is a nation of sheep. STUPID LOGIC. Everyone on TV kept saying the same thing: "The game is not important--Damar Hamlin's life is important." Absolutely. Of course. And it's great it had a happy ending. But what the fuck does that have to do with playing the rest of the game after he was already in the hospital? If you just heard the commentary, you would have thought we were asking him to suit up again and go back in the game. The inability to do two things at once--to recognize his life is more important than the game and that playing the game doesn't "dishonor" him, is depressing. Playing the rest of the game would have had zero effect on the thing we were all saying was most important--his life. The doctors in the emergency room weren't distracted because they were watching the game out of the corners of their eyes while they worked. Everyone talked about it like it was a zero-sum situation where playing the game would somehow take away from his care or in some way make us think his life wasn't more important than football. You know who got this? Damar Hamlin. The first thing he wrote when he woke up was not "How am I?" or "Am I going to be OK?" It was "Did we win?" No, Damar, your team didn't win, because they didn't play, because you live in Stupidland. OVERREACTION. The only appropriate reaction in America is overreaction. I thought football was played no matter what, come rain or snow or whatever. It's a violent sport, we've established that, but it's also still voluntary--players are injured in every single game, and the announcers say, "We'll step away," which means we go to a commercial for Nationwide insurance while they scrape the body parts off the field, and we all hope--or, if it's your thing, pray--they'll be OK. And the fact that on this night the player in question turned out to be OK made it all the more ridiculous that everyone acted like the World Trade Center got hit again. HYPOCRISY. This was a freak accident that did not have much to do with football--obviously if you collapse from a heart issue after a routine play, something else is going on with your health. But what is routine is players retiring with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and then often not being able to function in life; some have even killed themselves because of it. Happily, Damar now seems fine. Unless he plays again and gets hit in the head so many times during his career that later in life he has CTE and finds life unbearable because of it. If they really cared about people getting grievously injured, they wouldn't have canceled the game--they would cancel the sport. But again, they shouldn't, because we all should be able to make those choices in life. Life is about trade-offs, and they should always be ours to make. WEAKNESS. There's no crying in football. Excerpted from What This Comedian Said Will Shock You by Bill Maher All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
