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NOW I DON'T
WANT TO GET OFF ON A RANT HERE, but that's the problem with America.
You can't tease anybody. I read now that gay people don't even want
to be called gay anymore. They now wish to be referred to as Asian.
"Hey,
what's Dennis saying there, man? Is Dennis saying all Asians are gay?
Is Dennis saying all gays are Asian?" You know what I'm saying .
. . all Asians are gay.
Now somewhere
out there, there's an Asian person talking pen to paper in protest.
And I want you to hear me out . . . put the pen down, it was a joke.
Walk away from it. Let it go. It never happened. It was a comment on
how pathetically neurotic we've all become over our own little piece
of turf. Obviously, you know don't believe that all Asians are gay.
For Christ's sake there's a billion of you, I know somebody's fucking
out there, okay?
And yet this
is what it's come to. This is what it's come to in contemporary
America. Everybody's broken off into these petulant little Travis
Bickle tribes. Everybody walks the perimeter of their own damaged
esteem ever-vigilant against an incursion by They, Them. The Other
Guys. Everybody's touchy and everybody's encouraged to be touchy,
everybody that is . . . except me: the White Anglo-Saxon male. I'm
everybody's asshole. Black people think I'm oppressive and physically
deficient. Women think I'm oafish and horny. Gay people think I'm
overly macho and latently homosexual. And Asians think I'm lazy and
stupid. Hey, you think you've got an ax to grind? I'm fuckin' Paul
Bunyan over here, okay, folks?
And if I'm
expected to be genial, there's a principle of reciprocity here, I
expect you to do the same. Why are we so hung up on the name calling?
We are all such overgrown babies. As it turns out adult life is just
a tall grade school: "You suck," "With your
mouth," "Hi, my mouth," "Hi, me." It's
embarrassing. I can't believe it, the playground is way back there in
the mist. We've got to let it go and get on with it. Why do you think
we get hung up on all the little bullshit?
I have a
theory: I think we're far less evolved ourselves. I know we consider
ourselves to be very nineties creatures, we take it all in, we deal
with it . . . we put it back out. We are just the hippest little
creatures, but you know something? I think in a deep gut level we're
scared shitless. We live in a madhouse and it's brought into our
living rooms on a day-to-day level via CNN. And we see things that we
probably aren't equipped to even vaguely get our head around.
Children in Somalia . . . the atrocities in Bosnia--Cal-a-frag-a-listic-ex-pee-al-a-docious.
I think all this shit comes down and we think, "Christ, it
really is out of control."
So what we do
is we take all the little bullshit things, we trump it up into
something bigger than it actually is, something we can mold and
handle, and in some vague pathetic way keep our feet tethered to the planet.
And that's
why this entire country has turned into Gladys Kravitz from "Bewitched."
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