The Detroit Pistons just capped a 28-game losing streak, the longest in sports history. At my college, the University of Michigan, about an hour from Detroit, we used to joke that college football coach Bo Schembechler ate his cereal from a box because he’d lose it in a bowl. When the Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1984, we nearly burned the city down in celebration (after the mini-riot, the Detroit Free Press ran a political cartoon showing a Tigers fan standing atop a smoldering rubble heap wearing a “We’re No. 1!” styrofoam mitten).
But last week, the Wolverines won their first outright national championship since the mid-1900s — without anarchy. And last night, the Detroit Lions won their first playoff game in eight decades. In other news, dogs and cats are staging a love-in music festival and Republicans believe in evolution.
I’ve never been one for hyperbole, but that’s the most surprising thing in the history of histories. This is a miracle on the scale of loaves and fishes, people. Detroit football fans don’t need sunscreen; they wear paper bags.
But Michigan has held some surprises of late. It elected a Democrat as governor — a female governor at that. Downtown Detroit has enjoyed a resurgence because owning property is the new whip. Homicides are down from 500 a year to about 250. And it has Eminem.
Not that it’s yet time to retire in Hamtramck. I checked the weather today and the temperature was two. American cars remain pieces of shit. I’m told you still don’t want to linger in the Motor City after dark. And it has Eminem.
But given what sports typically means in Detroit, especially football, last night’s victory came straight from the storybooks.
I’ve sat on the fence too long. You see, it’s a picket one, constructed of splendid splinters. So it’s a bit rough on the ass. But I digress.
I’ve decided to enter my name in the Democratic presidential race. I would have announced more formally than this, but Jack n the Box refused to reserve parking lot space for the press announcement. And after all the lobbying dollars I threw their way…
Anyway, I’m running, joining the other 237 candidates. Unlike those hopefuls, however, I believe in coming out with policy statements immediately out of the gate. And since my likely opponent, Cap’n Bone Spurs, and his evangelical base are so concerned with the candidates’ positions on crotches (why is that, by the way? The GOP lately has been an acronym for Groin of Preference), I figure I better come out with my general positions on people’s dangly bits.
First and foremost: I support the right to genitalia.
In terms of exercising said right: I wholeheartedly support right of choice. In fact, under a Bowlesian administration, only women will have a vote on the abortion issue. If only one gender shoulders the burden of an issue, they should have the right to determine its fate. Until a man can force a bowling ball through his puckered sphincter, we should shut the fuck up on the topic (And let’s be fair: if a proposition arose, say, calling for mandatory circumcision, only men would get to vote on that).
Gay marriage. Last week, Kentucky passed a state law banning bestiality. Really. Last week. It’s not that it’s an absurd law, only that Kentucky yahoos need to be legally told not to fuck Spot. But let’s not go overboard; my administration not only supports gay marriage, but you should have the right to marry the family turtle if the love is there — as long as you have the animal’s written consent.
Beyond the dangly bits, some other campaign planks:
The electoral college: Gone.
Daylight Savings Time: Gone
Political ads on Facebook: Fucking gone.
Gun control: Buy a bazooka if you want. But all gun owners, like car owners, must pass a written and road test if you want to exercise the privilege of ownership. The system would work exactly like auto licensing: You must show proficiency to practice, and paperwork to own. And don’t give me this slippery slope bullshit. Americans haven’t been forced to buy hybrids or electric cars by requiring licensing.
Yet the need has never been greater for licensing. According to the Center for Disease Control, there were 39,773 gun deaths in 2017, the most recent year available, up by more than 1,000 from the year before. Nearly two-thirds were suicides. It was the largest yearly total on record in the C.D.C.’s electronic database, which goes back 50 years, and reflects the sheer number of lives lost. You need to prove you can operate an Acura, but not an AK-14?
Now for matters less contentious, Factslaps:
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva is a rare genetic disease which causes damaged soft tissue to regrow as bone.
“Stan”, from the Eminem song with the same name, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, defining it as “an overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity.”
In Northern Ireland, women earn 3.4% than men on average.
Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. About 80% of women reproduced, whereas only 40% of men did.
4.6 million Americans were severely behind on payments on student loans in 2017.
The average American throws away 70 pounds of clothes a year.
Corporatocracy is a term used to refer to an economic and political system controlled by corporate interests.
Every winter, great white sharks swim for 40 days to meet up between Mexico and Hawaii, and nobody knows why.
First: How is it that Donald Trump has not responded to rapper Eminem’s scathing video beat down of the administration, in which he told his fans that if they were supporters of the Pumpkin-in-Chief, they should stop following buying his music?
It was a rare non-response (which has become as much a tea leaf into his thinking as the Tweets he does make) from a president who likes nothing more than to enter a social fray in which he can offend.
Confusion is the only scenario I can think of that led to the silence:
Flunkie: “Sir, social media is buzzing about Eminem’s video criticizing you.”
Trump: “Those sons of bitches. Was it the green one?”
The Incontinent Id did offer some interesting fantasizing last week. Namely, wondering aloud if the media’s daily excoriating of him wasn’t tantamount to unequal political coverage.
Of course, one of the greatest memories in the history of memories didn’t use the word “tantamount.” Multi-syllabic words are not his friend (except bigly, which actually is a word, coined in the 1400’s). Instead, he mused aloud whether he should yank NBC’s broadcasting license.
Gen. John Kelly couldn’t get to him in time to tell Trump he doesn’t have the legal authority to do that. Or perhaps Sarah Huckabee Sanders scolded Kelly that it’s disrespectful for a Gold Star family member to differ with a president. Regardless, the Tweet went out like a silent fart at church.
Still, under the broken-clock theory of logic, Trump occasionally (if unintentionally) strikes on a salient point. What if he could revoke FCC licenses? The question is less one of power than programming. Trump has floated the idea of equal air time before. But what would Republicans put in its stead? The GOP is terrific at bellyaching (Hannity, O’Reilly, Limbaugh), less so at belly laughs.
Consider: Name one politically satirical TV show that is conservative. There was once Dennis Miller of Saturday Night Live fame, but his humor became so obscure even he didn’t get his jokes. Other right-tilting comedians include Tim Allen, Jeff Foxworthy, Adam Sandler and Larry the Cable Guy. But they joke about politics about as often as they do pedophilia.
Now consider the other side of the ledger. There are no fewer than seven big-budget comedy shows making Koch-like money skewering President Carrot Top: The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Late Night with Seth Meyer and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper. And that doesn’t include Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, The Trump Show on Comedy Central, or the increasingly leftward leanings of mainstream comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon. All but Klepper were born during Democratic presidencies.
What gives? The most common answer I get is “Republicans aren’t funny.” But we know simply from the success of Republicans’ non-political entertainment that this isn’t the case. Sandler’s movies clear $83 million a flick. Allen’s Home Improvement ran for nine years and took more than a dozen Emmy Awards.
The issue, then, must be the material more than the emcees. And here’s where you find the comedic difficulty of conservatism.
Like journalism, comedy requires editorial freedom to work. It also requires watch dogging, critiquing and whistle blowing when the system goes off the rails — hardly a skill set sought in quarters that seek order or discipline, like the military, government or church.
Picture a Republican TV show that excoriates Trump for a boneheaded comment. Or teases the religious right. They’d be shut down in a week — by Republicans. When you take god or the president off the comedy menu, you’re left with a plateful of limp-noodle punchlines. And little to aim at besides people telling the jokes.
Which as been the sole stratagem left standing for the alt-right. A day after the Vegas shooting, Sean Hannity went on the air to play a montage of comedy shows that took a moment to recognize the massacre — and make a call for a change to gun laws.
Hannity vomited some nonsense about the left’s unquenchable desire to politicize American sadness.
But the shows were right, if only on a visceral scale. We are sad. And mad. And goofy and dumb and eager to address issues of the day, bigly (it means “to handle with great force, often emotionally”). So loosen up, Foxtards. There are literally millions to be made with just a dash of humor.
But here’s a tip. When you go looking for the show’s band leader, don’t bother Eminem. I don’t think he likes you.
