“Do you pay attention to your fucking life?!”
In retrospect, it wasn’t the most tactful thing I could have said.
I was talking to Greg, a friend from my old neighborhood, whom I hadn’t seen in years. I was born on the South Side of Chicago in a family of 12 kids. They say you learn a lot about life growing up in a big family. The biggest thing I learned was that I was easily replaced.
I knew that, if I died, it wasn’t going to put a big dent in my parents’ plans. Can’t imagine my mom sitting around crying, “Oh no, Jimmy’s gone! What am I going to do now . . . with just the ELEVEN OF YOU? How do I fill the empty 1/12th of my heart?”
I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. It was really blue collar . . . you know, racist.
The part of town I grew up voted for the Democrats for the better part of a century, until the first African-American Democratic candidate for mayor appeared on the ticket. Suddenly, my part of town realized they were actually Republicans.
These were the people who worked all day in physically demanding jobs they hated. After work, they’d stop at the bar to down a six pack while complaining about minorities and then go home to watch reruns of Archie Bunker . . . and laugh for all the wrong reasons. They didn’t understand that they were supposed to be laughing at Archie Bunker, not with him. I used to run through my house yelling, “No, Meathead is right! Meathead is right!”
They loved to brag about how physically hard their jobs were. It was a weird macho competition where the winner was the guy who had the shittiest job.
“I worked a double shift on a stand-up forklift in a warehouse without air conditioning, in temperatures over 120 degrees,” or “I started plowing snow at midnight on Friday, didn’t stop until Sunday at 6pm. That’s right, 40 hours straight at TRIPLE TIME!” was the kind of bragging you’d hear from guys in my neighborhood.
The only thing better than working a job that would put you into an early grave was having a job that paid well and required no work. Think toll booth operator. I know it sounds like a job you would try to avoid, but in my neighborhood, guys vigorously pursued these jobs. Toll booth workers were admired cuz they got to sit on their ass all day and got Dental.
A job at a major utility was also great for not working. My friend Danny worked for the Commonwealth Edison, the company that powered Chicago, and his favorite brag was “Today I spent 8 hours looking for a pipe. . . . Guess what? I didn’t find it!” And he would laugh as if he had beaten life.
Of course the only job that could top them all was Chicago city fireman—the crown jewel of blue-collar jobs. Respect and envy ran deep for the fireman, for they could trump any occupational brag. A fireman could both boast about not working at all and having to do the hardest, most dangerous work in the world.
Chicago city firemen had 24-hour shifts, and consequently, they only went into work 7 days a month. Basically they spent their shifts sleeping, eating, or playing cards. So most of their time they were getting paid union wages to do nothing. But at the bar, they could also tell stories about climbing three flights of stairs in pitch-black smoke and carrying down a 300-pound elderly lady. Not that these firemen were slackers. Most worked heavy-duty second jobs in their off-hours, like carpentry or bricklaying, driving their co-workers nuts by boasting about getting paid for sleeping at the firehouse.
Those were the exceptions. This was a world where hard work wasn’t shunned but embraced. These men worked until their bodies burned out. They sacrificed for their families and for the American promise that, if you worked hard, you could have a good middle-class life. Sadly, that is no longer the case. This is a different America. We are now a nation in which workers live near the poverty line, where social mobility is stuck in quicksand, wages barely support a family, and third world labor forces making first-world products is the norm. We innovate financial schemes like derivatives, credit default swaps, and mortgage backed securities—all things that create money for the money changers and add nothing to the economy or society. Which leads me back to my friend Greg.
My friend Greg was now living in St. Louis. In the fall of 2008 I visited him. He used to be a mortgage broker. I say “used to,” because he lost his job when, um, well . . . you know (like I said, it was 2008).
Greg was going through all the new American rites of passage: out of work, lost his health insurance, upside-down on his own house. All of this while raising a family with one kid in college, the other in Afghanistan, and a wife with a medical condition. He was in a tough spot, and I couldn’t have felt more sorry for him. And worst of all, he lives in St. Louis.
He told me that nobody saw the financial crisis coming. Nobody? All the brainiacs in the banking business, the guys on Wall Street buying and selling mortgage securities, the federal regulators—none of them had a clue that a train wreck of 1930s proportions was on its way? There were some pretty big train wrecks in the 1930s . . . oh, and there was also the Great Depression.
I’m a comedian. If comedy were about to make millions of people lose their homes and cause giant, 100-year-old banks to fail, I think I would try to warn people. Hell, I tried to warn people about Dane Cook and Jay Leno. If I didn’t see something like that coming, expert that I am supposed to be, I would at least feel like a dick for a super long time.
However, I was conflicted. Greg has always stayed gleefully ignorant of politics and current events that are not celebrity- or sports-related. So I thought it was kind of sad that it took this horrible turn of events and the shittiest government since the invention of shitty governments to make my friend politically aware. At the same time, I was a little happy. I thought that, from then on, we would engage each other in conversations of substance and import. Our time together would be meaningful, and maybe we would even grow closer (not that I really care, I have enough friends, I tell myself).
I was eager to begin, and blurted out my conversation-starter: “So, who are you voting for?”
“Oh, I don’t pay attention to politics,” Greg said matter-of-factly.
“Well, do you pay attention to your fucking LIFE!?” I replied, with my conversation-ender. Maybe I could have been more tactful and gone with, “OK, if you could have lunch with any politician, living or dead, who would it be? And would you ask them about the deregulated financial system that put you in the poor house?”
That evening I returned to my hotel, counting how many friends I had left, and on television I heard this:
“As you know, I’m not political at all on my show.”
–Andy Cohen, television host
That was said by openly gay television host Andy Cohen. He was making the rounds on TV talking about gay rights and how important they are . . . but please don’t forget that he’s not political at all, except, I guess, when he stops to talk about the most incendiary political topic of our time. Then he’s political.
Yeah, it’d be nice if every “non-political” person’s pet issue wasn’t inextricably connected to every other political issue in the whole world. Saying you’re “not political” and then talking about gay marriage and civil rights is like calling yourself a vegetarian when you eat chickens and pandas. Andy Cohen is an openly gay TV host, for Christ’s sake! That in itself is a huge political statement.
We are all political. If you want the pothole in front of your house fixed, that’s politics. If you want better schools for your kids, that’s politics. If you don’t want your tax dollars wasted on foreign wars, that’s politics. If you want clean air and water, that’s politics. If you want to be able to go to the doctor when you get sick without going bankrupt, that’s politics. And if you want equality for gay people under the law, that is not only political, but to a lot of people, including lots of good white Christians, that’s also radical.
Most things are considered radical until they aren’t anymore, like slavery. That was pretty radical. Oh yeah, owning and enslaving other people was a real hot-button political issue; it was the “gay rights” of its day. Imagine Abraham Lincoln saying, “I’m calling for completely changing the economic model for half the country to assure equal rights for all people . . . but don’t worry, this isn’t political.”
Why does this bother me? Is it because the Andy Cohens of the world think it makes them more mature to say, “I’m not political!”? I guess it bothers me because I know people like that. The people who like to play the nice, happy-go-lucky guy that everybody likes, who isn’t strident like those “political types.” Get it? He’ll never do anything that is the least off-putting, and he certainly won’t say anything to make you question your beliefs.
It creates this false world of “getting along just fine without politics.” As if nice people, friendly people, likable people don’t talk about politics. My friend Greg said folks in St. Louis “don’t like to have those kinds of conversations.”
Even when their lives are crushed by a collapsed unregulated economy, they act as if politics is a luxury, reserved for people with too much time on their hands. As if government has as much relevance to their lives as Arena Football. I just don't get that mentality. They could be a Jew in 1932 Germany and be voting for Hitler. “I don't pay attention to politics, I let the guy with the little mustache take care of stuff. I’ve got other stuff to do, you know?”
Not that the media makes it easy for them to get informed. Who would've guessed that corporate made-for-profit news might be less than informative? Some media outlets are actual defense contractors, like NBC and MSNBC, which are 49% owned by General Electric, which sucks more than $1.8 billion out of the Pentagon’s tit every year. Trying to get the truth about a war from these multinational corporations is like trying to get the truth from someone . . . who is not inclined to give it to you! . . . (OK, my analogies are wanting, and I didn’t want to mention Hitler and the Jews again, but I’m taking a class at the Learning Annex.)
In fact, most people are so misinformed that they still believe the myth that news is controlled by a “Liberal Media.” My friend recently said he doesn't watch NBC, “because they're too liberal.” Hmmm . . . a liberal defense contractor full of vegetarian hippies manufacturing hemp-knitted cruise missiles, makes sense.
Me? I sometimes wish I were the kind of person who only watched Fox News. I like my news given to me straight, exactly how the Koch brothers, the Heritage Foundation, and Rupert Murdoch want me to hear it. Don’t waste your audience’s time by getting all fact-checky about the supposed information you’re broadcasting. What good does that do? I mean, let's say you discover that politicians are stating incorrect “facts” (which they usually are). What then? They’re just going to keep doing exactly whatever they want, whether it’s bad for the country or just super-bad (and I don’t mean black-exploitation-movie kind of “super-bad,” I mean the way the words were actually meant to mean). So now all you've done is upset yourself because you know the "truth.” I've seen it happen to people I love. My brother only watches Bill Moyers on PBS, and now he walks around anxious and miserable all the time. Bill Moyers and his crew are always investigating and finding out stuff, like facts. They’re constantly exposing the current administration’s lies, propaganda, and spin. Yet it hasn’t changed a thing, and my brother has developed a bleeding ulcer.
It's enough to make you move to St. Louis.