I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (10 page)

Look at the accomplishments of the candidates that Obama defeated. You had Hillary Clinton and the entire Clinton machine; there was nobody on the Republican side even remotely close to that in 2012. The other Democrats consisted of a governor—Bill Richardson—and prominent national politicians like Joe Biden and John Edwards. Those were some major heavyweights—but note that
nobody
came from a private corporate background.

I’m not saying any businessman is intrinsically unqualified to occupy the Oval Office. But Herman Cain is
a fucking pizza salesman
. His “business accomplishments” consisted of selling shitty food to people in Georgia. That’s the home of the fried pickle. How is that even remotely preparation for the White House? If you want to stick to fast food, there are plenty of better choices. At least Burger King has had to make executive decisions over his Burger Kingdom. Mayor McCheese has been fighting crime in the form of the Hamburglar for decades; he’s got a résumé. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? Of course it does. And here’s the catch—
Godfather’s Pizza is tenth in the nation in terms of sales
. When Papa John’s is an aspirational figure to you, maybe the presidency is still a bridge too far.

Everything
about Herman Cain was a function of him being a pizza salesman. “I wouldn’t have any bill be longer than two pages”—
which is as long as a fast-food menu
. The reason the bills and contracts are so long is because they try to anticipate as many eventualities as possible. If a bill is not extremely specific, then what the bill entails has to be interpreted by one of two groups: federal bureaucrats, whom the Republicans regard as ominous oppressors, or federal judges, who would thereupon be branded as “activist” and accused of overstepping their bounds.

The instruction manual to take some shit out of a box is longer than two pages. A school paper is longer than two pages. How are you going to fix the health care system in two pages? The fucking Constitution, which the Republicans wave around like a bloody shirt, is much longer than two pages. So does Herman Cain think the Constitution is bad law? Where should we edit that down, to get it to the two-page limit?

The very first thing I thought of when I heard of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan is that it sounded like a commercial for food. Not too long ago, Denny’s had ads that went, “One ninety-nine? Are you out of your mind?” to promote their $1.99 price. That’s why it sounded so catchy to Cain’s supporters. It’s sadly ironic that the rednecks who like simple shit can’t remember that they’ve subliminally heard this song, or variations of it, their whole lives. If you’d walk into Denny’s and think that
any
price is “a good deal” for the shitty food they serve, of
course
you think it’s a good idea for a tax plan. A black man singing about food? That shit is
natural
. It’s just too bad that Herman Cain can’t get a table at the so-called restaurant that inspired his economic policy.

Cain said that “we need simple.” Yet the world’s not simple anymore. The world is complex, it is dangerous, and it is fluid. If you
want to get fast, you race somebody faster than yourself until you can win. You don’t improve by racing someone slower—or by trying to pretend that complicated things are simple. Steel sharpens steel, much the way dumb begets dumb. We’re fat, we’re lazy, we’re ignorant—and we want somebody to make us feel good about being that way. It’s like we’re reverting to the animal level. When you bring a dog some food, that dog is like, “You’re in charge. You’ve got it figured out.” It’s the same thing with Pizzaman for president: “Oh, this guy brings food, therefore he knows what he’s doing.”

Cain’s candidacy really did hit close to home for me. I’m sure for many Republican voters, he’s the closest thing they ever had to a black family member. He reminded me of one of my relatives. I have a cousin who could say some of the brightest things I’ve ever heard. He’ll sound bright and well thought out and then, when he starts to explain
why
he feels that way, I get the sense that this son of a bitch is batshit crazy. Everybody has one of them cousins or uncles or aunts, someone in their family. That’s what Herman Cain is.

I can tell my relatives when they’re being nuts. But the Republicans wouldn’t say anything because Cain was black. His purpose wasn’t to represent them; it was to give them political cover. It used to be that racists would claim “some of my best friends are black.” Facebook has made it easy to disprove that assertion, so in 2011 it became “I was a Herman Cain supporter.” He’s every racist’s imaginary black friend. They didn’t care when the black guy started imploding in front of them. It didn’t matter that the onetime front-runner didn’t even come to Iowa or actually put an organization together there to try to win. It was of no importance that he didn’t have any offices or employees in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation state. Cain was just playing a role and serving a purpose for them.

That’s why Herman Cain makes me more sad than anything. I
don’t have an issue with him personally. I’m
sure
that Herman Cain does
something
really well. I’d like him if we never talked politics; I’d probably like him if we
did
talk politics, so long as he wasn’t deluded about his presidential aspirations. I like a lot of old black cats that make me laugh. At the family reunion, that dude would crack me the fuck up.

But now that Herman Cain is done, the white people he appealed to have no more use for him because he didn’t win. He’s not bright, he’s not entertaining, and after the music’s off, why do we need to see this clown dance? Stop it, Benson. It’s just embarrassing for everyone. I saved Herman Cain for last because to me he was the most revealing by far of the Republican candidates. Cain demonstrated that, when it comes to Republicans, any black man will do … 
and I can prove it
.

T
HE
Republican Party likes to adopt the mantle of Abraham Lincoln, one of the only Republican presidents who gave a fuck about black Americans. They acknowledge that blacks vote overwhelmingly, 90-plus percent, for the Democratic Party. Republicans contend that their policies would be better for black voters but black voters don’t see it. Which is another way of saying:
Black Americans don’t know what’s good for them
. Yet isn’t that the “elitism” that conservatives decry, when allegedly practiced by the left? Why are
we
brainwashed when certain white segments of the Republican
Party, like the Southerners and evangelicals, aren’t? Why do
they
not give the Democratic Party a chance? Why is the same question never asked of
them
?

I’ve been on Bill Maher’s show a number of times and talked to these conservatives. They always think that if they talk slower, or if they’re really precise with their explanations, that I’ll draw the same conclusions that they do.
I don’t see the world the way they do, no matter the cadence of their speech or the precision of their language
. All I am is what I’ve seen; we’re all the sum total of our life’s experiences. I
knowingly
disagree with them, and millions of other black people do too.

One political party is the most selfish, most narrow-minded, most hateful group of people that I’ve ever seen. The other wears rose-colored glasses and believes government can do everything and should be involved in every aspect of our lives. Neither one of those perspectives is
true
, but those are my only options. The former is motivated by a place of evil and selfishness. The latter comes from a sense of altruism and wants things to be better and fair. So who do I go with? It’s like getting a ride home from a party. I’d rather go with someone who gets lost when they’re driving me back than go with someone driving me with no regard to my wishes—or even intentionally driving me in the opposite direction. The Republicans want to drive me where
they
want to go. My values, and the values of people who look like me, are illegitimate to them.

To be a Republican, you really have to be more selfish and downright mean. It’s a very small way of thinking. It’s all about
me, my
, and
ours
. But that kind of approach necessarily means that minorities are
you, they
, and
theirs
. We’re not going to have a place at the table. The Republicans are pragmatic businessmen and dwell on efficiency. Sometimes people feel that they need that type
of approach. But when you look at
inspirational
political figures, can anyone name
one
contemporary GOP operative out there that would inspire people like a Kennedy, or like Clinton, or now like Obama? One person who makes Americans feel like something could be different, even though oftentimes we’re disappointed?

The Republican Party doesn’t even
try
to get the black vote. Anyone who wants to become president has to be able to glad-hand and persuade people on a personal level. Yet the Republicans obviously think that these black people are so fucking gone that there’s no point in wasting five minutes trying to charm us, to say nothing of
persuading
us. George Bush never came to black functions because he automatically assumed that he wouldn’t be welcome. He assumed he’d be wasting his time because we’d never vote for him. How can he
never
step into a room with one of our organizations, and then expect our vote? What would be his message? “Give me your vote even though I won’t do anything to get it. The Democrats just use you, so let me use you too.”

If we had two bright black men running for president who were ideologically opposed,
all of us
would be proud. It would be a real choice.
One
administration changed black people from Republicans to Democrats, the same way that
one
administration made us Republicans. Neither was necessarily
in love
with black people. Lincoln said time and again that abolishing slavery wasn’t his priority, yet he still ended up doing the right thing. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t FDR who brought the black vote into the Democratic Party—at least not in a unanimous way. There were still many blacks who voted Republican after he was gone because the Democratic Party was still the party of Southern racism. It took Kennedy, with his conceptualization of civil rights, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, with his political courage, to make it happen.

The reason the black community is such a lock for the Democrats is because Kennedy and Johnson took huge political risks for us. Pushing civil rights wasn’t the politically expedient path for them to take. Their actions were detrimental to their political futures, so detrimental that Lyndon Johnson wasn’t assured of being nominated in 1968 despite winning one of American history’s biggest landslides in 1964. “We have lost the South for a generation” is what LBJ said as he was signing the Civil Rights Act into law.

Republicans have won seven out of the last eleven presidential elections. That’s a pretty good record for a party that always had a disadvantage when it came to national voter registration. The reason was
race
. In 1964, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater came out against the Civil Rights Act, calling it unconstitutional. But if that were true, legally, then why did he not propose a constitutional amendment to effect the same change? Because the act alienated enough racist Southern Democrats that their votes were up for grabs. They used to be called yellow-dog Democrats before that, since they would vote for a yellow dog before voting for any Republican. Over the following fifty years, they became the base of the Republican Party. The party
based
its strength on Southern racists, on those who switched party
because
of their opposition to civil rights.

It is impossible to name
one
modern Republican who took a risk like that for black people,
one
person who put it all on the line simply for the sake of doing the right thing. It is impossible to name
one
modern Republican who ever did one thing in the last fifty years that was transformative for us—or even
tried
to. Reagan only made things better for rich, white people. The black community during that time was reeling from the crack epidemic and its subsequent addiction, crime, and incarceration.

Most important, it is impossible to name
one
modern Republican who is comfortable among the black community. Any such man or woman would be welcomed with open arms. Why would we choose to be around people who simply tolerate us or seem to have an aversion to us? Why would we go out and vote for them? How can they speak
for
us when they won’t even speak
to
us?

In the Republican Party, anyone who’s brown or yellow or other than white is treated differently. J. C. Watts got a House leadership position simply because of his race. Marco Rubio was touted as a vice-presidential nominee before he was even elected—literally, before he accomplished
anything
other than being a Latino. Minorities in the Republican Party are used like a spectacle. It’s like the modern-day equivalent of the freak show. They think of blacks as accidental, freak Americans, and if they have one brown freak on the stage, maybe the rest of us will hop under their alleged “big tent.”