New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (22 page)

Crude Awakening

 

NEW RULE

 

S
top whining about gas prices. Gas costs a lot because we have to find it, bribe or kill the people who live on top of it, extract it, refine it, ship it, and pump it. You’ll pay $2 a gallon and you’ll like it because you know what the alternative is: riding on the bus with poor people.

How come we have cars with global positioning systems, satellite radio, and voice-activated Web access, and we still power them with the black goop that you have to suck out of the ground? Hate to tell you this, folks, but gas doesn’t cost too much, it costs too little.

I know, you hear about gas prices being over $2 a gallon, and it makes you nearly choke on your $4 latte. We bitch about gas, but adjusted for inflation, it’s the same price it was back when the pope was a Nazi. And it’s not the fault of ExxonMobil, either. That’s like Kirstie Alley saying her problem is that Arabs control all the fudge.

Anyone who’s been to Europe knows that the price of gas over there is just a picture of an arm and a leg. That’s because they tax it heavily, and we don’t. How come we Americans accept that you can overtax cigarettes just because they are bad, but that somehow burning oil into the atmosphere is okay? You can’t smoke in a bar, but you can drive through a restaurant. A little smoke from a cigar is intolerable, but a lot from a Hummer is no problem.

Of course, the Hummer is made by General Motors, the owner of other gas-guzzling fuck-you-mobiles like the Escalade and the Suburban, and they just lost a billion dollars in one quarter because it suddenly got a lot less sexy to drive one of those fake macho vehicles when it started to cost a hundred bucks to fill it up. Nobody’s dick is that small.

Plus, does anybody remember the ’70s? GM has been down this road before: They got filthy rich selling giant cars that suddenly people didn’t want after gas prices went up. Cut to the Japanese gloating. Now they’re back to gloating because they own the patent for the hybrid car. GM could have had a piece of it, but they said it didn’t make “economic sense.” Hey, you just lost a billion dollars in 3 months. You don’t have any economic sense!

So, let me remind everyone of this: The most vulnerable point of the Earth is the atmosphere, which acts like a giant mirror, absorbing 95 percent of the sun’s energy. When I heard that, I said, “Honey, that sounds important!” And I’m not even married.

If we don’t protect the atmosphere, ultraviolet radiation will fry us like ants under a magnifying glass. I know these kind of facts aren’t in the Bible, but maybe we should think about them anyway. After all, this could even affect Tom and Katie. It’s not a real threat, like an activist judge, but it’s kind of important—because, in the last half century, this precious atmosphere of ours has thinned by 40 percent. And this worries me because in the exact same time frame, my hair has thinned by 40 percent.

It worked out for me, but the Earth may not be so lucky.

Giving Till It Hurts

 

NEW RULE

 

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errorist organizations can’t also be charities. You can’t spend half your time building hospitals and schools and the other half blowing them up. For one thing, it will confuse President Bush, who won’t know if you’re with us, against us, or faith-based.

As the government report on 9/11 made clear—especially if you can read through a black Sharpie—claiming you’re a “charitable organization” is second only to saying “religion” when you want to make people lie down and let you get away with something criminal. People like the Saudis can get away with giving money to people like Hamas by saying “Hey, they’re a charity, too.” Yeah, Habitat for
In
humanity
.

Groups like Hamas say, “Don’t judge us because, besides bombings and murder, we also provide valuable community services.” Yes, and Mc-Donald’s has salads now, but that doesn’t make it a health food restaurant. It’s like how John Gotti’s neighborhood in Queens loved him because he threw a nice block party. You can’t claim you’re part of the Make-A-Wish Foundation if the wish is to drive every Jew in the world into the sea. Mothers Against Drunk Driving can’t also be a ring of call girls—although we’ve all heard the rumors.

The point is, you can’t do and be everything at the same time. That’s why President Bush always waits a week between wars before he proposes another tax cut for the rich. To far too many Muslims in the world, feeding children and knocking down the World Trade Center can both be considered “good works,” which is also how Hamas stays in business.

But we in the rest of the world don’t have to buy into this insane contradiction. If we don’t take a stand now, people will come to believe Hamas really is a legitimate charity, and then we’ll start getting come-ons from them in the mail, and Pam Anderson will have to start showing up at their fund-raisers with her tits hanging out. No one wants to see Joan Rivers on the red carpet with Zarqawi.

So, come on—we broke up the phone companies, can’t we separate “charity” from “bad-ass murder club”? Wouldn’t that be a start? And if we can accomplish that, then I predict that one day in the future, when Palestinians and Jews are living side by side in harmony, all of us sitting here today... will have been dead for 1,200 years.