New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (24 page)

Hard Cell

 

NEW RULE

 

Y
ou can make fun of Lynndie England if you want, but when it comes to prisons, we’re all holding the leash. America’s anti-sweetheart, Private Lynndie England, has finally faced justice for her part in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal—or as Rush Limbaugh calls it, “the sleepover.”

Now, a lot of people think Abu Ghraib happened because, as Americans, we’re comfortable asking our horny hillbillies to fight our wars. And we are. But we’re also comfortable pretending that anyone in America who winds up in prison for whatever reason somehow deserves not just loss of freedom but a brutalizing, terrifying trip to hell.

It’s no mere coincidence that the guard described as the ringleader in the Iraq prison scandal, Charles Graner, worked before the war... where? In a prison. In America. He didn’t learn to torture from the CIA or Special Ops; he picked up his abuse skills right here and took them to Iraq—outsourcing at its worst!

In a way, we are all Lynndie Englands because we know what’s happening in our prisons and we clearly don’t care. We tell ourselves the convenient lie that anyone who bears the label “criminal” or “terrorist” is irredeemable, subhuman psycho scum, and so whatever happens to them behind bars is justified, when the truth is that millions of nonviolent Americans have been traumatized for life in our prisons simply because they either did drugs or made a bad judgment, usually when they were young, stupid, and drunk—you’d think President Bush could relate.

There are more than two million Americans locked up, and that is not including the people who work at Wal-Mart. America, the nation that always has to be number one, is number one in terms of percentage of its citizens in jail: two million people total. It costs $40 billion to house this many prisoners. Do you know how many countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 we could attack for that kind of money?

In conclusion, if your response to this is “not my problem,” remember this: There are monsters and animals in our prisons, yes, but most didn’t go in that way, but it is how they’ll come out.

Or to put it another way: If you think Martha Stewart had an attitude before ...

Muddle Ground

 

NEW RULE

 

P
olitics is about compromises—really stupid compromises. That’s how we got such laws as: Blacks are three-fifths of a person; slaves are property, unless they make it to Ohio; interning the Japanese, but not the Germans; slaughtering the Indians, but letting the ones who survived run the keno parlors; porn, but no hardcore porn; booze, and then no booze, and then booze again. But no pot. Except medical—which is legal to possess, but
illegal
to obtain. You can’t have stem cells, except the ones you already have.

In this spirit, I would like to offer a few compromise suggestions for one of the knottiest issues we face today: same-sex marriage. Why not this: It’s okay to be gay if you’re already gay—but no new gays. We’ll grandfather you in if you’re already an organ grinder, but that’s it.

Or how about we let gays marry but not own homes—come out against “gay mortgage.”

Or maybe the answer to this is as plain as the nose in my lap. With both sides so set—one being all for gay marriage, and the other side completely against it—how about we just let the lesbians marry? Come on, marriage is a chick thing anyway. Monogamy and marriage were invented by women and the Church as a way to address female insecurity and to stamp out oral sex as we know it. And don’t give me some line about how two women can’t reproduce. As long as David Crosby is alive and can swallow a Viagra, that’s not a problem.

Plus, let’s face it, when people talk about homosexuality being “not natural” and “an abomination,” they’re not talking about the women—they’re talking about the men. Nobody seems to find anything abominable about Britney Spears tonguing Madonna, or Gina Gershon in bed with Jennifer Tilley, or anything else on the third shelf of my “library.” But here in America, when a man puts something in another man, it had better be a bullet.

So, isn’t it time both sides compromised a little on this issue: The statistics tell us that anywhere from 2 to 10 percent of people in America are gay... although it certainly seems higher at my bathhouse. So look, all you conservatives, I know you’re sincere, and you think you’re doing God’s work, but in 100 years people traveling by jet pack to Mars are not going to be tripping on gay marriage. The whole issue is just gonna be a joke—on you. So my advice is simple: They’re here, they’re queer, get bored with it.