BAD AMERICAN: The Flip Side

I’m a Bad American -- this pretty much sums it up. I like my things a manageable size, which means I don’t do my share to uphold an economy based on getting more stuff.

I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some overpaid and underworked CEO with hairplugs and a facelift who likes to hobnob with the other corporate welfare beneficiaries comparing the virtues of their wives’ designer drugs and the cleverness of their accountants. Pension plans are for suckers.

I don’t care about appearing patriotic.

I think sex education doesn’t make you a teenaged parent. I believe steeping your kids in ignorance and telling them to “Just Say No” might.

I think that I’m doing better than the homeless because I’ve been lucky.

I don’t think being a minority makes you noble or victimized, and that the minority gender needs to get over it, guys. I have the right to expect that anyone who wants to post the 10 Commandments in a courtroom is obligated to live by them every second of the day, because they have posted their expectations in the halls of justice. I know what VIOLENCE is, and that SEX can be its favorite expression.

I don’t celebrate Christmas. But if you want to that’s fine. I just don’t feel like everyone else should have to. Yet I am locked out of my workplace every December 25 and have to make up those hours later.

I believe that it’s OK to translate the Constitution and our various laws into languages other than English. American citizens have come from all over the world, and American English is the richest and most flexible language ever because it has embraced all the influences that have come with these brave and enterprising immigrants. I think that Americans who want the rest of the world to speak English are either too stupid or too lazy to study another language and will never get the jokes told at their expense. Anyone who says our forefathers died in vain because immigrants dare to speak the language of their parents doesn’t understand the history of English too well, either.

I think a cop who shoots somebody in the back is a thug with a badge. If you can’t understand the word “freeze” or “stop” in English, or if you’re deaf, that doesn’t make you a candidate for live target practice -- not in a free country, anyway. I don’t use the excuse “national security” as a shield for unpopular opinions or actions.

I know how to count votes and I also know that machines have no judgment. I feel much safer letting a credentialed panel of adversaries duke it out in the daylight. I know what the definition of lying is: lying is not telling the truth, by commission or omission. And there’s the word “is”! One would know there had to be a verb in a definition if one studied language a little.

I don’t think that anyone is entitled to special loan programs while the indigenous peoples can’t get better than a high school education because they can’t afford it. The treaties with the tribes of the First Nations have been disgracefully ignored and their peoples have been impoverished and cheated for too long.

I didn’t make jokes about bombing the Russians. I thought “Ernest Goes to Camp” was funny -- once. I want them to bring back safe and sane fireworks, defined as “shot off by professionals”, not “given to 8-year-olds”.

I believe no one ever died because of something Ozzy Osbourne, Ice-T or Marilyn Manson sang, nor any of the overproduced country music acts either. If someone pulls up next to me at a stop light blaring something I don’t want to hear, I know how to roll up my window.

I think that working at Blockbuster or Jack In The Box gives you exactly the amount of enlightenment you could expect from working at Blockbuster or Jack In The Box. I think that anyone who ever quits being a student, even after they finish school, is asking for a petrified brain.

I don’t want to eat or drink anything whose package must identify the contents as “food” or “beverage” just so people will know.

Our soldiers did not risk their lives in vain defending the Constitution: nothing worth doing is in vain. Had the authors of the Constitution not realized the world would change after they died, they would not have written the amending process into the document. It has been amended many times. The abolition of forced servitude and the institution of female suffrage were not things the Founders would have said if only they had thought of it -- these ideas were debated at the time. The Constitution's strength is its flexibility. What do people think it is? The Qu’ran?

I don’t hate the rich. I help the poor. I know wrestling is fake, though I think Jesse Ventura, bless him, wanted to be for real. My family came to this land just in time to be drafted for the Civil War, so don’t give me the slavery song and dance.

I believe that a radical is more dangerous than a moderate no matter what the outlook. I am amazed that a political party so fond of touting the Bible has so much trouble applying The Sermon on the Mount to itself.

I want to know at exactly which church the “Reverend” Pat Robertson preaches, and what exactly his job function is.

If you own a gun, that’s fine. If you let a child get hold of it, I want it next. All the better to shoot you with, my dear.

I think that Big Business uses its clout to crush small business. That makes me mad. I think that, if I invented something that could threaten Microsoft, Microsoft could low-ball me so badly that I would get killed. Gates could absorb the loss that would leave me broke.

I confess to a grinding ambivalence about hate crime legislation. Violence is an expression of hate, and yeah, we have plenty of laws on the books against violence, but if minorities and women were valued the same as white men in the first place, then they wouldn’t be victims of crimes that focus on ethnicity, lifestyle or gender. I think white men are pissed off that they don’t get their own hate crime law. When the laws we have are enforced (by the police, who are overwhelmingly white and male), then my ambivalence will go away.

I think taking a perfectly good vegetable and smothering it in 500 calories’ worth of Easy Cheese is disgusting. I believe that anyone who doesn’t think it takes a village to raise a child has never looked for a reliable babysitter. I’ve cried at lots of movies, but I haven’t cried over "Ol’ Yeller" since I was 9. Dr. Seuss let Art Buchwald use his work to write the satire “Richard M. Nixon, Will You Please Go Now?”. Dr. Seuss was a great man.

You may frown upon or look down upon or try to shut me up because I have these beliefs and opinions, but I don’t give a rat’s ass. I know this country allows me free speech and free association, and I intend to keep them. I will not conform or compromise just to keep from hurting somebody's feelings. I'm a little pissed off, but that just heightens my level of political involvement, no matter how desperately Fox and The Washington Times would like the world to believe I’m on the run or otherwise disenfranchised. Yes, I guess by some people's definition, I may be a bad American.

But that’s tough.