I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up Read online

  The other countries in the G8 got their asses whupped already. They had the idea of who they were beaten out of them. They know what it’s like to not win. They had to either perish or become something else. They evolved into more genteel, humane, sophisticated, cohesive societies—even bloodred China is quietly making reforms in that direction. But let’s look at the example of Japan again. The denim we wear, the most American of fabrics, is Japanese. We don’t even own the mills anymore; they do. They exert major control over our banking system. They buy all the jazz albums, all the hip-hop albums. American musicians can’t wait to tour Japan, because that’s where they make the most money. The Japanese are the same people they used to be—only they went up the chain mentally.

  Americans are also the same people we used to be—only we went the other way. All this time we messed around building up our muscle while our minds got duller and duller. We were the first nation to put men on the moon. We remain the only nation to put men on the moon. Now we don’t even want to go into space. We canceled the program and said we’d rather hitch a ride with the Russians. I’m not going to ride with a Russian to Brooklyn, and NASA is going to go into outer space with them? Are they crazy? Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his sarcophagus.

  Our delusional self-image prevents us from even considering certain solutions to our issues because they’re “beneath” us, as if there’s anything below rock bottom. I know a little something about hustling. Two years ago, I discovered that my credit rating had dropped. I had no idea why. I knew that I’d always kept up with my bills. When I called Ma Bell, they told me that I had an outstanding phone bill in the amount of $972. “I’ve never been late on my phone bill,” I told the service rep. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Do you live at 539 Lysander Street?” she asked me.

  Right away I knew what had happened. 539 Lysander was my mother’s address, the house I had grown up in. My mother had put the phone in my name when I was six years old. For the last couple of months, she hadn’t paid—and it went into collections. The phone company had looked at the records. They knew that I was only six when I got that phone in my name. Decades later, they could pin it on me without any qualms whatsoever.

  I doubt my mother had even asked me, as if a six-year-old would have insight anyway. But we needed a phone in the house, and that was that. In times of economic crisis, people tend to look to the powerful to figure out what to do. After all, they’re used to handling large amounts of money. But the elites aren’t the ones who have to figure out where to get their next meal from. They’re not the ones who are struggling with surviving day to day. So who is really smart when it comes to handling economic adversity? Is it the wealthy—or is it the poor?

  No one is coming to bail out Bushwick, Compton, or Newark. When you grow up in a place like that, you do what you need to do to survive. You know the safety net is very frayed—if it exists at all. There’s nothing proud about starving, and there’s no shame in gaming the system if you aren’t hurting anybody.

  I was watching the news recently, and the percentage of Americans who are collecting unemployment insurance was almost 16 percent. But if you combine that with the people who have stopped looking for work, the actual number of unemployed people was over 30 percent. Those people haven’t stopped eating. They haven’t stopped getting shoes and buying gas. So they sell weed. They turn a trick or two. They hook this dude up with that dude, and they take a cut. Instead of working, they hustle. They stop messing around in the streets and they get down to business.

  America needs to do more shit like that. Let’s put our phone bills in Mexico’s name. We can open an unregistered day-care center, babysit some kids, and keep it off the books. Got a job? Make them pay you in cash. You can get an EBT card and sell it, like some dope dealers I know. ODB managed to be on welfare until he was dumb enough to show it off on MTV. If any man has to choose between some Chinese bankers he has never seen and feeding his family, his family will win every single time. Our politicians argue that we have to pay off the national debt immediately—when people are broke. But that debt is like the small print on the loan application. Would you rather Bank of America be mad at you, or your kids starve? I hear conservatives use these credit-card analogies for rednecks who don’t understand that the national debt is not the same as personal debt. How the fuck are you worried about the Fed owing money when you live in a trailer park?

  America has hustled in the past when things got tough. For years and years, gambling was a complete taboo. Liquor was regarded as such a vice that the Constitution itself was amended to prohibit its sale. These positions weren’t reversed because people thought that drinking and gambling were now good things. Those weren’t benevolent moves. People were broke and they needed jobs! We let go of our idea that we were a sober country that doesn’t play cards. What must have seemed like a shocking legalization of sin at the time is met with shrugs today. It all reconciled pretty well with who we are.

  Corporations hustle all the time. Lobbying is straight hustling. When GE or whoever gets their people to write the tax code with loopholes big enough to drive a Buick through, that’s a hustle. It might be perpetrated by Harvard-educated lawyers in expensive suits and perfect ties, but the mentality of gaming the system is exactly the same.

  The easiest hustle we can pull nowadays is the legalization of marijuana. Legalizing pot would mean instant revenue. It’s not like pot farms don’t already exist. It’s called weed because the stuff is so goddamn easy to grow! We grow a lot of it. It’s the biggest cash crop in America today. We grow $35 billion worth of the stuff every year. That’s more than corn, more than beans, more than anything else. If it’s not fair that huge corporations pay zero dollars in taxes, how absurd is it that we’re not taxing the biggest crop in America?

  That’s just on the revenue side. Savings would also come from a decrease in spending. In Orange County alone, they spend a billion dollars in legal fees, prosecution, and containment simply on marijuana cases. That’s just the court. That’s not counting police man-hours, and that’s not counting the investigations. The prisoners cost money too. They get housing, they get food, and they get $1,800 worth of medical care every year. Imagine how much more effective the police would be if they weren’t worried about some dude selling weed.

  But no one wants to think in these terms, because of our self-image. The biggest idea we have to give up is that we’re a hardworking people. That reputation hasn’t been warranted for a very long time—but it was warranted decades ago. We only became a hardworking nation because we came from immigrants. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, America completely reinvented itself after beating the shit out of ourselves in the Civil War. The slaves had just been freed and the Great Migration began. People came from all over the world with their ideas about what they wanted to do. They came from Ireland and they came from China and they came from Eastern Europe. They all arrived with their ideas to make this country great and turned away from the bullshit that they had seen back home. “Fuck this,” they said. “There’s got to be a better way.”

  It was a certain kind of person who came here. If you were rich, you weren’t going to get on a boat and cross an ocean to a country that had nothing. Whether you were a domestic slave who had been freed or you were from the slums of Europe, everybody that came here was a “nigger” where they were from. They left everything they had before and appreciated what they had here. The American experience had to work for them. We were plan B—and there was no plan C. This was it! That’s why America was so tough. They came here, to Irishtown and Chinatown and Little Italy, and they got their first taste of freedom.

  We became a great country with this huge influx of immigrants. The American character had to get cut with something instead of being that unadulterated colonial Puritan bullshit. Before the immigrants, we were just racist rednecks and white landowners. After the immigrants came, we were amazing. We be
came hybrids! You can see the same phenomenon happen even today, if you ever see someone who is racially mixed. They’re just prettier, because they’re the best of two things.

  The two world wars came when all those immigrants had just about had enough. Before the world wars, people weren’t scared of us. It wasn’t until the many became one that America turned into a global force to be reckoned with. Take one of the many examples out of the conflict: World War II was the first time that black people were allowed to fly. At first, white people hated them. The Tuskegee Airmen had no support—but they had a lot to prove. That’s why the whole time they were commissioned, they never lost a plane. Their record of protection was so great that the white pilots started going, “Gimme the coloreds.” During this whole era, the one thing that held this nation together was that we were broke motherfuckers who weren’t taking any shit. Back any dude who has just tasted freedom into a corner and see what happens next. Spoiler alert: It will not end well for you.

  All those immigrants had pride in what they did. Wearing a uniform and putting in a hard day’s work at the factory meant something to them. Even when the Great Depression hit, many men were too proud to accept “handouts” in an economy collapsing through no fault of their own. Everyone likes to think that America is as proud as ever. But is it? Or is pride the exception? Take a look at photographs of people shopping at Woolworth’s back in the day. Now compare them to people at Walmart. Are they from the same country? Are they even from the same species? Our leaders are only as good as our people.

  I’ve seen how businesses handle pride from both sides. One recent Saturday night, I had a performance in San Francisco. The showtime was technically 8:00, but since I had an opening act I didn’t have to get there until 8:45. I went with a couple of my friends to a restaurant called Farallon. We arrived at 6:45, which would give us plenty of time to enjoy our meal before I had to go on stage.

  They served us the bread, and they served us the salad. I got my Dungeness crab appetizer, and I had my roasted tomato soup. They were spectacular. But by 8:20, we hadn’t gotten our meals yet. I called over our waiter, knowing I had to leave. “Box up our orders,” I told him. “We’re getting ready to go.”

  Immediately, the manager came over. “Was everything to your liking?”

  It’s not like I was irritated and had been complaining. “Everything was excellent,” I told the dude. “I just have a show, and I gotta go.”

  “I’m not going to ask you to pay for this,” he said to me.

  “I can’t do that,” I said. Between the food and wine, I knew that the bill had to be over five hundred dollars.

  “No,” he insisted, “we didn’t get your food to you. We don’t want you walking out with bags of our food when you didn’t get a chance to enjoy your meal.”

  Next, the chef came out of the kitchen and apologized.

  Even the owner of the restaurant, who was having dinner in a booth by us, came over and apologized. Then they gave me the box of food to take with me for free.

  The next night, I went back to Farallon—and this time I paid. Every time I go to San Francisco, I go back there because they had such pride in their product and their service. American service used to be head and shoulders above everybody else’s, and the customer was always right. Even motherfucking Domino’s Pizza used to promise they could get you their “food” in thirty minutes or less.

  I told my friend this story and he just rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but you’re a celebrity. Of course they treated you well.” He exactly proved my point: It was such an aberration that a person gets exemplary service, even at a top-class restaurant, that there must be some other explanation. That kind of thing might happen to you if you’re known, but the Average Joe is SOL.

  My friend was right in one sense: Nowadays, nobody promises you shit. A month after I was in San Francisco, I took a Delta Airlines flight to Chattanooga. It was a small commuter plane, with gateside bag check. I gave my bag to the guy at the base of the plane just like I was supposed to. When they gave it back to me, I saw that my wheel had been bent off. I went to complain about the damage to the customer-service desk.

  The lady listened to what had happened, glanced at my bag, and then waved her hand at me to dismiss me. “We don’t fix wheels,” she said.

  “Can you find someplace that’ll fix my bag and have it fixed for me, so I don’t have to buy another one?”

  “We don’t do that.”

  There was no apology. There was no sense of guilt or embarrassment that they had damaged someone else’s property. She could have said, “We normally don’t do this, but we’re going to just accommodate you.” Instead, she treated me like I was annoying her about some trifling nonsense that didn’t matter.

  I gave the woman my frequent-flyer number so she could look up how often I flew Delta. “Let me tell you something,” I said. “I’ve flown three million miles with this airline. Three million. Do you know why I am going to stop flying this airline? Because of that wheel that you broke.”

  Now it became about the principle. Not only was the customer not always right, they were acting like the corporation was never wrong. I spent an hour and a half arguing at that desk. They broke it, but they sure as hell weren’t going to buy it.

  Finally, the customer-service lady buckled. “We’ll give you a three-hundred-dollar voucher to fly on this airline in the future.”

  “Why would I take a ticket?” I asked her. “Your reward to me is to fly on the very airlines that I fucking hate?”

  She’d had enough. She went and got her supervisor—which she could have done ninety minutes earlier. The supervisor came out with a big checkbook. “We don’t normally do this,” he told me, “but here’s a check for your trouble.”

  I guarantee, getting that bag fixed themselves would have cost them less than three hundred dollars. I also guarantee that taking five minutes to take care of a problem would have felt a lot better and been a lot less stressful than spending an hour and a half arguing with a pissed-off D. L. Hughley. But people don’t think like that anymore. They just shrug their shoulders and say that it’s not their problem.

  When was the last time customer service felt like actual service, instead of an imposition? Half the time when you call for help, you literally have to sit through an automated message and press the right buttons. What kind of “servant” won’t even take your calls? A person won’t take your calls if they’re more important than you, not if they’re trying to help you! The computerized voice will do everything in its power to keep you from speaking to an actual person. That robot on the other end of the line doesn’t want to help you. It doesn’t actually want anything!

  When was the last time an American corporation bragged about the quality of its product? No, the commercials always talk about how it’s cheap, it’s fun, and you can have a lot of it. That sounds a lot like taking a big shit, don’t it? Ford had ads that said, “Quality Is Job 1.” But that was over twenty-five years ago. It’s gone from being an American motto to being the answer to a trivia question.

  They always say that pride goeth before a fall. Well, America’s already had its fall. Maybe it’s time for some of that pride to come back. That would require men and women of leadership and courage to come forward and turn this fucker around. But there are no incentives for extraordinary men to come forward. Bill Gates is an extraordinary man. Steve Jobs was an amazing person. Traditionally, those are the types of men who would be up there with the Rockefellers. They would be running the country, whether politically or socially. They would have a sense of civic duty to not only make money but to make this country better and to give it the benefit of all they know. You don’t have to deny Andrew Carnegie’s evils when you recognize the good he did in his later years. The founding fathers stepped into their roles because they were the outstanding citizens of their time, not because they were politicians. Our leaders are just not extraordinary today, and that extrapolates out to everything.

  What w
ould happen to an extraordinary man who stepped forward to lead America? Would he be treated with respect and dignity? Would people come together to forge a way forward? We don’t need to argue these issues as hypotheticals. It’s playing out right now in full public view. All we need to do is look at Barack Obama—the man who embodied the American dream—and the reaction to his presidency.

  THERE’S a profound difference between disagreement and disrespect. I respect a lot of people I disagree with, and I have no respect for many people who happen to share my views. Not everyone who cares about the environment, for example, cares about humans as passionately—and sometimes they’re just dicks.

  Let me refresh everyone’s memory about how Senator Obama became President Obama. To even get the Democratic nomination, he had to take down the Clinton political machine. The Clintons had been working behind the scenes for over a decade to get Hillary into the White House. No one can claim that Obama got the nomination through chicanery or playing dirty. He beat her fair and square. In doing so, he achieved a goal that the Republicans were desperately trying to achieve for sixteen years: He got Hillary Clinton to shut the fuck up.

  After he got the nomination, Obama didn’t get elected by scaring the country. He didn’t claim that a vote for McCain is a vote for another 9/11, and he didn’t attack McCain personally or attack his character. Every time Obama would say something or answer a question, people would go look at his books or go to his website. He created a perception that he could actually do things. This dude talked the country into voting for him based on the fact that he was going to go to Washington and change shit. He really told the country that although he may not have had any experience, he had this hope and this magic, and the country believed him. Did the Republicans regard him as a breath of fresh air, an opportunity to put partisanship in the past and to work together? Did they take it as an opportunity to disavow the wildly unpopular Bush years—or did the GOP immediately start plotting how to take the motherfucker down?