President Me (33 page)

THE DEPARTMENT OF
WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

Let's
either go metric or ban that system entirely. We're caught in between, in some kind of measurement no-man's-land. I'm tired of these Europeans making us think. Eventually the only people who'll know the metric system are going to be junkies.

And when it comes to time zones, here are my new rules. There is no longer Central or Mountain Time. It's too confusing. I'll do a gig in Chicago and have no fucking idea what time it is. And God forbid I want to watch a live TV event anywhere in the middle of the country. I have to take out a calculator to figure out what time it's on. From now on we'll draw a line right down the middle of the country and just have East Coast and West Coast time. If you're a state that falls right on that line you get to choose.

Daylight saving time is also going to be eliminated by my administration. That “fallback” part is great. Who doesn't want an extra hour to sleep? But to have that robbed away in the spring is like a chick starting a blowjob and then, as soon as you're feeling pretty good, chomping down. I'll gladly lose that extra hour in November just to not feel that horrible gut punch in March. It's always confusing too. I never see it coming and it always pops up the day before I have to get up extra early. We'll always leap ahead the morning I book a 6 a.m. flight. It starts at two
A
.
M
., so you forget to change your clocks half the time and fuck yourself up. And some clocks adjust automatically, others don't. They all either need to be automatic or require me (and by “me,” I mean my wife) to change them manually. I woke up wildly disoriented the morning after daylight saving time kicked in last year. The nineteen-dollar clock sitting in my bathroom changed automatically, but the one in my $95,000 Jaguar? No can do. That car has a seat warmer, satellite radio, can defrost the outside mirrors, but cannot change the time automatically. That car does everything but suck your cock, but can't change its own clock.

And I don't think we need it anymore. The whole point was about giving farmers more daylight time to do their thing. I don't know about you, but this most recent daylight saving time I did very little soil tilling with that extra hour.

I saw a hard-hitting
USA Today
snapshot a few years back about what people were going to do with their extra hour. First off, whether it's the
Peanuts
cartoon that isn't funny and barely makes sense, or these useless infographics, newspaper publishers need to admit that they have nothing useful to report and print a picture of a missing kid. It'll do a lot more good.

This one read, “How will you use the hour gained with the end of daylight saving time?” The first group was honest, 36 percent said they'd sleep. Seventeen percent said they'd “do chores.” I know this is bullshit. I'm positive when the survey taker asked this question, the guy's wife was standing next to him. “Yep, I'm gonna do chores. I may not even wait until morning. Two thirty-five
A
.
M
., gonna fire up that leaf blower.” Thirteen percent said read, 9 percent said watch TV. That's probably pretty accurate, though I think many of the “reads” were lying too. Six percent said, “Visit with friends.” What kind of relationship is that? You only have an hour a year to hang out and if you both lived in Phoenix you'd never see each other at all. But the one that pisses me off most is the last one. Coming in at 19 percent was “don't know/didn't answer.” C'mon, asswipe, how uptight do you have to be? Spit something out. Can't commit? Playing it close to the vest with your plans that hour? What's the fear—Edward Snowden is going to get ahold of that information and leak it?

I also saw a
USA Today
infographic about “Favorite Comfort Food” that had the 16 percent “I don't know.” How difficult a question is that to answer? What did your mom make you when you got a boo-boo? What did you eat yesterday? Doesn't everyone have a favorite comfort food? I feel like you could wake me up in the middle of the night and shout, “Favorite Comfort Food?!” and I'd say, “Lasagna,” and roll back over.

During my presidency you must give an answer to every survey question, or there will be consequences. You won't need to worry about what to do with your extra hour of daylight because you'll be in the hole at Leavenworth.

I'm also going to direct the Department of Weights and Measures to make the craziest, funniest, and most semihomoerotic-yet-most-masculine dream I've ever had a reality. One night while tossing and turning, not fully asleep and not entirely awake, I came up with the following brilliant idea:

On the eighteenth birthday of every male in America, they will have to submit to a test. They will lie down on a quarter-inch-thick aluminum plate. This plate will have a hole in it for the young man to put his penis through and into a graduated cylinder full of water. The displacement of the water will be measured. Then every year after, on their birthday, men will lie on their bellies, put their dick through the aluminum glory hole, and get remeasured.

Here's where this idea gets really great. Once we have your measurement you will be issued a windbreaker with a number on the back. That number won't be the displacement; it will be your ranking. It would look like an ATF windbreaker, but it would have your position among the 112 million eighteen-plus males in America on it. If your number is readable from a distance, you're in pretty good standing because the median would be around 56 million. Anything below six digits would be a victory, and if you're in the single-digit club, you're definitely going to be making the rounds on the talk-show circuit.

All the males in America will be ranked by these criteria, and they'd be forced to wear these windbreakers the last week of June every year. So it's like a graduating class of 100 million where we name the vale-DICK-torian.

Remember, this is not about length; this is about displacement, so you could have a two-inch dick, but if it's the width of a paint can you're in good shape. If you move the most water you're the winner. The loser is your girlfriend or wife. At a certain point the length and the ranking would coincide. My guess is that would happen at around fourteen inches. But this would be a great equalizer in our country. There could be a guy working a forklift on a loading dock in Des Moines who comes in at a lower number than Tom Brady, George Clooney, and Mark Cuban. Regular schmoes could end up getting a lot more pussy because of this test. Though once you get into triple-digit rankings, the ladies would be looking at a real vagina breaker.

Every year, an event will be held to name the winner. This will be similar to the Heisman ceremony. We'd hand out the windbreakers to the top ten, there'd be commentary and analysis about immigration patterns and Asians throwing off the curve, Tom Bergeron would host the lead-up. It'd be like the finale of
Celebrity Apprentice
. We'd milk every minute into a two-hour live event and then name the winner. We could scout up-and-coming talent, because remember, every day thousands of young men turn eighteen, so even if you've kept the number one windbreaker four years running, someone is always nipping at your balls. This would surely be a worldwide television event. It will be known as the HUNG-er Games.

But until we get the logistics worked out on this, we can at least standardize and codify the rules for penis measurement. In my America a penis is measured very simply and very honestly—from the center of the anus to just past the tip.

11

THE FCC
 
 

You
can really judge a culture's decline by its entertainment. Rome fell around the time they started feeding Christians to lions and calling it good family fun. If you take a stroll through the thousands of channels currently being beamed into our homes, it's not hard to see that . . . well, we're fucked. The
L
in TLC stands for Learning. What exactly I'm learning about while watching
Honey Boo Boo
I'm not sure. Other than juvenile diabetes. Nothing about the
Real Housewives
, including their faces and tits, are real. How
Cajun Pawn Stars
factors into the history part of the History Channel beats me. And one thing I'm sure of is the family of rednecks with ZZ Top beards who make duck calls on A&E is neither art nor entertainment.

As a C-list celebrity, I believe that I can bring something extra to the presidency when it comes to encouraging a cultural course correction. I've worked with the hack producers and executives who constantly fill our airwaves with this garbage, so I believe I can bring about some positive change in our mass media.

The biggest problem is that we've confused entertainment with schadenfreude. You know I love judging, but our current state of affairs goes beyond that. Every show these days is about people being kicked out of the tribe, not getting the rose, not making the cut, etc. It's about rejection. (Though I will say from experience: reality-show judge is the greatest gig in the world. You sit around like an emperor and order people to perform, and then dismiss them. And the show producers tell you to keep your response to eight seconds. So you spit out something like, “I thought it was good but not great,” cash your check, and go home.)

And those are just the competition shows. The other “reality” shows are pure uncut schadenfreude. This is a pervasive problem in our society. We've all experienced the moment at a restaurant when you hear a glass break and everyone stops talking to gawk. Everyone except me. I'm smart, I know what happened. I'm sure a DC-10 didn't hit the building. I know it's just some twenty-three-year-old chick who's already mortified and doesn't need me looking. That's our shitty instinct. We want to put people down to push ourselves up. We are wired to think, “I'm a C student, but my brother is in juvie, so who's the favorite kid now?” I don't think any of the greats were wired this way. Think about the reality shows we used to watch versus those today. It used to be “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” on
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
. It was inspirational. Now it's a diabetic chick with festering bedsores who collects her own toenails in Ziploc bags. We've gone from “Life Styles of the Rich and Famous” to “Lice Styles of the Poor and Depressed.” It's all geared and produced for the viewers to think, “Well, my life is bad but not that bad. They just cut back my hours at work but I'm watching a chick who will eventually be killed by the avalanche of her own hoarded newspapers.” All we do is watch people with no teeth on something called
Midnight Moonshiners
saying, “My still sprung a leak but I shoved my three-year-old in there to clog it,” and laugh at them. The carnival freak show is alive and well, except instead of coming into town on a flatbed truck, it comes through your cable box. Well, fuck that, I want to see rich people on jets. Looking at shit beneath you is no plan for greatness. That keeps you there. Look up the mountain and keep climbing.

And what about the moral responsibility of the producer who's there filming the morbidly obese woman who's confined to her bed and can't reach her inhaler. Well, you could put down your latte and hand it to her, but that wouldn't be as good for your ratings, would it?

Daytime TV is especially guilty when it comes to this. We have the
People's Court, Divorce Court, Paternity Court, Judge Joe Brown, Judge Judy, Judge Mathis . . .
I'm fucking positive Judge Judy's goal was sitting on the Supreme Court, not sitting in judgment on someone who stiffed her hairdresser over a faulty weave. But we lap it up. No one is watching these court shows because they're a law student and want to pick up some tips. They're losers, sitting at home during the day when they should be out looking for work but instead are looking for someone worse off to judge and remove the burden of improving their own lot in life.

One of the worst offenders is Dr. Phil. He covers all of his bullshit with a thin candy coating of righteousness and tough love but it's all got a chewy, nougatey center of “let's judge these assholes and their terrible marriage.” But if you really pay attention you'll notice that Phil's doctorate must have come with a side of fries because he has nothing to say. Daytime television is a festival of people who shouldn't be on TV spouting advice like they're geniuses. In fact I had a breakthrough the other day about one of Dr. Phil's daytime TV compadres/competitors. A real lightbulb moment. I realized that Steve Harvey is the black Dr. Phil. Think about it. They're both bald. They both have those mustaches and they're always wearing giant suits. But more importantly, no one really knows what they do. They write books and dispense a bunch of clichés disguised as wisdom that no one's really interested in. They both sit around and say things like, “Well, that dog just ain't gonna hunt” and “Let's take it down and break it down,” and people just nod because they're afraid to admit they don't know what the fuck either of them is talking about. There are no huge fans of either one of them, yet they're both billionaires. None of my black friends love Steve Harvey (I don't have any black friends), and none of my white friends love Dr. Phil, so it's not a race thing. Bottom line is that they're the same dude. I really think if we put them in a room together they'd explode. Or maybe they're just the same performance artist—a small Jewish man from San Francisco with great makeup.