Read The Douchebag Bible Online
Authors: TJ Kirk
I distrust overly nice people and view them as phonies.
I don’t fear spiders or ketchup. Hell, I’d eat spider in
Ketchup is someone offered it up as an exotic dish. I don’t take
any meds, though I arguably ought to.
Most of the fears that make her seem pathetic to me are
fears that I share. The traits I hate most are ones I share most.
Is my sending angry letters to a girl I broke up with 5-
years-ago any less horribly obsessive than her writing my name
across her tits and sending them to me without any provocation?
Is my raging at people who believe in even the least dogmatic of
deities any different than her raging at people for eating eggs?
Girls.
They reflect us with an emotional rawness that we could
never muster. They show us our every insecurity, magnified by an
order of magnitude. They are us better than we are ourselves.
That’s why we hate them. That’s why we love them.
That’s why Muslims put drapes over them. That’s why we
subtly encourage them to wear as little as possible.
Girls.
Damned elusive beasts of our hearts.30
30 If you’re a girl who just so happens to not be a lesbian, this chapter doesn’t really
speak to you, does it? It speaks about you, and it speaks about you as though you’re
not here. That has to be someone disconcerting. I apologize for that. You can have
free sex with me as a consolation if you present this book to me with this footnote
hi-lighted.
Similarly, if you’re a gay guy who couldn’t give a fuck less about girls and their
mysteries, I apologize for writing an utterly inaccessible chapter. You can have free
gay sex with me as a consolation if you present this book to me with this footnote
hi-lighted.
Free and Dumb
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a
redress of grievances.
Today I saw a story on the news about a 15-year-old girl arrested
for child pornography because she took nude pictures
of herself31
.
In other words, the government of this country has boldly
declared, yet again, that we belong to them. Our bodies are not
our own to do with what we please—they are fodder for Uncle
Sam’s meat grinder.
We call this a free country, but everything about this
country is designed to stifle freedom. Now, many conservative
rednecks like the ones I live around will tell you, “Yeah, well you
try protesting in the streets in China and then you’ll be grateful
for the freedom you got here.”
That’s right. According to every redneck I’ve ever gotten
into an argument with, America is a free country because we’re
more free than countries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
That’s like saying that McDonalds serves healthy food because it’s
not as bad for you as getting shot in the face. I like to ask these
rednecks (who are by no means inherently stupid people, by the
31 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,434645,00.html
way) if they’ve ever tried to protest here in America. Most say that
they haven’t. I ask them why. They say because they don’t think it
would change things.
Which leads me to the question that not one of them can
answer sufficiently: If protesting can’t change things, then why
does the right to protest matter?
Of course, in America we have such a thing as Free Speech
Zones,32 which are specific places set up where protestors are
allowed to demonstrate against any given thing. What’s the point
of a right to protest if you can’t protest where those whose actions
you are protesting can see and hear you? And does not the first
Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America
that every government official is sworn to uphold state that all of
America is a “Free Speech Zone”?
Anyone who has ever filed a Demonstration Permit—
the
very concept of which makes me sick
—and seen it rejected can
tell you all about your right to protest. Ask the people who
protested the WTO in Seattle (it doesn’t matter here if you agree
with their paranoid fear of multinational conglomerates or not)
how they feel about the state of their right to protest. Getting
sprayed with hoses, shot with rubber bullets and tear-gassed by
police in full battle regalia tends to diminish one’s ideas about any
sort of right to protest in America.
Exactly what freedoms do you think you have, America?
The freedom to timidly voice a complaint with the way things are
32 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zones
going? The freedom to pay less in taxes than most European
countries, perhaps? Take my hand for a moment (it’s okay, I use
sanitizer) and follow me down this road.
Poll after poll has shown the Americans of all political
stripes overwhelmingly favor some form of Universal
Healthcare33, yet to watch the news you would imagine that the
country was fiercely divided on this issue (and if you watch Fox
News you’d get the impression that only hardcore socialists would
even suggest such a thing). Does the government say, “Wow, look
at those polls! We better get on this problem right away!”?
No.
Instead our representatives (HA!) say, “Wow, the private
insurance industry sure is giving us a lot of money. I guess we can
tell 70 to 80% of people that it’s just not feasible and that they’re
unpatriotic for wanting it.”
Here’s just how stupid and controllable the electorate is:
just today I overheard a redneck saying that the Democrats
removed the word God from a WWII memorial. It was an excerpt
from Roosevelt’s speech following the attack on Pearl Harbor,
and it was removed by the Godless Democrats who want to write
God out of history. This set my bullshit detector off immediately
and I did some research. I found that, yes, God was mentioned in
Roosevelt’s speech. However, the excerpt found on the memorial
in question NEVER included anything about God. The
aforementioned redneck was complaining that God was nowhere
33 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/01/opinion/polls/main2528357.shtml