Congrats! I'm Expecting!!!

Yeah, we all are.

All of us who have waited for our beloved country to lurch back towards the left.

Or towards what would ostensibly, realistically and fairly be called the new center.  

Because let's be honest.  It ain't like we're gonna be moving FAR SOVIET UNION LEFT into some kind of totalitarian nightmare where we're on camera all the time, wearing drab uniforms, walking around like the living dead and subsisting on a diet of gruel.

That's for Wal-Mart employees.

But we're expecting that things will change.  That much is certain.  The question is...

How fast?

Are my expectations for immediate universal health care, a non-imperialist foreign policy, serious alternative energy initiatives and the dismantling of the military industrial complex too much to hope for? 

Probably.

A more apt question might be does this moment, this death knell for Reaganomics precipitate disaster (as my conservative friends would have me believe) or does it precipitate a new era of peace and prosperity for the middle class?

Will it be kinda like the 50's only without the the ass-backwards social mores?

I hope it will.  I think we all do.  Even Joe the Plumber.

But I do also believe that I and my left of center friends are in for some frustrating times.

Because we're not gonna get all we want when we want it.  It doesn't work like that.

The ship of state turns around like a giant cruise-liner.  You can't feel it, you have to look at the horizon to even know you're turning.

Because (other than the Civil War and the American Revolution) change is always incremental.

So I urge patience.  Patience to all.

As the Reverend King said, "... the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice."

Look where we were at the beginning of the 20th century in regards to segregation, worker's rights, women's rights (they couldn't even vote), child labor laws, etc. and so on in a never ending list of things that would seem repulsive and obviously wrong to us today.

We have indeed made great strides, both moral, technological and financial in the last 108 years.

Yet...

We live at a time of great peril.  Peril of our own making.  We use too much of the World's natural resources.  We have embraced corporate fascism and all the low-low price bargains it can bring.  We have outsourced our entire manufacturing sector and are enjoying the fruits of de facto off-shore slavery.

We make nothing.  We consume everything.

Yet if we are willing to embrace a few changes we can save this Nation from self-immolation. We need humility.  We need compassion for our fellow countrymen.  We need to pour every resource and tool we have into educating the next generation of Americans.  We need our corporations to be patriotic in their decision making, whether it be the decision to keep jobs here, or the decision to treat employees fairly and reward the dignity of work with a living wage.

Most of all we need to become a self-sufficient republic, not the imperialist, expansionist world police force we believe ourselves to be.

That last sentence is especially important.  Because if we want to heal the World we could not do much better than to follow the advice of Jesus who said quite succinctly, "Physician heal thyself."

I hope we do heal. 

But I know that it takes time.  I know some of you will give up.

I won't.  I'm in this for the long haul, watching the horizon slowly drift past.  

Join me on the deck, won't you?

Crises, Economic and Personal

So Obama may win.  Good.  

I said he "may" win because 13 years in show business has taught me nothing is final until the contract is signed and your lawyer is paid.

I just want it to be over.  I can't stand the coarse nature of the political discourse in this country anymore.  Plus stress-wise this has been like game 7 of the NBA Finals for like 2 years.

Nationally everything sucks right now.  Clubs going out of business right and left, no one with money to spend on entertainment... and trust me folks, we have not even begun to make out the beginning of the murky depths of the bottom of this crisis.

Things will be bad for a long time before they are finally mediocre and then someday, hopefully tolerable.

I'm flying across the country to be with my girlfriend on election day.  That's how much this whole shebang means to me.  I want to be with someone I dearly love when the elephant hits the mat, when Reaganomics finally implodes upon itself in a shitstorm of plummeting home values and socialization of banks.

I only wish Milton Friedman and Ronnie himself were alive to see what the free market hath wrought.

I thought it was telling when Alan Greenspan said the other day that he thought the banks would "police themselves."

This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt ol' Alan is an ivory tower math nerd with no understanding of human behavior.  

Let me ask you this, Alan - are societys capable of policing themselves or do they, not to be redundant, need a "police" force to keep the peace and make sure everyone stays in some semblance of order?

Why should a financial institution, an organism made up of humans, be any different than regular humans?

People require regulation, laws and enforceable agreed upon rules to live by.

I believe, like Jefferson, in the perfectibility of man.  Unfortunately we live in a Hamiltonian world of cut-throat capitalism.

Therefore and forever we require laws.  No one, no individual, no institution, no political body, no politburo, no stock exchange, no police force even, is capable of self-regulation.

On a personal note I'm really, really fucking tired of doing stand-up.

I don't do drugs (save the occasional Xanax), I don't drink and I don't try to fuck young, middle aged, or older women.

Why?

 "I'm too old for that shit," to paraphrase Danny Glover.

Drugs and drink suck.  Or at least I do when I'm on them.

As for random sex well I'm in love with a terrific woman and even if I wasn't anonymous sex is about as appealing to me as a Bon Jovi concert.

I guess you just outgrow some things.  Like fucking strangers and listening to Metallica records.

Also there's just a really fine line that I crossed a few years ago that separates doing something really fun and being a pathetic old bag of intoxicated bones making advances towards people born in the 80's.

I think I'm just tired from a mini-tour of the UK then a flight back to Seattle then a two day turnaround and another trip to the midwest to do the Bloomington Funny Bone.

Great club, nice people.  But I was tired.  Tired of audiences.  I can't feel their laughter anymore.

It used to feel like Heroin or a snorted Xanax when they would laugh.  Now it feels like nothing.

Like having sex with someone you've fallen out of love with.  Like a duty, a job, a fucking grind.

I'm sure this will all get better in a few days and I'll rediscover my zest for my art.

Sometimes I just wish I could be like a band and take off 5 years between albums and tours.

Wah wah wah.  I asked for my dream job and I got it.  So stop bitching, Kent.  You could still be hocking treadmills to overly-tanned bitches in the Valley.

Instead you have random drunks coming up to you, slapping you on the back and telling you, "that was fucking, funny as shit dude."

It could be worse...

 

Now You're REALLY Dating Yourself, McFederalist

Again Orwell screams at me from the pages of 1984...

"He who controls the past controls the future."

Because last night John McCain tried to rewrite basic American history again when he said this about Roe V. Wade, "I thought it was a bad decision. I think there were a lot of decisions that were bad. I think that decisions should rest in the hands of the states. I'm a Federalist."

I'm having a fucking breakdown.  I happen to be a lowly 34 year-old middle of the road stand-up comic and I know what a Federalist was.  

But apparently John Sidney McCain, the 72 year-old would be President and current senior Senator from Arizona does not.

I guess he really did skip a lot of classes at the Naval Academy.

Either that or he's trying to change the meaning of the word Federalist COMPLETELY.

See folks the Federalists were a political party, the first political party in the history of the United States.  

They held control of the Federal Government for 12 years until 1801 when Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans took over in what what many call the second American revolution.

Their most famous members included such unknowns as George fucking Washington, Alexander fucking Hamilton (the first Secretary of the Treasury) and John fucking Adams (the first Vice-President and second president) among others.

John McCain should probably know this.  We're not exactly talking McKinley here.  This is common knowledge sheeyat.

The Federalists believed in a strong central government.  The idea is sort of implicit in the name - FEDERALIST.

Especially Hamilton who was the intellectual engine behind the movement.  

To use McCain-ese, my friends, Hamilton was a great American who along with James Madison and John Jay wrote many of the Federalist Papers which helped convince the country to ratify the Constitution in 1887. 

He came up with the idea of a National Bank and a unified currency throughout the states.  He nationalized the war debt in exchange for putting the capitol in Virginia.

Above all....

HE WANTED A STRONG CENTRAL GOVERNMENT.

He did not want decisions left to the states.  He was for union uber alles.

So again I am faced with deciding if McCain is either lying or stupid.

Again I ask - which is worse?

Oh well, who cares.  He will lose and soon be relegated to the pages of history with Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and William Howard Taft.

Goodbye, McKnow nothing.  It was nice knowing you and knowing more than you.