To look at us, it was a Norman Rockwell scene.
A father knelt over his 7-year-old rosy-cheeked daughter, lacing her skates. You could see our breath in cold air of the shack next to the city’s outdoor ice skating rink.
Teenaged boy worked behind the counter, renting skates and taking admission. One was a lanky beanpole, the other a freckly cherub. Skinny teased Tubby about something, as playful teens will do.
“Fucking asshole,” Tubby responded, not quietly.
Norman Rockwell had just sucked a lungful of crack.
“Hey!” I said. He said nothing. “Do you work here?” I turned to the skinny one. “Does he work here?”
“Yeah.”
I said, “What’s with this fucking asshole stuff, when you’ve got a father and a little girl right in front of you?”
My point wasn’t watch your language, obviously. What really galled me was Porky Pig’s obliviousness to me and my daughter. I hated being invisible.
“Use your head, kid,” I said. “Use your common sense. This is where you work. This is where people come.”
“Sorry,” he said, more resentful than contrite. Lumpy moron, I thought. Fucking asshole, yourself.
In recent months, I’ve heard just about every one of the “7 words you can’t say on television” in a local video store that play movies on monitors as an ambient feature. The chain is called Family Video.
Not once has any customer objected, me included. It’s not that we’re shocked. It might be in part because being a prude is kind of embarrassing.
The real reason is that we’re overwhelmed and utterly exhausted by trying to protest. What feeble objection can anyone raise that would make a difference? You’re better off protecting yourself from a monsoon with a Betty Boop umbrella. Like the brawling western that barreled over on to the set of the gay musical in Blazing Saddles, it’s uncontainable.
On the other hand, Rudy Guiliani began cleaning up New York by first getting graffiti under control. Graffiti is a billboard advertising chaos. Graffiti’s message, no matter the words, is NOBODY’S IN CONTROL HERE. And that Teen-Tub-o-Turds in the skating rink, right in front of my daughter, was spray painting my teeth.
Well, if you can’t be sheltered from it, use it as a lesson. At least that’s what I tried to do. If we came across the Jerry Springer show at the moment when some snaggle-toothed hoot owl flashes her boobies, I tell the kids, “See what happens when you don’t do well in math.”
When we see the inebriated slobs with hairy painted guts, sloshing beer in mugs the size of a baby pool, I say to the kids, “Would you be embarrassed if I behaved like that?”
Okay, truth is, I’m too scared to take my kids to an NFL game. A generation ago, seeing the Vikings at the football stadium meant Minnesota was in town. Now their permanent bleacher fixtures, raping and pillaging after every bad call.
They’ve won. And not just in the NFL. During the Florida vote recount in 2000, Republican stooges were flown to Florida from Washington to bang on the walls and windows to scare the vote counters. These thugs weren’t ejected. They succeeded. They stopped that recount.
Because nobody stood up to the brazen hooligans, it was decided to keep it up in 2004. Run roughshod over decorum. No one will hold you accountable for it. You will WIN!
John Kerry used the word “sensitive” in a mature speech about foreign diplomacy. The Bush-Cheney squads spat tobacco and laughed, their target in their sites. Both Bush and Cheney willfully took the word out of context, as if Kerry would’ve challenged Osama Bin Laden to a quilting bee. If they can’t feminize or mock their opponents, Bush & company give them towel-snapper, playground nicknames.
That was the plan though, appealing to the dumb brute asshole section of their base. The media, through this and all of the Bush-Cheney campaign, have been as quiet as the moms and dads who like me who continued to sheepishly peruse the video shelves while all the shit-piss-goddams pepper the air. If Karl Rove hasn’t thrown a barbecue for those sellout swift boat goons, then they’re just waiting for the thaw.