One Pissed-Off Dude

I’m an American. This has always been my favorite label, but of late even that has seemed to mean less and less. Being called an American used to carry with it a certain pride and esprit de corps that now apparently is dated and passe. How else can one explain the rash of America-haters in our midst who only claim pride in America if a Leftist resides in the White House, and can only back a war effort if the decision to go to war was that of a Democrat.

I’m a Conservative. And I am also an actor who lives and works in Hollywood. Many of my friends advise me to keep that on the down-low, advise me to not speak up lest I scuttle any future employment prospects, so predominantly liberal is the entertainment biz. And yet I persist.

You see, I’m one pissed-off dude.

I’m told I’ll hurt my career if I continually spout off about Liberalism — which I see as a growing cancer in our society. Worldwide, I’ve seen Liberalism metastasize into virulent incarnations of Socialism, and, left unchecked, even into its malignant cousin, Communism. Only the arrogant or the somnambulist would think such a thing could never happen here. It’s a matter of increment. Once a group organizes into a coalition, it’s a short step to claiming the right to the property of another group. All that is necessary is for an individual’s right to personal property to become a secondary concern. The ‘needs’ of the group must supercede, dontcha know. It’s a vicious cycle – wants become needs become rights. The fact that the thievery is done at the behest of a ‘civilized’ government does not sanitize the crime.

“At least the highwayman has the decency to wear a mask.” – Author unknown.

So I’m told I should shut up. I make my living in the Hollywood community, and Hollywood is by and large run by Liberals. I’m told I need to stay quiet when the Left has their way over issues that affect my daily life. I’m told I need to learn how to get along with the Left, learn how to compromise. I need to be more open-minded. I need to be more tolerant.

I say F T S. Ask your 9-yr-old if you have trouble deciphering that. (No, wait, don’t.)

I don’t want to get along with the Left. I want to take them down. I want to expose their idiocy for what it is and reveal it as a harmful, dangerous succession of lies and deceptions. My friends say that that effort, aside from being fruitless, will cost me work. It will cost me my career. And I say Wait-a-minute, Bucko. Those folks who founded this country were willing to risk not only their careers, but their property, their families, their very lives…the least I can do in standing up for our precious freedoms is risk a silly television career. Not to compare myself with the brilliant thinkers who declared themselves independent of England and framed our Constitution…but those were some pretty pissed off dudes too. Compared to that, loss of a little TV or movie work seems pretty inconsequential. So in honor of Pissed Off Americans past and present, I rant.

I’m pissed off that everyone seems okay on having to press one for English. We’re supposed to be tolerant and understanding that maybe some folks who now live here (legally or not) might have trouble understanding what I’m saying to them if I speak in my native tongue, regardless of the extra cost to the rest of us. FTS.

I’m pissed that my sweet well-wishing friends and acquaintances now say “Happy Holidays” instead of Merry Christmas. Oh, we don’t want to offend the non-Christians, they’ll say. Again – FTS. ‘Happy Holidays’…nice and non-specific, soothingly generic. In keeping with the spirit of the season, I try not to show it – but I roll my eyes. Jeez, could you be any more spineless? Everybody walk on eggshells for the rest of your lives, living in perptual fear someone who holds a different religion, or sexual preference, or nationality is going to suffer some little offense if you actually wish them a lovely Christmas. “Oh we don’t celebrate Christmas.” “Oh, I’m so terribly sorry, I don’t mean to offend you. Please enjoy the Holiday of Winter Solstice and Earth Renewal Day or whatever your heart leads to celebrate, if indeed you are even feeling like celebrating anything.” Shut up! Smile and say thanks. Happy Hanukkah, Merry Ramadan, Soulful Kwanzaa…whatever. Smile and say Thanks.

Can we all stop taking ourselves so damn seriously for half a minute? Hey – life ain’t a popularity contest. So grow a pair. Speak your mind and if someone can’t handle it, request that they take a hike. How the hell did we ever survive life before the all-knowing, all-caring ACLU began to run interference for all our tender sensibilities? It’s a wonder any of us grew up without some crippling psychosis that drove us to chop up our grandmother. I’m old enough to remember when Common Sense ruled the day. (*cue the Cranky Old Man music)

It irks me that Democrats are always looking to raise my taxes. I’m patriotic if I take it up the bum and don’t squeal. What’s worse, they don’t even have the integrity to call them taxes. They call them ‘fees’, or even, ‘contributions’. As I learned the word, a contribution is a volitional act. Left to free choice, I say I choose to not contribute more than I already do. Let all those who say we are overtaxed stand up with me. Those who think different can form a line to the left…and we on the right will leave you completely free to contribute more. Raising taxes takes food off my family’s table. I regard people who advocate doing so in the same vein as I would the burglar I confront in the dead of night – an enemy.

I’m pissed that I study the political issues of the day, educate myself, stay informed daily by a multitude of news sources from all slants…and yet, come election day, my informed vote is cancelled by some numbskull who votes for the nicest smile, who doesn’t know who the current vice-president is, or which party controls Congress, and what’s more, doesn’t care. Am I the only one who thinks a basic intelligence and general knowledge test should be a prerequisite for voting for our leaders? No? Too radical a notion? Well, then, why not just make the winner of American Idol president and save all the drama? Everyone can text in their vote. And Paula, Randy, and Simon… the new cabinet. “Tonight the State of the Union speech will be sung by the President, backed up by Rascal Flatts…and special guest duet with Secretary of State David Archuleta…”

I’m pissed off by how soft many in our nation have become. How whimpy the tone, how spineless the resolve. What happened to that brutally real notion that people should be held responsible for his or her actions? Nowadays, it always seems to be someone else’s fault, whatever it is. Got a life of poverty, it’s rich folks doing it to you.

Alcohol addiction, substance abuse, your mother never said she loves you. Having trouble finding work, it’s the white, black, purple guys keeping you down. Your car company is going under, it’s the unfair business practices abroad and an economic downturn. Hey, nimrods – newsflash. LIFE IS HARD. The End. Get used to it, suck it up, get some spine, invent some if you have none, and GET ON WITH IT!!!! I’d like to offer, in utter compassion, and speaking on behalf of at least several like-minded bretheren out there, a class-action BITCH-SLAP to every mamby-pamby, limp-wristed douche-bag of a complainer who has the audacity to hope that we hard-working, God-fearing, America-loving taxpayers should be forced to give you one penny of our income to enable you further in your responsibility-shirking, self-destructive habits. Get your collective shiite together, friends. I am not, nor are my friends, my brother’s keeper. Though my heart is open enough to come to someone’s need should an honest and sincere calamity befall a brother or sister… when did destitution become a virtue? Did my snooze button malfunction causing me to oversleep a couple decades? When did begging become a noble venture? You see them standing there bravely, “God bless”and something about ‘can’t find work’ scrawled on their cardboard. Victims of society, of Bush/Cheney, of Ronald Reagan, of any heartless Republican administration. And worse – hey, I’ve seen the sign people on the offramps, I’ve seen the green flow as we assuage our prosperity guilt – these guys are cleaning up! Am I in the wrong business? When, dear friends, did panhandling become a lucrative industry? FTS!

(Side note: I’ve personally offered several of these beggars who had written “Will work for food” to buy them lunch if they’ll do some yard work and fence painting for me, and the reaction was always the same. Hell no! They just want cash, right now! Hmmm…and yet the sign said… Forget about the begging, whatever happened to truth in advertising?)

Who can identify virtue, when there is no shame?

And speaking of shame…have you on the Left no shame when it comes to calling evil EVIL? What’s in a name — a terrorist by any other name is a ‘Jihadist’. A freedom fighter. A rebel. But when are we going to admit that there is an evil movement out there dedicated to our destruction. And it ain’t Sarah Palin and George Bush. It’s radical Islam and they want to cut your personal head off simply because you’re not throwing in with them.

You’re not on your knees worshiping their boy Allah, so for this you and everyone like you all over the world must die and die now. But wait, it’s a ‘religion of peace’, we’re told. Wow, not the last time I looked. If Islam is a religion of peace, where are all the peace-loving Muslim leaders decrying the radicals’ murderous actions? The beheadings, the suicide bombings, the IED’s, the blowing up innocents on buses? Where are the peaceful Islamists’ protests against Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Queda, et al? You are a frog in a pot, Lefty – being boiled slowly, apparently too slowly for you to notice. Too much Climate Change on your mind to notice that the barbarians are at the gate. When the Nazis stormed into Jewish homes in 1939 I’m sure there were more than a few head-in-the sand myopic residents screaming about the troopers tracking mud on the carpet. If only they had had the ACLU to save the day… Human rights and clean carpets surely would have abound.

Speaking of climate change, while we’re at it…if the argument is over…and the facts are clear…how is it we can predict the climate twenty years hence, when we can’t even predict with much accuracy if my ass is going to get wet attending my friend’s kid’s Bar Mitzvah next weekend. When did we give the title to anyone with a PhD in front of their name the added moniker of ‘Soothsayer’? I read Paul Erhlich’s book, THE POPULATION BOMB in the early ’70’s and it scared the begeebers out of me. By his prediction, each human being in 2008 would have less than a square meter of space to live in. (William F. Buckley voice: “Ahh…Mr. Erhlich was unavailable for comment, ahhh… but stressed the importance of keeping his line clear, lest the Nobel Prize committee call.”) And Mr. Gore – I do believe in Climate Change. It’s called summer, spring, winter and fall. Happens each year whether I drive my SUV or not. FTS!

Before I came up with the inspired notion of tossing my life away and becoming an actor…I was fully ensconsed in the science department at the University of California, Irvine. I know the way it works. The professors confided in me. You need a problem to study, better yet a crisis, or you don’t get funding for your research. It’s that simple. One professor of botany told me that these very high-tech ultra-violet cameras we were frolicking through the fields looking at flowers through cost the University $200 thousand dollars. Off my open-mouthed gape, he shrugged, “Gotta spend the money, or next year they cut us back.” So yeah, you’re going to find a ton of scientists who swear we’re killing the planet…and we desperately need another three million dollars to study the problem.

I’m confident I could find two hundred accredited scientists to join me in an exhaustive study to find out why belly button lint is demagnetizing the moon leading to global flooding…if only Bill Gates will step up with some coin. FTS!

Lastly…can we finally be done with all the hatred? George Bush is very soon to be out of a job. Time to let up on him a bit, don’t you think? Erase the hate, Lefties. You can stop proclaiming him to be the anti-christ, evil incarnate, the boogeyman, Darth Vader, or the Heartbreak of Psoriasis. The guy did his best. Like him, don’t like him, he kept us from attack for seven-and-a-half years so let it go. Your guy is in now, so relax. Have fun again. Laugh without derision. Smile without the snide. You remember how? Take off your flak jackets, it’s going to be okay. Our brave warriors did some serious ass-kicking in the Middle East, and though there’s no shortage of crazy Islamo-fascist bad guys yet to come, at least they know who they’re f*cking with.

Somehow along the way, so many of you forgot one simple, undeniable tenet: We’re the good guys. We’re not imperialists, or else we would’ve nuked the oil countries into radioactive dust, then moved in and taken the oil. We don’t ‘torture’ prisoners, or lawyers for the Gitmo ‘detainees’ would have CNN photographing the horrid scars and missing limbs. We don’t bully smaller, less developed nations. On the contrary, we expend our more precious asset: the blood of our brave, bright and courageous young men and women – all in committed effort to free them from despotic, brutal dictators. We are not brash. In 1991 we amassed a coalition of 34 nations before we acted to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and this after months and months of negotiations and U.N. resolutions. Twelve years later after waiting six months and seeing fourteen U.N. resolutions ignored by Hussein, George W. Bush had accrued a multi-national coalition and a majority vote in Congress before sending troops into Iraq. We are the big dog on the block. And yet we ask no penance from lesser countries. Instead we offer aid in the form of cash, medicine, and humanitarian help. When we go after bad guys in war, we don’t carpet bomb, or blow up civilian-filled buses. We have smart bombs that pinpoint targets to limit collateral civilian casualites. We’re the good guys. Only an entrenched self-loathing hatred of America will prevent you from seeing that. If that’s the case, you have my sympathy. But don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And yes, this is our country, whether a Democrat of a Republican occupies the White House.

Yeah, a lot of things piss me off. But I’m a ridiculously happy guy. I’m blessed with a wonderful family, terrific friends (many, many of them Liberals, oh yes), a strong Faith in God and a sweet certainty that this nation is on the side of good in the world…and that that good will overcome the bad.

I was asked by the founder of this site to write an article… an ‘opening salvo’. Considering who might read it, and who in Hollywood might be incensed, the temptation to parse words and couch my opinions was strong. But the guy in the mirror counsels me the loudest. I was always impressed with John Hancock, when, reminded that signing one’s name to that Declaration in Pennsylvania could very well lead to their deaths…solemnly stepped forward and with grand flourish signed his name in huge, legible script. In that grand spirit…

I hereby declare my independence…from the small-minded, America-hating, race-bating, Christian-bashing, class-warfare-waging, politically-correct, collectivist, Liberal Hollywood establishment.

Anybody got a problem with that, I’ll mapquest you directions to my front door, we’ll settle it like men.

Signed,

GARY GRAHAM