The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.)

  This, of course, will do nothing to stop murder, theft, corruption, or the black market in drugs. Since when was going to the doctor or the lawyer cheaper than hanging out on the corner? We’ll end up building thousands of “treatment facilities” and sending dopers there instead of prison. The countryside will be festooned with Betty Ford Centers, except bigger, with barbed wire around them, and with no cute actors, rich kids, or politicians’ wives inside. At least in prison you get out when your sentence is up. In treatment you don’t get out until you’re “cured.” Who gets to decide? I hope it’s not my wife.

  NO LEGALIZATION WITHOUT NO TREATMENT is my motto. And maybe no legalization even then. Suppose that we do manage to obtain an unregulated free market for all drugs. And suppose that this somehow doesn’t cause a horrendous head-on collision between “Pursuit of happiness” and “Where’s the party?” Suppose we legalize and it works. It won’t work anyway.

  Give Americans a legal right and they’ll think they’ve got a federal entitlement. As I said before, we drug users deserve free drugs. Sounds like a vote-getter to me. Pretty soon Democrats in Congress will be lambasting Republicans for cutting school-lunch morphine portions. And if you think Social Security is expensive now, wait until Medicare covers Granny’s freebase.

  Nor should we imagine that drug legalization will get us our $44 billion back. The Drug Czar won’t get fired or end up sleeping on my sofa. He’ll just shift the focus of his efforts from jailing Woody Harrelson and annoying the peasants of Peru to educating America’s youth: “It may be lawful, but ain’t it awful.” Maybe the Drug Czar will spend the $44 billion on more of those very trippy antidrug TV ads. Have you seen the one with the cute chick busting up the kitchen? “This is what your family goes through!” she yells as she whacks the dinner china with a skillet. Who hasn’t wanted to do that to the ’rents?

  What’s the sensible answer to America’s drug policy conundrum? It’s the same as the sensible answer to the National Household Survey of Drug Abuse. Just lie, Max. I don’t do drugs anymore. You don’t do drugs anymore. End of discussion. New topic. And everyone who’s involved in America’s drug policy debate: Calm down and have a drink.

  Speaking of which, I said, I think I’ll have another. I’ve got to take Muffin to an Easter egg hunt that some Martha Stewarted parents from her play group are giving. The kids will be searching for colorfully dyed caviar.

  9

  MAY 2001

  Fortunately,” mused my wife, “it turns out not to matter what the neighbors think of you—as far as baby-sitting is concerned.”

  The teenage baby-sitter from next door breezed into our kitchen. “My grandparents,” said the baby-sitter, “are patronizing bores. Last night they told me they were proud of the way Eminem handled himself at the Grammy awards, which were three months ago. And nobody ever says that about Yo Yo Ma. Sorry I’m late, Mrs. O, but my mom got stuck in a power yoga position. I had to pour canola oil on her legs to get her untangled. She sent a treat for Muffin. They’re called ‘vegesicles.’ You make them by putting vegetable soup in Popsicle molds. They’re awful.”

  Muffin took an experimental lick.

  “Mr. O,” said the baby-sitter, “didn’t you used to be more important? When you were on TV? I was thinking about this while I was watching my Sunrise Semester macroeconomics course. And I was wondering, how did you get on television?”

  Keep wondering, I said. And check your answering machine. You may be next, young lady. Have any broadcast experience? Familiar with TV production? Are you a nationally recognized expert in a particular field? Me neither. But 60 Minutes made me a commentator—briefly. And brief is what a commentator must be. The comments aren’t supposed to last too long. Ditto, I guess, for the career.

  Molly Ivins, Stanley Crouch, and I were hired to debate Important Issues. Molly is a seasoned journalist with a thoroughgoing knowledge of America’s political nuts and bolts—especially, since she’s a liberal, the nuts. Stanley is acclaimed as a critic and an essayist. I understand why 60 Minutes wanted to bring their arguments into America’s homes, but I just make fun of things. Everybody’s got a person like that around the house already: wisecracking spouse, young assistant who thinks he’s a hoot, smart-aleck teenage baby-sitter.

  Anyway, the 60 Minutes disputations were to be about gun control, abortion, Medicare funding, that sort of thing. And we were supposed to bring a light touch to these subjects. You try bringing a light touch to Medicare funding. But don’t try it on my father-in-law. He’s pretty handy with that cane. Thanks to Medicare funding.

  Molly, Stanley, and I were given helpful instructions—someone called and told us not to wear plaid. And we received a hearty welcome from the program’s senior humor commentator of long standing, who shall go nameless. He had many valuable suggestions for us, such as conducting the debates in mime or doing our segment with our backs to the camera or walking around in traffic until we were run over by a bus.

  Then we went into the studio, although not together. Molly lives in Austin, Texas. Stanley’s a New Yorker. And I was off searching for things to make fun of, in a bar somewhere. We didn’t even go to different studios at the same time. Each segment was taped separately. The only debater I could see or hear was me, on the studio monitor. Getting in an argument with yourself on national TV is not a résumé builder.

  At a videotaping you sit alone on a hard chair in the middle of a room staring at bright lights for an hour while behind you a dozen people experience technical difficulties. Meanwhile there is a single thought in your head: “Put a digit in a nostril and I’m on somebody’s blooper tape forever.” The script appears in bottom-of-the-eye-chart letters on the TelePrompTer, which is located slightly above the camera lens. Thus when you’re reading from a TelePrompTer, you’re not quite making eye contact with the viewers, and your pupils are moving back and forth, plus you’re squinting. The result is a shifty, unblinking thousand-yard stare usually seen in the segregation units of maximum-security federal prisons. An earpiece the size of an escargot is jammed in your aural canal. From this emanates much static and hissing and, occasionally, an instruction from the segment producer, such as “Take your finger out of your nose.”

  Bad as a taping is, it gets worse when it’s over because then you have to watch the tape. This is when I discovered the one thing that sets real television professionals apart from the rest of us—other than enormous amounts of money. They can sit still. I cannot. My first try on 60 Minutes should have been titled “Watch Mr. Fidget.” I squirm in my seat as if I need to be wormed. I wave my hands around like a Sicilian greengrocer. The way my head swivels you’d think I was watching a Ping-Pong match. A cable TV aerobics class has less on-camera movement than me bringing a light touch to Medicare funding.

  Real television professionals deserve those enormous amounts of money. They can sit there like bumps on a log for hours on end—as you may have noticed if you watched the 2000 election night coverage. I can’t even get my clothes to hold still. My collar points pop out. My lapels flap. My tie gets loose and starts doing a hula. And just when I think I’m getting things under control, one of the technical-difficulties people will yell “Makeup!” because I’m starting to look, on camera, the way I look in real life.

  Makeup is the toughest thing of all about being a television commentator. Not tough for me, of course. I just sit there with a bib around my neck. But it’s darn tough for the person trying to get me to look like a decent citizen not in need of ninety days at Rancho Mirage. It’s one of life’s depressing moments when you first sit down in front of that mirror with all the lightbulbs around it and hear the makeup artist sigh and say, “This is going to take time.”

  So there I am in the studio, sitting on my hands, wearing so much foundation and powder that I can’t move my head anymore. Little pieces of gaffer’s tape are scattered all over my body, holding my wearing apparel in place. The technical difficulties are over. I’m learning to live with the TelePrompTer a
nd the earpiece. The tape is rolling. Everyone’s quiet on the set. And…

  This is when I realize I’m talking to 270 million people—minus a few poor souls tuned to America’s Funniest Home Videos. And I don’t have anything to say. What do I know that 270 million people don’t? What insight or information could I possess that’s so important it needs to be loudly announced to the entire nation? I’ve thought about this quite a bit. “Never eat a taco that’s larger than your head.” That’s the best I can do.

  So I’m off the air now. I’m not exactly sure why 60 Minutes ended my commentator stint. My theory is that somebody at 60 Minutes watched the show. Anyway, I’m glad I did it. I learned a lot, and I acquired new respect for television professionals. It’s amazing the way they sit still and keep their fingers out of their noses. Unlike most viewers, I’ve been behind the scenes. I understand what it takes to be a television commentator. When you see a person doing commentary on TV, young lady, you probably just think something like What a big idiot.

  Not me. Not anymore. I think, Come on. Give me another shot. I can be a bigger idiot than that.

  What in the heck, I asked the teenage baby-sitter, were you and Muffin doing in the backyard?

  “It’s a game my mom invented when she was teaching Montessori School,” said the baby-sitter. “It’s called Tug of Peace. Each side takes hold of one end of a rope and tries to help the other side across a line. As you can see, it doesn’t work at all. My mom is a total flake.”

  “Now, now,” said my wife.

  “Mrs. O,” said the baby-sitter, “I can’t work tomorrow. I’ve got to go with my mom to her court date.”

  Court date? I said.

  “She got arrested last month at Earth Day, for chaining herself.”

  To—? I asked.

  “The earth.”

  I remember the first Earth Day, I said. Thirty-one years ago, all across America, a couple million of my sandal-strap-entangled, natural-food-burping, hair-ball pals and I led the March to Ecological Consciousness. We found Ecological Consciousness, as I recall, behind the bandstand in Central Park, wrapped in aluminum foil. A guy named Groovy was selling it for $5.

  “Honey!” said my wife.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. O,” said the baby-sitter, “I don’t use drugs. It’s impossible to study differential calculus on drugs.”

  Earth Day wasn’t really a march, I continued. Marches were the kind of thing that serious, intelligent, well-organized civil rights activists did. If Martin Luther King, Jr. had been the leader of a bunch of gooey globe-smoochers, his famous 1963 march would have been called the Wander into Washington. When MLK gave the “I have a dream” speech, half his audience would have been going, “Man, I’m seeing things too,” and the other half would have mistakenly assembled in Washington State.

  Anyway, there we were on April 22, 1970, vowing to loiter for the sake of the planet, to get everybody to love trees as much as trees loved them, and to keep staring into space and mouth-breathing until Richard Nixon quit putting DDT into bird nests. I remember my cousin, who was a hippie-dip even worse than myself, coming back to our pad with a small bottle in his hands. “A dude laid this on me,” he said, in sacerdotal tones. “It’s water—from the Hudson River.” We lived two blocks from the Hudson River.

  To normal people, Earth Day must have looked like a lot of—to use a word then in vogue—pollution: the fetid stench of patchouli oil, the ugly sprawl of tie-dyed fabrics, the awful din of Tibetan finger cymbals and Peruvian nose flutes. Here was environmental blight indeed. Also, when your nation’s college-educated young people suddenly discover the ground they’re standing on, that’s not a good sign. The Youth Goof phenomenon was not just a reaction to the pill and the war in Vietnam; rather, it was the result of an entire baby boom full of cretins.

  It’s a wonder the squares didn’t round us up then and there and feed us to the nearest endangered species—which, in the drug-plagued New York of 1970, would have been anyone carrying a wallet after dark. Twelve days later the squares did, in fact, cull our herd at Kent State. But then something odd happened. The normal people turned green.

  Shortly after the first Earth Day regular folks—folks who, when you say “Gaia,” they think “Karmen”—began to spout all sorts of eco-blather and enviro-twaddle. Now my aunt’s canasta partner says, “This is the only planet we have,” even though the lunatic daughter from whom she heard the phrase would be perfectly at home on Mars. The guy at Slick Lube tells us that our used oil will be recycled—probably by being drained through a gunnysack and sold to someone else as new. And so on. The general public caught this from my generation, like head lice. Thus, long after most features of the Age of Aquarius have succumbed to common sense (or A-200 Pyrinate shampoo), Earth Day lives on.

  But is the earth better for it? No one seems to argue that the ecological situation has improved greatly in the past three decades. And if some progress has been made, can the credit go to those of us with a terrible crush on nature? Are atmospheric chlorofluorocarbon releases down because I want to go steady with the sky? Has putting the make on terra firma prevented any environmental damage at all? Or does carrying a torch for Mother E just make things worse?

  Not inside my head it doesn’t. Maybe the rain forest is toast, but that doesn’t mean the ecology movement isn’t hugely successful at protecting and nurturing my self-esteem. There’s nothing like telling the world I’m wearing u-trou made of hemp to give me a nice sense of false accomplishment (and a rash).

  Consider the environmental condition of the earth to be a kitten up a tree. Do we get a ladder? Do we seek trained professional help from the fire department? Or do we sit at a folding table in the mall getting signatures on a PETA petition against using domestic animals in metaphors about the environmental condition of the earth?

  The danger of a fondness for false accomplishment is that it gives aid and comfort to people whose accomplishments are even more false than ours—the cretin baby boomers who ran for president last year, for instance. Any mass action is inherently political, even a mass action as sweet and feckless as Earth Day, which—according to a newspaper clipping I have here—listed, among various global activities:

  In the Philippines, a huge environmental concert for youth was broadcast live all across Asia. Actually, if you’ve ever heard a Philippine rock band, this could be construed as fairly serious eco-terrorism.

  In Mexico, 30,000 high school students planted trees in the capital. After which 30,000 college students doubtless ripped them up and used them to build strike barricades.

  In Ghana, a three-day workshop taught women and youth skills in natural resource conservation: starving as a good way to conserve food, for example.

  When we gather in a big public crowd, we want the political system to do something. If we wanted to do something ourselves, we’d be at work. If we wanted to learn something, we’d be at school. And if we were really interested in natural resource conservation, we’d conserve some resources by staying home. Politicians don’t fix scientific and economic problems. The last time political types were totally in charge of scientific research and economic planning they built the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

  Shall government be the steward of our priceless natural heritage? Suppose a ruthless corporation owned Bikini atoll in the South Pacific. Crass and materialistic pursuit of profit might lead that corporation to destroy bird and animal habitat, degrade air and water quality, and sell sunblock with an SPF of less than 40. But would the corporation test an H-bomb on its luxury leisure development?

  The answer, of course, is yes—for the right price. But the price would be high. If somebody came to me and said, “We’d like to detonate a thermonuclear device on that lakefront lot you own in Maine,” I’d want more than assessed value. But we’re talking about a real estate sales prospect here, for which price is no object. And what customer cares nothing about price? The steward of our priceless natural heritage, the government, that’s who.


  We can’t go to the polls and vote our way into a better environment—unless the environment we really like is grubby little curtained booths with chads on the floor. And a better environment won’t come as an answer to our prayers just because we’ve made ecology our church and Earth Day our Easter. (Earth Day baskets have chocolate bunnies, marshmallow chicks, and gigantic California condors made of tofu.)

  We worship our children too, you know. But not literally. We want Muffin to be clean, healthy, and not on the endangered species list. We do not, however, sit her on a corner shelf, surround her with candles, and jam a stick of incense in her ear.

  Neither church nor state will breed the rhino or return the polar ice caps to the freezer or make the Detroit River a taste treat. In fact, checking the history of the past millennium from, say, the First Crusade to the Second World War, we see that what church and state do best is send mankind back to the Stone Age.

  “Deep ecologists” might think this is a good idea, but even prehistoric man had a problematic relationship with the environment. After all, mammoths are extinct because of Paleolithic atmospheric emissions—the air was full of spear points. Also, billions of poor people around the world are just now emerging from Stone Age living conditions. If we overfed Earth Day fans decide to gag on our wallets and make everybody go back to living with Fred and Wilma in Bedrock, poor people will be peeved and they’ll kill us.