Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir Page 21

  In any case, by 1870 George had been emancipated and was living with Eliza and their children, including great-grandfather George, in Lowndes County, the county in Alabama that a century later was referred to as “Bloody Lowndes” for the civil rights struggle there. In 1965, more than a hundred years after blacks were freed, most of the residents of Lowndes County were black—but not one of them was registered to vote.

  I am proud to say that my family has been in this country at least since 1818. We came in chains. We were immigrants of a sort, but we arrived on these shores legally. We survived. We persisted. We are here today. Let us not wallow in the past. You can keep the forty acres and a mule. The idea of reparations, compensating the descendants of slaves for the forced labor of their ancestors, is an idea whose time will never come. Instead, we should celebrate our freedom and our achievements.

  We will always be a minority, and politically, I will always be a minority within that minority because I treat each issue on its own, not according to party.

  I believe in Planned Parenthood, for example. A lot of parents today do not want sex education taught in the schools. They need to open their eyes. Your daughter is not fat. She is due in September! Just in time for back-to-school baby clothes!

  I also believe that when the Declaration of Independence says that we, as Americans, have the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, health care is included. Without the availability of health care, there is no life, no liberty, no pursuit of happiness.

  One of the few stories my mother told me about her growing up involved Aunt Vivian. She had two sons, Harold and Lloyd, and Lloyd suffered from asthma. She would take them and ride the bus—the black bus—some seventy miles from Selma to Birmingham to visit the white doctor who treated blacks for free one afternoon a week. He was inundated with patients and often did not finish until after the last black bus had left to return to Selma. If she missed that bus, Aunt Vivian, who worked as a maid, slept in the bus station with her kids until the next morning’s first bus home. She did that every other week for many, many months.

  One day she came home and told Aunt Inez, “I’m just so tired.”

  “You’re being lazy,” said tough Aunt Inez.

  Vivian lay down, closed her eyes, and went to sleep. She never woke up. My mother did not know the cause of death, except to say that “she just wore out.”

  Stories about the difficulty in obtaining health care are still heard today. I am sick and tired of hearing about people who do not go for medical help because of the cost, about people with insurance who are turned down for treatment, about people who do not fill their prescriptions or are removed from hospital beds because they do not have the money. We have some of the best medical technology in the world, but most people in the United States cannot afford it. The price of medical care today has grown too high. One of the leading causes of bankruptcies is medical costs. Even if you have done everything right—insurance, savings accounts, and so on—a serious illness can decimate everything you have accumulated in a lifetime.

  The health care system that exists today does not work. We are losing money, lives, and hope. Every American has preexisting conditions—it is called life. Universal health care will cost everyone, but there is nothing more essential to us as individuals and to our society than our physical well-being. America is the last holdout against universal health care in the civilized world, and that needs to change.

  Some of our wounds in the health care system are self-inflicted:

  America, we are junkies, drug addicts, and I’m not just talking about crack, coke, or heroin. No, I mean the prescription kind—Oxycontin, Vicodin, Zoloft. The majority of people in drug rehabilitation aren’t there for heroin or cocaine but for some kind of prescription addiction. And what’s worse is that Americans think this is normal.

  We need drugs to stay awake, to go to sleep, for pain, to be happy, to slow down, to speed up, to fight depression. Who knows when it started, but it is now out of control. The phrase “natural high” doesn’t apply to Americans. Add in alcohol, and the United States is the number-one drug-addicted nation in the world. Students, teachers, actors, athletes, talk show hosts, housewives, business executives, young and old are doing some kind of prescription mind-altering drug. People on these drugs function daily in our society and would never think of themselves as addicts.

  It’s all in the family too. Kids take them from their parents’ medicine cabinets and use their parents’ doctors to get prescription drugs. Multibillion-dollar drug companies and doctors are the pushers. Addicts know they can get drugs from their doctors anytime as long as they check in once or twice a year. And if one doctor won’t give them the drugs they want, they’ll just go to another doctor. According to water pollution experts, people in America should be warned that our water supplies have traces of many prescription drugs.

  I would love to say I or someone else has a great idea about how to stop this abuse. I don’t. But the first step toward recovery is recognizing that you have a problem. America has a problem.

  I voted for Ronald Reagan as president. I did not vote for Barack Obama for president. I’m sure announcing either of those statements will guarantee that I never get invited to an NAACP Image Awards retrospective. Unlike the vast majority of black Americans, I have never been a registered Democrat. That, in and of itself, puts me on a blacklist in the black community.

  That Obama had the same skin color as me was not important in determining who would get my vote. I did not agree with his political philosophy. Ideas matter, not political parties. I loved Reagan as our president and I loved Bill Clinton as our president. Republican Reagan appointed more blacks, women, and minorities to government positions than anyone before him. Democrat Clinton, who was the blackest president we have had yet—Obama included—ended the welfare system.

  Speaking of Clinton: Here is some more common sense from a Logicist. People in positions of power have a greater opportunity to cheat in their marriages than other people do. This has been happening since, oh, the beginning of time, and it will continue to happen as long as there is power and sex. Clinton happened to get caught. Times have changed. More politicians will get caught more often in the future.

  I was in Washington, DC, and Marion Barry meets me at the airport, gives me the kilo to the city. . . . This Marion Barry thing is a black-and-white issue. You know what I’m talking about? You take Jimmy Swaggart and Marion Barry. . . . When Jimmy Swaggart gets caught, he just admits it, just comes on TV: “Yes, it was me. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. My wife, my kids, please forgive me!” Marion Barry, who was caught in a hotel room on film—alcohol dripping from the lips, palming a girl’s breast, cocaine coming out of the nose—says, “It’s not me! I’m innocent! Frame up!”

  I got off on a good foot in Omaha. A thorn in my side, however, was a local black activist, the sort of guy who if you ran over a chocolate doughnut, he would scream, “Hey, that’s a black doughnut! You hate black people!” He was Omaha’s Al Sharpton. When I came out against honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday, he came down hard. I felt there should be a day of remembrance, just not a day that shut down the entire government. He wanted to shut me down—and launched a campaign to do exactly that.

  I believe most Americans are common-sense folks and appreciate hearing the truth even when it is harsh. But those are not the ones who call talk radio. Eventually the ratings for my show fell off. After about fourteen months I was let go. A year later I was back on the air at KMJ-AM in Fresno, filling in for Ray Appleton on his local talk show alongside the syndicated shows, once again, of Limbaugh, Hannity, Glenn Beck, and so on. I continue to substitute host there to this day.

  Getting fired is one thing, but getting axed for expressing your opinion, especially if it’s a joke, is more insidious. I was once fired from a cruise ship gig that I had been doing for four years because someone did not like a political joke I made in front of the usual crowd of f
ifteen hundred people.

  George Bush went to Canada and an official there called him a “moron.” Bush said, “That’s not true. I’m a Presbyterian.”

  Now that seems pretty harmless and silly to me. But someone in the audience complained to the cruise ship line that I had made the president look stupid. I was responsible for making the president look stupid? Really? Because I upset one person, I lost my job. Some people just can’t take a joke.

  Gabe Kaplan had a routine in the early ’70s in which he would impersonate Howard Cosell at the Crucifixion of Christ announcing the action as if it were a sporting event. Christ was a running back and the cross was the football: “Here’s a little guy carrying his cross down the street.” As Christ was raised up onto the cross, Kaplan as Cosell said, “Up goes Jesus, up goes Jesus!”

  I was at the bar at Catch a Rising Star after his performance. Two big guys came up to me.

  “Is Gabe Kaplan here?”

  I waved Gabe over, thinking they were going to say, “Hey, we liked the show—just wanted to tell you.”

  Gabe put out his hand to shake theirs. One of the guys grabbed him by the throat.

  “You think it’s funny, Howard Cosell at the Crucifixion?”

  Gabe looked scared and mumbled something.

  “Don’t you EVER make fun of Jesus again! That is blasphemy, you fuckin’ son of a bitch! That is the Bible!”

  He slammed Gabe against the wall.

  “I don’t ever want to hear you do that again, you goddamn motherfucker!”

  From what I have been told, Gabe never did that bit again.

  Comedians, beginning with the first court jesters, have always poked fun at the powers that be, no matter who they were. But in this politically correct world we live in, people can get crucified for a joke—especially white people. Blacks are often given a pass, but not whites. They can’t speak out or register their thoughts about race nor can they have an open dialog without being considered racist. I feel sorry for them.

  When football player Junior Seau was asked how to stop San Diego Charger star running back LaDanian Tomlinson, he said, “You give him watermelon and load him up with fried chicken and tell him to keep eating.” Seau, who is a minority himself, was wearing a Tomlinson jersey at the time. He later said Tomlinson, a former teammate, was one of his best friends and that there was no issue. Tomlinson agreed and said he didn’t know what all the fuss was about.

  Fuzzy Zoeller, a white pro golfer, was once asked what he thought Tiger Woods might serve at the Masters dinner the year after he won. Zoeller replied, “Tell him not to serve fried chicken . . . or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve.” Zoeller was called a racist, had to apologize to Tiger, and lost Kmart as a sponsor.

  Gambler Jimmy the Greek was having dinner at a Washington, DC, restaurant when he told a reporter that blacks were better athletes because their slave owners bred them to be stronger. He was fired from his network TV job.

  Senator Trent Lott said the country would have been better off if segregationist Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. He was stripped of his leadership role, lost a number of other privileges, and had to make a public apology.

  Limbaugh had people bailing out on him faster than a ham at a bar mitzvah when he said on ESPN that black Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because people wanted to see a black quarterback succeed. Limbaugh was fired from the sports network.

  And then there was Don Imus, the Granddaddy of Shock Jocks, who jokingly called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” That was nothing more—and actually a lot less—than black women are called in rap songs. But when a white man said it, all hell broke loose.

  Today, when it comes to talking about race, “White people, don’t go there.”

  Because we are not allowed to offend someone, we are forced to say or do things we do not believe. We become liars; we become hypocrites. Political correctness, so embraced by liberals, masks the truth. Rather than coming to terms with an issue, talking it out, and dealing with the reality, we pretend it does not exist.

  Make no mistake about it: There is racism on all sides. That is not a good thing, but it is a real thing. If blacks were in the majority, we would be the worst racists. Check out how a white is treated at a rap concert versus how a black is treated at a Larry the Cable Guy concert. The white guy would be harassed; no one would touch the black guy. That is the new double standard.

  America, we’ve lost our funny. We have lost the ability to laugh at ourselves and at others, both people we know and people we don’t know. We are afraid to laugh for fear of the PC police, who will call us racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever. Classic sitcoms like The Honeymooners ( “to the moon, Alice” . . . spousal abuse) , I Love Lucy ( “Lucy, you got some splainin’ to do” . . . anti-Latino) and All in the Family (almost everything) would not even get on cable TV in this climate.

  The Rat Pack—Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop—made fun of each other’s cultural differences. But they and entertainers like Will Rogers, Jack Benny, W. C. Fields, Mae West, and others would be PC’d out of business today. On a series of popular national TV commercials, cavemen point out the absurdity of our PC culture.

  America needs to go into Comedy Rehab to get its funny back.

  People—black and white—laughed at this joke from my album in 1975. We should be able to laugh at it today:

  A delivery boy knocks on my door and says, “Excuse me, boy, is the master of the house home?” I said, “Now hold on, man. I am the master, the king, the high exalted ruler, and I’m tired of people coming to my house saying black people can’t do this, black people can’t move here, black people can’t do that. There are black people in every conceivable area of the American mainstream of life. There are black scientists, there are black lawyers, there are black store owners, there are black doctors, there are black dentists, there are black people in every possible area of life. It’s people like you that keep perpetuating these racial stereotypes that keep messing everything up, man. Now I want you to leave my watermelons here and get out!”

  The races don’t have to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” together, but it would be nice to see them respect each other enough to be honest and open. For example, we have heard about white guilt over slavery and the treatment of blacks. But there is also black guilt that is almost never talked about, a feeling that I have experienced.

  When I delivered groceries for the Grand Union market, I wheeled large carts down the street to very well-to-do, two-story, townhouse residences on the Upper East Side. Of course, I used the delivery entrance in back. One day I was carrying a box of peaches and eating one on my way up the stairs inside the home. I heard someone on the steps behind me and cupped the peach in my hand so they would not see it.

  I turned around—and saw a little white girl, maybe eight years old.

  “I see the peach in your hand,” she said. “You don’t have to steal it. If you want it, you could just ask.”

  That I still remember her, with her two braided pigtails, is evidence enough of how embarrassed I felt. If she were black, I would not have had the same feeling of guilt.

  Maybe that explains what I did decades later in a record store in Chicago. Three black kids came in, grabbed a stack of CDs, and ran out. There were white people in the store and there were black people in the store. What hurt me the most was the look of the black people. They were embarrassed. Those black kids reflected on us—all of us. I went to the white girl who was the clerk at the cash register.

  “How much did they steal?”

  “Looks like about a dozen CDs.”

  “I’ll pay for them.”

  She said, “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to.”

  Customers came over and told me I should not feel I needed to pay for them. The clerk didn’t know what to do. I saw the manager and called him to us.

  “I
’m demanding to pay for what they stole,” I said. I gave him maybe $120, money I really did not want to spend for CDs I did not buy.

  But what those kids did made us look bad. They made all black people look like what white racists expect us all to look like. I felt guilty for them. I needed to do something that said, “We are not all like that.”

  There have been many times when I have been walking down a street at night, with a white woman by herself either in front of me or behind me, and I have crossed the street to the other side. Why? Because I saw that she was nervous—if not scared—of a black man. She had every right to feel that way. Our reputation precedes us.

  I went to a tough high school. When the referee would shoot off a gun to start a track meet, the track team would shoot back.

  There is an old joke about two guys arguing and one says, “Don’t you know who I am?!” The other guy says, “Well, if you don’t know who you are then I can’t help you.” I know who I am. There isn’t a black man in America who has not been profiled, followed, or wrongly accused by police, myself included. That is a fact of being black.

  According to the Census Bureau, one out of every four black men in America is in jail. I take no chances. When I get in a car, I make sure I have no more than two other black guys with me.

  In 1997 I was in Kansas City promoting my upcoming shows at Stanford & Sons comedy club. Along with another black comic, I went to a TV station at around 5:30 in the morning for an interview. It was winter, so we wore hoodies and big coats. We were buzzed into the building and made our way through the hallways by ourselves.

  “Hey boys, what are you doing here?” We turned around and saw a white guy, presumably a security guard.