Saturday, April 22, 2006

Finally some New Rules
Sorry it's been awhile, but there finally back.

New Rule: You can't go out and play until you finish your war. President Bush kicked off another baseball season with a high, inside ceremonial first pitch. Come to think of it, the president's pitching style is a lot like what he's exhibited in Iraq: a lot of balls, with no real plan to get anybody out.

New Rule: If you work at an office, you have to take a turn cleaning the office microwave. I opened ours the other day, and a bat flew out. The inside looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. The three settings are now, "Cook," "Defrost" and "Hepatitis." And if you're not going to clean the damn thing, at least take out whatever is growing in there so we can harvest the stem cells.

New Rule: Don't blame illegal immigrants for driving down wages. Blame Congress. Republicans in Congress have to stop saying that the problem with Mexicans coming over the border is they keep wages down. You know what keeps wages down? The fact that Congress hasn't raised the minimum wage since 1997. 1997, when my dealer still had a beeper! Car dealer, car dealer, what did I say?

Yes, news flash: Congress controls what the minimum wage is. Who did you think it was, the valet parking team at Tony Roma's? And upping the minimum wage would affect wages. It has to. The word "wage" is right in it. Even George Bush could understand that. Maybe not. The point is, the elephant in the room is that no one can live on minimum wage, and that we are making a whole swath of our society - tens of millions of people - live like animals. So that the luckier segment can live with indulgences their parents never dreamed of.

Do you know that most upper-middle-class people nowadays never clean their own toilet or do their own laundry...until they go to rehab.

Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is actually lower than it was in 1968, the year George Bush graduated from Yale. And that is unforgivable! And the wage thing is bad, too.

People like to tell themselves that these immigrants do the jobs Americans won't do. Not true. Americans will pick fruit in the hot sun. But not at $5.15 an hour. Trust me. If some of these jobs paid real wages, your wife would be having sex with a Jewish gardener.

Americans want the contributions of the poor and the immigrant without having to actually see or be among them. Which is why I suggest, instead of building a wall on the border, we build a Wal-Mart. It would be 1,950 miles long, or the size of a normal Wal-Mart. And there would still be just the one register open. But it would solve this problem.

Because if we built this Wal-Mart exactly on the border, the Americans could come through the front door and shop, and the Mexicans could come through the back door and work. And then go home the same way at night, unless they got locked in. It is Wal-Mart.

In summation, I am not saying that raising the minimum wage is going to solve the illegal immigration problem. That can only be solved by arming Lou Dobbs. But five bucks an hour in an America where the luckier ones spend that on a coffee, is a cruel joke. And if you don't believe me, do what I do. Listen to the voices of those poor souls who are making this paltry sum. Of course, I have to. They're my staff.

New Rule: Parents have to stop coddling their children. The latest is, schools have stopped grading papers with red ink because of complaints that a big, mean, red X is too negative. Why, a kid might even think he got it wrong and learn something. These parents today are so fixated on protection, it's amazing they ever got pregnant in the first place.

A recent reality show called "Super Nanny" placed an old-school, discipline-wielding nanny into a family where the mother can't figure out the reason she's having a nervous breakdown is that she says things to her kids like, "Tyler, mommy would really appreciate it if you didn't throw rocks at me." You know, moms and dads these days are like the Democratic Party: lame, spineless and not holding up their end of the equation. And kids are like the Republicans: drunk with power and out of control!

Maybe that's why there's also a new phenomenon called "parent coaching," a kind of tech-support service for clueless parents when their 3.0-year-old goes haywire. As described in a recent New York Times article, here are some of the questions a typical mom asks her parenting coach: What should she do when Skylar won't do his chores? Should there be limits on how he spends his allowance? Should Forrest get dessert if he does not eat a healthy dinner?

Now, for those of you who are saying, "But, Bill, you're not a parent," I say, "True. But I have one thing these parents apparently don't: a brain!" This is not rocket science. What you should do when Skylar won't do his chores. How about using your size advantage. Make him. Because if there's one thing we know about kids, it's that if you give them an inch, the authorities will raid your Neverland Ranch.

Yes, like Michael Jackson, parents these days act like they're on a date with their children. Trying to impress them, trying to buy their love and never contradicting them or giving them a big red X when they're wrong.

So, no, I don't have kids. And you know what? I don't intend to have any until people start making some I'd want my kids to play with! Until then, I'm just glad I own a lot of stock in Ritalin.
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