The Best Allegory Ever

When I was a younger man my dad shared with me the best allegory ever.  I have no idea where he got it.

Picture a horse-drawn carriage.  The carriage has three components: the carriage, the horse that pulls it, and the driver.

The horse is a powerful beast with not a whole lot going on upstairs.  It’s a horse.  It gets scared, it gets tired, it moves its ass when it gets whipped, but ultimately, it’s a beast with a will of its own.  Most of the time, when the horse is behaving, it will pull the carriage without the driver needing to interfere a whole hell of a lot.

The driver is, compared to the horse, weak, but the driver is a sentient human being.  He has logical thought, free will, and he is in control of the carriage.  His job is to lead the horse where it should go.  If it weren’t for the driver, the horse would just take the carriage off the road, off a cliff, wherever.

The carriage is, well, a carriage.  4 wheels, axles.  The driver sits on it and the horse pulls it.

The driver controls the carriage, right?  Anyone who has dealt with animals, let alone horses, knows that they can be very difficult to control.  They may not have higher thinking but they sure as hell have their own agendas.  No matter how much the driver on that carriage yells, pushes, prods, even whips that horse, if that horse doesn’t want to move, that horse isn’t going anywhere.

The driver only thinks he’s in control.  The best the driver can do is keep his horse alive, healthy, and on track.  And hope that his horse doesn’t lose a shoe, get sick, get terrified, get stubborn — all of these things can and do happen.  The best a driver can do in a situation like that is whatever he can to solve the horse’s problem, or his carriage isn’t going anywhere.

You are the horse-drawn carriage.  Your body is the carriage itself.  Your brain is the driver.  Your heart is the horse.

You may think you’re in control of the carriage.  Most people believe quite fully that they are the driver and the driver only.  But the horse is what is pulling the carriage.  Never forget that.  The driver is really just along for the ride.

Bring on the AIDS

Oh noes!  The world is “losing the fight against HIV!”

I must be a genius or a wizard because I know how to win.  My strategy consists of two words:

STOP FUCKING.

But then again, who actually cares, anyway?

Seriously.  Why should you, I, or anyone else for that matter care that a bunch of poor people are dying of AIDS?  If it’s not AIDS, it will be starvation or malaria.  What possible good will it do to keep these people alive at monumental expense to you, me, and everyone else?

Here’s a news flash: everybody dies.  And the life expectancy rates for most of the people who are dying from AIDS weren’t that much longer than they are with a disease that can kill you in 2 years or that can kill you in 10.

I’m sorry, I must be sounding awfully compassionate right now.  Is it really so hard to admit to yourself that for all your useless ideologies and make believe sympathies that deep down you really don’t care about these abstract people living in a place you’ll never see and whose daily trappings have no impact on your existence at all?  I am more concerned about the drop in bee populations in the midwest than I am about the drop in tribal African populations because at least the bees do something that directly impacts me, namely by pollenizing crops that produce food that I eat.

Before, during, and after the AIDS epidemic sweeps through places like Africa and Asia and naturally selects promiscuous humpers to die, the only impact this event will have had on my life and yours is the suffering we’ll endure as we listen to assholes sing about it.

Any direct (or indirect) consequence of every single human being in Africa dying on my life that you might attempt to come up with is just a stupid butterfly effect theory and deep down in places you don’t like to talk about at parties, you know it.

What the world needs is more AIDS, not less.

“Oh, but Evan, boo-dee-fucking-hoo, they are poor and ignorant and don’t know about safe sex and they don’t have condoms and blah blah blah…”

No matter what you say, the simple answer to this epidemic is to stop fucking.  If you don’t fuck, you don’t get AIDS.  You act like fucking is some kind of uncontrollable compulsion that is worth risking your life to pursue.  Oh wait… it is.  Well, then guess what.  You’ve got two choices.  You can empty your nuts (or have them emptied into you) and not get AIDS, or you can copulate and roll the dice.

Anyone who tries to tell me that these people don’t know they’ll become infected is not worth listening to because they are obviously naive douche bags who probably skitter through life making excuses and assigning blame.  If it weren’t enough that we finance a bunch of misguided children with no direction to traipse through the third world country side passing out condoms and informational packets, human beings have not survived for millions of years by being too stupid to put two and two together about a disease that is killing people by the millions.

You may be thinking to yourself, “wow, Evan is a coldhearted dick!”  Maybe.  But so are you.  The difference is that I’ve come to terms with the truth and I am not swimming in a cloud of imaginary ideals that will never be actually tested.  You’ve been conditioned to believe that it’s a good thing to give a shit about poor suffering people thousands of miles away who might as well not exist to you, and like a good little soldier, you will stand in rank-and-file and repeat the same tired bullshit that the Kennedy’s of politics have been stuffing down your throat since 1960 without pausing for a minute to think about whether any of it is true, applicable, or even worth discussing.

You should be glad there are people like me out there, and here’s why:

Let’s imagine for a minute that we’re at a party.  It’s me, you, and a girl who’s between a 6 and an 8.  The conversation goes like this:

Me: I am glad AIDS is killing millions of people.  It’s really a fascinating study of natural selection.  We get to see it in action.  Plus, they’ll stop shooting down our helicoptors while we pass out free food.  Fuck them.

Girl: I can’t believe you’d say that.  It’s so backwards and cruel.

You: I agree.  I am much more new-age and progressive.  I truly care about world hunger.

Girl: Excuse me for a minute.  Your empathy toward an abstract group of darkies you do nothing to actually help and your statement about how much you truly care has wettened my panties.  I need to go wipe myself so my smelly, moist crotch doesn’t bely the hard-to-get routine I’m going to play with you, the caring world citizen over here before I unceremoniously sleep with you and then never call you back because I didn’t like some trivial detail about you during or post-coitous.

What’s in a name?

Have you ever noticed that girls with certain names are always one of the following:

• trouble makers
• sluts
• bitches
• ugly

I’ve always been particularly fascinated by this phenomenon because so far, I’ve yet to be disappointed.  Here are some names that are bound to be trouble:

• Brandi
• Amber
• Deidre
• LaFawnDuh
• Brooke
• Carmen

I mean, seriously, have you ever known a girl named Brandi who isn’t a complete fuck up?  If you do, the congratulations, because that Brandi beat the odds.

Just take a look at these two:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290025,00.html

 I wasn’t the least bit surprised to discover that these girls’ names were Amber and Brandi.  So typical.

You never hear about Sarah or Katie or Jessica or Mary breaking laws.  You hear about Amber and Brandi choking their driver and hijacking the government vehicle on the way to Juvie hall.

Coincidence?  I think not!

American “elite”

Everywhere you turn, “disenfranchised” Americans accuse the “wealthy elite” (sometimes dubbed “richest Americans”) of all sorts of treachery, notwithstanding propogating the kind of classist society that has plagued and held back cultures like the Indians and better masked, the British.  All you need to do is listen to Edwards reiterate his vitriolic “two Americas” speech to hear what many voters seem to believe actually exists in the United States.

To anyone who buys into this kind of nonsense and likes to sit around demonizing “evil corporations and their nefarious overlords” (while simultaneously ignoring celebrities who are equally wealthy and one hundred times more likely to remind you of their wealth by appearing in tabloids crashing their cars that cost more than many Americans will make during the span of their entire working careers), I’ve got one simple question for you:

If these wealthy elite are so privileged and special, why didn’t you work harder to become one?

There is absolutely nothing stopping you, John Q. American, from taking life by the horns and making millions of dollars except one thing: you don’t have what it takes.  The American capitalist system is one of the fairest systems on the planet, and anyone who disagrees is too blinded by jealousy and/or their own lack of motivation and initiative to see it for what it is.

When it comes down to it, America is full of opportunities.  You’re born; you probably won’t die right away.  Your parents, if they care at all about you, can take you to any emergency room in the country and the hospital is required by law to treat you regardless of whether your parents can pay.  Will you get the best service?  No.  Will you get service that is still better than 99% of the service you’d get anywhere else on the planet?  Yes.

Providing your parent(s) are capable of keeping you alive and aren’t crack whores, you’ll get to go to school, and get one of the best public educations on the planet.  Sure, you can whine all day that Canada’s is better or Japanese students are better at math, but those studies are conducted by America haters and the people who believe them want to hate America too, and I’m getting to exactly why.

You get 13 years of free public education in this country.  If you are poor, the school will give you free lunch.  You probably won’t starve.  You graduate at the age of 18.

If you actually had any motivation, brains, or happen to be good at sports, you’ll be accepted to some college somwhere.  The federal government will give you student loans.  There are hundreds of private banks that will also write you student loans.  You can afford college, as long as you’re willing to face the fact that you’ll be in debt for 10 years.

You graduate college, you get a job.  You live in a crappy apartment because you’re paying off your loans.  You work hard, you impress your boss, you get promoted.  You change jobs a few times.  Black?  Female?  Jewish?  Gay?  Congratulations, you can’t be fired.  Or if you are, you can always try suing.  You have a decent chance that the company will just settle for $20,000 and that will pay off the rest of your student loans.  If you happen to be the universal oppressor (i.e. white male), sorry; you’ll just have to do it the hard way, since you can’t sue.  Too bad we all can’t be born with that card to play.

Sick?  Don’t have insurance because you’re a contractor and didn’t want to buy it yourself?  Just go to the ER; they’ll treat you.  Don’t pay.  Let someone else pay $90 for a Tylenol, $89.90 of which will go to paying your ER bill.

Pay off your loans, start your own company.  Work nights, work weekends, work your freaking ass off.  Hire smart people to do the hard work for you while you kiss ass at venture capital cocktail parties.  Develop some product, technology, or patent portfolios that make large, billion dollar corporations wet.  Sell your company to one of them.  Cash out for $80M and retire early.  Drive fast in expensive cars, cut people off; you own the road.  Go to only the best hospitals.  Join exlusive country clubs.  Curse the government for taxing you each year more than most people will ever earn.  Start voting republican.

Oh wait… you won.  You succeeded, you captured the American dream.  Now everyone else hates you.

Why do they hate you?  Because you did what is possible for everyone regardless of anything more than factors which are impossible to change.

Those factors are things you’re born with, like brains, drive, and a strong work ethic.   You had those things and you saw the dream through.  You worked harder than those silver spoon bastards from rich old money families ever did, but you know what?  That only makes it even sweeter, because you earned it yourself.  You can laugh at the pretty rich boys who didn’t know what it was like working until 4am every day for 2 years trying to get your little startup off the ground and profitable.  You have the money and the scars, which will make you more sexually appealing to “average” girls, the same girls you grew up with and don’t have an attitude because they were born rich little prisses.

My point is this: before you start hating these people, realize that the vast majority of them had to work their asses off at some point in their lives to get where they are, whether it was at med school, law school, or years having to schmooze total assholes to climb the corporate ladder.  Very few of the people you hate were born into what they have.  Sure, privilege helps; it’s no lie that having a head start by being born to smart, educated, and possibly wealthy parents helps.  But this is America.

Opportunities exist for every single person.  We’ve made the system as fair as it can possibly be.  The only one who can make it even more fair is God – stop producing lazy bastards.  Make everyone born with brains and the wherewithall to make something of themselves.  Until that happens, no amount of social engineering is going to make the lives of the “average American” any better because the average American is a fat beer swilling lazy fat ass with an average IQ and more of a desire to sit on their fat asses in front of the TV watching Sopranos and American Idol than to work extra hours at the office and advance their career.

Any time you hear a politician talk to you about wealthy elite or “super rich” or how they’re going to improve the “lives of the middle class”, you should run away screaming.  The only things they’re interested in doing is punishing all the people who are more successful than their voters so their voters will feel less jealous.  Appealing to the jealousy of a bunch of fat lazy retards is not a quality I would ever like to see in a leader.

And that’s because I’m not fat lazy retard.  If you want to lump yourself in with “middle America” go right ahead.  I on the other hand want to have the choice to make something for myself, and that means have capitalistic opportunities to work harder, faster, or smarter than the average American so I can have more than the average American has.  I don’t want to elect politicans who want to take that opportunity away just because a bunch of lazy people don’t want to take advantage of it.  “If I can’t have it [because I'm too lazy] then NO ONE CAN!!11″

How do they take away that opportunity?  Income redistribution, outrageous taxation, etc.  The sliding tax bracket in the US is an example of a way to punish success.  If you work hard and make more money, you get to pay more of it in taxes because you succeeded where some lazy fat ass with no medical insurance and no savings failed and needs dialysis.

The bottom line is this: the only person who is responsible for you not having as much as the wealthy elite is you.  Until you’re willing to accept that fact, keep voting democrat.