I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up Read Online Free PDF Page A

rednecks who don’t understand that the national debt is not the same as personal debt. How the fuck are you worried about the Fed owing money when you live in a trailer park?
    America
has
hustled in the past when things got tough. For years and years, gambling was a complete taboo. Liquor was regarded as such a vice that the Constitution itself was amended to prohibit its sale. These positions weren’t reversed because people thought that drinking and gambling were now
good
things. Those weren’t benevolent moves. People were broke and they needed jobs! We let go of our idea that we were a sober country that doesn’t play cards. What must have seemed like a shocking legalization of sin at the time is met with shrugs today. It all reconciled pretty well with who we are.
    Corporations hustle
all the time
. Lobbying is straight hustling. When GE or whoever gets their people to write the tax code with loopholes big enough to drive a Buick through, that’s a hustle. It might be perpetrated by Harvard-educated lawyers in expensive suits and perfect ties, but the mentality of gaming the system is exactly the same.
    The easiest hustle we can pull nowadays is the legalization of marijuana. Legalizing pot would mean
instant
revenue. It’s not like pot farms don’t already exist. It’s called weed because the stuff is so goddamn easy to grow! We grow
a lot
of it. It’s the biggest cash crop in America today. We grow
$35 billion
worth of the stuff every year. That’s more than corn, more than beans, more than anything else. If it’s not fair that huge corporations pay zero dollars in taxes, how absurd is it that we’re not taxing the biggest crop in America?
    That’s just on the revenue side. Savings would also come from a decrease in spending. In Orange County alone, they spend a billion dollars in legal fees, prosecution, and containment simply onmarijuana cases. That’s just the court. That’s not counting police man-hours, and that’s not counting the investigations. The prisoners cost money too. They get housing, they get food, and they get $1,800 worth of medical care every year. Imagine how much more effective the police would be if they weren’t worried about some dude selling weed.

    But no one wants to think in these terms, because of our self-image. The biggest idea we have to give up is that we’re a hardworking people. That reputation hasn’t been warranted for a very long time—but it
was
warranted decades ago. We only became a hardworking nation because we came from immigrants. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, America completely reinvented itself after beating the shit out of ourselves in the Civil War. The slaves had just been freed and the Great Migration began. People came from all over the world with their ideas about what they wanted to do. They came from Ireland and they came from China and they came from Eastern Europe. They all arrived with their ideas to make this country great and turned away from the bullshit that they had seen back home. “Fuck this,” they said. “There’s got to be a better way.”
    It was a certain kind of person who came here. If you were rich, you weren’t going to get on a boat and cross an ocean to a country that had
nothing
. Whether you were a domestic slave who had been freed or you were from the slums of Europe, everybody that came here was a “nigger” where they were from. They left
everything
they had before and appreciated what they had here. The American experience
had to
work for them. We were plan B—
and there was no plan C
. This was it!
That’s
why America was so tough. They camehere, to Irishtown and Chinatown and Little Italy, and they got their first taste of freedom.
    We became a
great
country with this huge influx of immigrants. The American character had to get cut with something instead of being that unadulterated colonial Puritan
bullshit
. Before the immigrants, we were just racist rednecks and