Dear Dirty America

ADAM MICHAEL LUEBKE
Los Angeles

I was on my way this late afternoon to get a coffee at the local watering hole — well, it’s a very lavish, bourgeoisie strip where Angelenos pay a lot of hard earned dollars for designer shirts and pants and belts and thin slices of pizza and cups of ice cream and gourmet coffees and yoga sessions — when an ugly green beater of an old car zoomed past my car and slammed back into the lane, just ahead of me.

I’ve already been in a serious accident! I called out. I’ve already been pummeled by a wild old lady in a speeding bullet of a car! A Honda Accord that didn’t obey the socially understood meaning of a red light.

The driver’s head floated cockily over the driver’s seat — at least that’s how it appeared to me. He’d almost clipped my car. I had a feeling it was Justin Bieber, again terrorizing the hectic streets of Los Angeles. Maybe he’d picked up a shitty tin can car because he was tired of customized one hundred grand sports cars. After awhile, a person probably wants to get behind the wheel of a crackerbox and cut loose with an engine that won’t necessarily last another month.

Either way, if it was Bieber, pretty soon it would be time to take that freak’s driver’s license away and put him in the slammer. Give him a real experience he can sing about. Prison house blues. Getting away with one in the shower. Lamenting the oodles of time upon wasted time while sitting in a cell. Except that would never happen to Bieber. That kid’s got a blessing from the Lord hanging over his head. He lived a fantastic and pious stretch in his past life, but in this one, all signs are suggesting he’s pissing it away.

He can do 100 mph on the 101 without getting shot. That’s damned good. Usually, the LAPD pull their guns and fire so everybody on live television can get that adrenaline kick and thrill they need every week or so. Mercy killing, fresh and live. And everybody feels good about the ordeal because they gunned down a criminal. No matter if there were questions. Wait until the smoke clears and the blood’s trickled into the grass median.

Bieber really did get stopped by CHP again. Paparazzi following him, is the story, so far. He was doing excessive speeds on the highway in his silver Fisker Karma. If it hadn’t been Bieber, but some other 19-year old man, officers would have nailed him 90 times before they were satisfied. That’s unfair, you might say, because Bieber stopped when the CHP demanded it. Except he placed a lot of people in danger on a busy freeway, and because he was trying to lose the paparazzi. That’s a good excuse in Los Angeles. If you’re famous. But to me, paparazzi are a part of the one hundred million dollar paycheck.

If I drove over eighty-five on the freeway and claimed I’d had a miserable fucking month, and I was trying to outrun it, I would get a few official police firearms aimed at my face. I’d have to lay flat out on the concrete as other drivers — some texting — zipped by the scene on their way to work, the mall, the club, or nowhere in particular. If one officer thought he saw a gun in my hand, he’d fire, and then the other three officers would unload. They’d reload, and empty their clips again. It’s all for television. For the Big Show. That’s the way it is with the LAPD. In 2011, they fired upon people than ever before. I’m not making it up. From a Reliable Source:

Los Angeles police fired their weapons in 63 incidents last year, a total which marked a roughly 50% increase over the shootings in any of the previous four years

I’d probably be dead. But Bieber will live another day. And another after that, I suppose. Unless his deal with the Higher Power runs dry. So far, that doesn’t look likely.

But I noticed the symbolic fish decal on the back of the green car. Couldn’t be Bieber, because that was the Jesus fish. Everybody knows Bieber works for the Devil. Then the question hit me. What kind of asshole dares tote a Jesus-fish on the back of his car, and then nearly clips my car because he can’t slow down and wait to properly merge into traffic? What kinds of Christians are we putting up with today?

I have high respect for Jesus, but most Christians, I’ve noticed, do not. It’s one thing to admire and love Him, but it’s another to take His name and live everyday like a deadbeat capitalist.

Let me stop right there, before I delve into that age-old religious argument that everybody’s heard and read a thousand times. Jesus hasn’t been Jesus for ages. His words are used in the scopes of sniper rifles used in Iraq by American troops. Nothing to bolster the boys like a rousing phrase such as, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Imagine how good those letters look as they adeptly float over the turbaned head of a man pushing his bicycle through a dusty street, on his way home to his wife and three children. If Jesus gives the nod, well hell, pull the trigger. No guilt over that. Glory killing. Every A-rab played a part in 9/11, and we won’t be through with them until we’re through.

Anyway, there’s no great way to end this article, except to write a startling headline imagining Justin Bieber being treated like anybody else who speeds 100 mph in Los Angeles: CASE OF JUSTIN BIEBER SHOT 90 TIMES ON THE 101 FREEWAY ‘TRAGIC’.

Tragic. Not even a Jesus fish would save him. Besides, every time he stuck one to the back of that silver spaceship he drives, the sheer G-force of every powerful takeoff and 100 mph joyride would knock the decal to the road, where other nonchalant Angelenos would drive over it.

I would never wish onto anybody the wicked fate of driving over a Jesus fish. That’s such bad karma, and the problem is, you don’t know you did it until ten years later, when your house burns down, your kids are born with terribly rare and deforming diseases, and everybody you love refuses to help, or get involved with that kind of streak of sour luck. You’d never know it was Bieber’s Jesus fish that you crunched with your Goodyear tires on an old shitty car you don’t even have any more.

Life is a strange event, and it’s not for the faint of heart. We are covered in skin that’s sensitive to heat, cold, and all sharp items, and almost everything on this planet is harder and sharper than we are. Sooner than later, you will feel pain. Light pain. Heavy pain. Sooner than later, your routine will be disrupted.

Life might be about enjoying the calm before the next eventual storm. If your pain is light today, enjoy it, because tomorrow it may take a serious jump into barely tolerable. That seems to be the lesson, so far. The next lesson is finding living peace with your suffering, and seeing it as spiritual growth and development. Viewing your heartache as a result of a complexity of compounded karma, more devious and sinister and complicated than facing your student debt. But you’ve got to develop abounding grace and faith to believe that.

Did the guy driving the shitcan green car understand that? Is that why he lives life with very little regard for other humans? Does he survive on a diet of Kraft’s macaroni and cheese and spicy potato chips? Does he fear loads of student debt racked up in his name? Is he a closet homosexual who torments himself with coming out to the world? Does he imagine himself to be Justin Bieber driving in a sports car? Has he seen the footage of Mona Lisa E.B.E.? Has that changed his worldview at all?

There are only questions. Always, questions.
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