Like Kofi Annan, Larry Miller is one of the most irresistible comic personalities working today. Known for years as an actor, writer, comedian, and sexual pioneer, he's gained a new following as a cultural commentator and frequent guest on political shows. Now, in Spoiled Rotten America, he fixes his gaze on what's funny about our daily lives—which includes, roughly speaking, everything. From middle-aged drinking ("When you're in your twenties, you can drink all night and bungee-jump off a bridge the next day. If I drank all night, I'd want to go off that bridge without the cord") to the excesses of our eating habits ("This is why the world hates us: the size of the portions we order. Thank God they've never shown us eating on Al Jazeera—that would be the end of it"), Miller finds the silver lining of absurdity within every black cloud.
Ultimately, though, Spoiled Rotten America is more than just the average yukfest. It's an insightful, and surprisingly heartfelt, plea for us to notice what's best and worst about ourselves. "The American pendulum only swings to extremes," he writes. "The news is on all day, but we know less and less; there's music in every mall, but we don't hear it; everyone has a phone but nothing to say. The chubbiest of us have the strictest diets, because we can't learn to modulate and moderate. It's all or nothing. One bite of a cookie, and suddenly you're on a plane to Vegas with a hooker. To the Cranky Nitpickers of America—a club I'd join in a second if I weren't already its president—it's long been understood that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket.
"What better time for a collection of seventeen comic essays?"
What better time indeed.
My wife just got a new dishwasher for us. She didn't tell me, she just got it. I discovered this the other day when I came home from work and saw it being installed, but it was difficult to learn any more just then, since she was in the living room with her friend Ilana, planning a party at our house that weekend for twenty-seven or so Little League parents. I didn't know about this, either.
"Oh, you'll love it," she said, with a wink and a wave of her hand, and turned back to Ilana, who was animatedly saying something like, "I think the pasta station should go in the playroom."
And I remember thinking, "You know, there may be some things I disagree with about Arab society, but, on the whole, you've got to admire the way they treat their women."
The thing about the new dishwasher was, I'd just gotten used to loading the old one. "It wasn't cleaning well anymore," she said after Ilana left. "Yes, it was," I said. "No, it wasn't," she said.
We could have batted this shuttlecock back and forth for a few more hours, easy, but ultimately it would've led me to turning curt and saying, "How would you know?" (Another night sleeping with one eye open.) Instead, I looked down at the shiny new appliance and muttered, "But I just figured the old one out."
My eagle eye and spaniel nose tell me that the principles of correct dishwasher use are one of those tiny-but-huge subjects debated by all households; and in this case I mean everyone. Man, woman, gay, straight, American, Norwegian—put any two adults together in a house, and they'll very quickly develop different, and fiercely rigid, views of how best to load the dishwasher.
You could pair an English supermodel with a Cambodian rice farmer, or two Sherpas who grew up on the side of Mount Everest and never even heard of electricity, and within four days you'd hear one telling the other, "No, idiot, the salad plates go behind the cereal bowls." Sounds like a new reality show, doesn't it? "She only speaks Hungarian, and he's never even seen a rocks glass, but watch the sparks fly when it's time to clear the table!" (That one's probably in development at NBC.)
I consider myself a dishwasher virtuoso even with my one great flaw, to wit: I rinse. I know you don't need to rinse before you load, but I do. Even toast crumbs. I just have to.
Still, I think I save more water than any reasonably sane American.
I never leave the faucet running while I'm scrubbing a pan, and only turn it on again when it's time to rinse, and then still only halfway.
I listen like a hawk (or just a maniac) when the kids go to brush their teeth, and run shouting down the hall the second I sense they've got the water on too high or too long, or that they're spraying each other, or—worst of all for a parent—that they're just giggling and enjoying life too much.
When it's time for me to shower, I'm like a marine boot being monitored by Lee Ermey with a stopwatch. Even when I'm a little fuzzy-headed in the morning, I allow myself just a brief cascade down the head and neck . . . unless of course someone's in there with me. (Oh, stop your cackling. This does so happen to me, though not every day, and almost always in a fancy hotel for one of those Mommy and Daddy nights away.)
In fact, I used to shower with the kids, too, when they were little.
At least until my sister told me not to.
This was when they were two and five, and after two and five years (respectively) spent getting an achy back and soaked shoes while leaning in to wash their hair, one evening at bath time the clouds parted, the angels sang, and I climbed in with them.
Well, I thought I had invented the wheel. It was so easy, I was staggered by the brilliance of the thing.
