Pimps up, Everybody Else Down

Let me creep to the laptop like a phantom, all cools to Dr. Dre.

I'm a past-middle-aged white man, but the pressures of a small salary mean that I live in a part of town where "rap" is spoken freely and I have learned to co-mmunicate, ya'll.

And my eyes peep this.

It's rap nation. The country is crippin'. Land of the free pimped out like a Cadillac Escalade with spinner rims.

Check this.

Rap music, oh, you know why your high school guidance counselor hates dat.

All women are hos and bitches in rap. Any little dis makes you get strapped and go lookin' to cap somebody. You crush that rival gang.

Above all, you get paid. If it ain't about money, you ain't about it.

Check it.

Musta percolated up from the bottom or maybe the top dripped on the bottom.

If you're street, you might live with a bitch, live off her check, but when you make some money on the corner, you know it's in your pocket, not hers. Don't come botherin' you for no child support, either.

Which is what the people who run America's financial industry do. Live off the taxpayer bitch when times are hard, work us for the bailout money, but when the market goes back up, Wall Street sticks the bonus money in its own pocket and leaves the kids crying for SpaghettiO's. Don't come lookin' for daddy, little man. Daddy's in Aruba.

And listen to talk from rich old white men about "welfare-sucking baby mamas." Can't you hear the rap snarl of "bitch" in that, in talk radio? And them hos wantin' legal abortions? What are they but hos? Don't give 'em the abortion, then don't give 'em the Head Start program. Your homies are gonna love it when you talk that over a 40 ounce bottle of white wine at the country club.

Green. Get the money.

Beat down unionized garbage truck drivers for it. Take it from teacher aides in ghetto schools, but get it, fold it and spend it on a Bernie Madoff crib.

Don't take no dis, either.

Yeah. These days the red "power tie" around the senator's neck looks a lot like the red bandanna hangin' out the back pocket of some itchy-trigger-finger corner boy lookin' to snatch your church-goin' grandma's purse.

Agricultural subsidies get the rich man by like food stamps feed the gang-banger's kids. And dope? You got big pharmaceutical companies slinging dope that'll knock your face in the dirt. And every political party gets paid offa that, lobbyists countin' Benjamins in the hallowed halls of Congress.

Like I said, I'm a piney woods white man pushing age 54 up the hill with my nose, but I know some things.

People who scream about the money-glorifying, gun-loving, death-hugging, punch-in-a-woman's tender face excesses of rap music oughta know the people on the bottom learned all that from the people on the top.

You look up from the street corner, and you see the elected grabbing money, grabbing women (all props to Barney Frank and those Republicans who haven't 'fessed up yet), and you know how it is. And you see 'em in court takin' the deal for short time and no lesson learned.

And you see how the point of it all is to get paid, that no money is too dirty to touch, that Democrats and Republicans will shoot up a neighborhood full of innocent people to get each other, that no name is too vile to call the guy in the wrong colors. Talk radio is a drive-by shooting.

The kid on the corner needs one rap song or one good year selling rock to be driving the Escalade with the spinner rims. The candidate's ride to office is one more yowled speech about city hall secretaries "draining the government dry" with their insane $40,000 a year salaries.

It's a cheaper country every day, and I hate that cheapness every day. Dollar stores and the tea party, lower wages if you work, house in the country if all you do is sell worthless mortgages, everybody grabbing the money.

Get rich or die tryin'.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit wwww.creators.com.

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