Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm

Introduction

The first thing I asked myself after making everyone I know check around to see if they could get me a book deal was, Why the hell am I thinking about writing another book? After all, everywhere you look, some pouty intellectual is whining about how we live in a postliterate age, which means that nobody reads anything longer than a text message, and even those are just a few dumb-ass abbreviations strung together—LOL (laugh out loud), LMFAO (laughing my fucking ass off), ROFLMAO (rolling on floor laughing my ass off), TTYL (talk to you later), or LOLSTC (laughed out loud scared the cat!).

Now here I am, almost fifty-eight years old, being completely honest with myself as I begin to approach middle age (LOL), full to the brim with wisdom, grandmotherly love, and the kind of gas that only a whole head of roasted garlic can generate, so you, dear reader, are in for a treat. I wanted to write the kind of book that I’d like to read, but my publishers, who just got bought again (this time by a Chinese hedge fund or something), told me that trashy crime novels full of lurid sex and gory details that forensics freaks love to revel in are just rotting on the racks. So I went straight to Plan B: a timely, eclectic book by a Baby Boomer that even younger people could take home and read, if they could in fact read after coming up through our skool systom (ROFLMAO).

Speaking of younger people, my five kids (I used to be pro-life), who think of me as a Mominatrix who has somehow always managed to both cruelly neglect them and butt into their lives too much, are glad I’m writing it. In fact, my whole formerly estranged extended family is happy about it. I think it’s because it’ll give them a chance to really consider my words carefully, get to know me all over again, and then see if there’s anything in here that would give them grounds to sue me. God love ’em.

I know damn well that there are a lot of people who never really got to know me and still don’t like me, but this really isn’t a book about ex-husbands. Some people are almost incurable hardcases, and despite the fact that legions of Roseannethropologists have determined that I’ve done our desperately diverse, dynamically dysfunctional culture way more good than harm, some folks just won’t let me live down that night all those years ago when I started the National Anthem too high, and ended up sounding like a screechy but brittle blend of battlefield surgery and a pterodactyl with its tit in a wringer. I’ve said I’m sorry a million times! I know this is a Christian nation and all that, but can’t they at least consider forgiving me after all these years? Talk about going the extra mile: I’m a Jew and I dressed up like Hitler and baked little burned people cookies to atone for my poor performance! What more can I do, for Christ’s sake?

I know that there are a lot of books out there right now by well-known people in the comedy business, people who are utterly brilliant and have timely, relevant things to say—funny things, poignant things that go straight to the heart after tickling the funny bone. Some of these talented figures, many younger than I, have enjoyed big success on TV more recently than I have, and they’re getting rave reviews. I’m not too proud to say that I hate those people. But I can’t let the jealousy I feel for them and my inability to focus keep me from trying to show them up and get out there and have my say, too!

I just know this book will be wildly successful and well received because I’m someone who surrounds myself with positive energy and light, someone who doesn’t let negative, demoralizing words like failure or disappointment or exercise even begin to creep into her life. I learned an important, valuable lesson years ago, when I used to smoke three or four packs of cigarettes a day: I am no quitter! I do whatever it takes to make things work—to make them fulfilling and joyous.

Hell, you want to see determination? I’ll take my son’s college money (I don’t think he’s college material anyway, but let’s just keep that between us), give it to my personal assistant when she gets out of rehab, and have her buy thousands of these sons of bitches, ten at a time. I don’t need Oprah’s Book Club; I’ll spend myself into the goddamn poorhouse, buying my own books by the truckload, and then get me one of them government bailouts! See what I’m saying? Those rookies at Goldman Sachs will come to me and ask how to work this free market ba-ziz-ness up in here!

I do hope you like it, though—yes, you, who are reading my words at this moment, this very moment, the only one we really have. Okay, there’s this moment, too, but you know what I mean. Think of this book as a big, fun, shiny fridge that you can open at three in the morning when your pill wears off and you realize your nightmare was more fun than your real life and you’re looking for something tasty to read. Open this book and the light will come on, and you can just stare into it, like a clueless zombie who doesn’t give a damn about low fat or fiber or cholesterol or corn syrup or blood pressure or any of that other crap the science nerds try to scare us into caring about—then you can just start grabbing at things, unwrapping them, smelling them, trying some of this or that. Don’t think of the slabs and slices and chunks of words as chapters that unfold in a logical manner or reveal some artfully woven plotline or ironclad womanifesto. Logical shmogical! Think of it more like Hey, this chocolate-covered strawberry really tastes good with a mouthful of bean-and-cheese burrito! Now, where’s the rest of that pumpkin pie? (I just made myself hungry.)

Anyway, thanks for buying my book, my friend! Eat hearty, and we’ll start our walking program next week—next week for sure. Till then: Bon appétit!

IRONY ALERT: Upon reading any and all parts of this book that deal in matters religious and political or any other areas that have traditionally caused humor-challenged people with arguably traditional values to burn bigmouthed women at the stake, please be aware that I reserve the right as a comic, a satirist, and a citizen of the nation that proudly proclaims itself the freest on earth to say things that should probably not be taken literally enough to make a nut job like you (you know who you are) feel justified in attacking me. Just as I discourage you from menacing or inflicting bodily harm on your spouse, your kids, your pets, your neighbors, or complete strangers who don’t look, act, think, dress, or believe exactly as you do, I urge you to keep an open mind and a sense of humor in reading this book.

I extend this invitation to the journalists and the media, too, as you guys always seem to take my jokes and report them as if they are serious news. Of course, I know that you cannot tell the difference, and I admit that I like to fuck with you all the time. But the last straw was when I was out with Michael Moore for his Slacker Uprising tour of colleges, and I used this joke onstage: I voted for George Bush because he is way more ‘educationably orientated’ than that Kerry guy—despite the fact that I got a huge laugh, the local Cleveland paper reported that I said: George Bush is more education oriented than is John Kerry. I fumed at this act of satanic brilliance and deceit—enough is enough. You can fuck with me, but don’t fuck with my jokes, you bastards!

Yours, for a free and peaceful world for

all living things to keep living in,             

Roseanne Cherrie Barr                        

Postintroduction

What the Hell . . . Let’s Go!

Writing another book is like having another baby, they told me, except with a baby you get screwed only at the front end of the deal. I wanted to write this book for a few reasons, and one is that I still have a story worth telling. Part of it has already been told, but the saga continues, as they like to say in comic books and zillion-dollar movies about adventurers and sorcerers and tales that challenge the imagination. The part that lots of folks who know me, or know of me, have probably heard starts with a fat, little Jewish girl growing up in Mormon Utah with chronically broke, disappointed parents who warned their daughter that if she didn’t cut down on the calories and the wiseass comments, she would end up a poor, fat, lonely, bitter old spinster. Man, am I glad they were wrong about the poor part!

Anyway, long story short, I’m guessing that if you’re reading this right now, it’s probably because of Roseanne, the TV show about the fat, sassy little girl who had become a fat, sassy woman with a husband and kids, all of whom found themselves in a family that doesn’t quite get how brilliant they are. It’s like the horse that’s pulled the cart of everything that’s come after it. I shouldn’t brag, because it’s been awhile since the show that made me famous aired on prime-time television; but it’s funny how the more time passes, the more Roseanne is proving to have been ahead of its time. Whether addressing working-class issues, gender equality, or changing family models, we took a pretty hard look at an America that was in need of a pretty hard look. It’s been more than a decade since we stopped making the show, which still airs all over the place in syndication, and we’re still grappling with the same issues that were brought to light back then.

I often open my stand-up act by telling the audience that I know what they’re thinking (because I’m psychic): "Roseanne, what has a has-been of your magnitude been up to recently?" Obviously, I’m able to take a joke, but really, I’m grateful that there’s always been a pretty steady stream of opportunities for me to dive into in showbiz. TV people, who figure lightning can strike again, still pitch me ideas; I’ve gone around the world with my stand-up act; the phone rings and the emails pile up—but something keeps me from jumping into any real big projects with both feet. And it’s not just because I’m busy raising my awesome but (I hope, temporarily) surly teenage son.

I have found that after all is said and done, having my say and doing it for free is my therapy for poststardom soul retrieval. Losing your soul is the cost of fame and fortune, I found. It will become severely compromised when you realize that you must remain silent about the worst things on earth. You will need drugs, alcohol, sex scandal, and incessant shopping to help you stay above the fray so that your conscience doesn’t bother you anymore. After buying everything on earth that one can buy, visiting exotic places, and meeting princes and idols, all I found myself wanting was to be able to say exactly what I wanted to say when I wanted to say it. There are, sadly, almost no women, famous or infamous, who can afford to do this, or who have the education, brains, or courage to do this, either—and there never have been. Which brings me to my website, Roseanneworld.com, and the blogging habit that inspired me to write another book.

I was the very first celebrity blogger, and I remain the only one to this day who advocates the return of the splendid guillotine for class criminals and pedophile priests. My blogging has gotten me into some uncomfortable positions on occasion, but it’s the place where I go to unload, upload, and fire back at the shitstorm of absurdity and horror that the media unloads on me, and the rest of us, every day. I shoot from the hip and bitch about people, places, and things; I pontificate and react and panic; I praise and criticize and encourage people, and sometimes fight with them; I turn them on to worthy organizations and causes, and talk about the things I think are the most important issues in our lives. Some days I go on at length about all kinds of strange, esoteric, metaphysical musings, and sometimes everything I write sounds like New Age jibber-jabber. I’ve expressed myself, reversed myself, defended myself, made people laugh, made people think, pissed people off, engaged in feuds, made new friends, made peace, given advice, asked for advice, and some of what I write is just pure Roseannearchy; channeled from Goddesses on High.

I’ve asked the world to cut the bullshit. The world can be a better place in a hurry. I don’t have forever, and sometimes it really pisses me off!

I have spent the majority of my life researching information about solutions to the world’s problems. I got interested in doing this at a young age, when I first discovered that I had an Imaginary Friend with whom I could spend most of my time discussing how to fix such a cruel and crazy world as this one. My Imaginary Friend was God. (Now I know that She was actually an Inner Self-Helper—something all dissociatives possess.)

She was always available to discuss my thoughts and fears, and later, when I could finally read (at about six years of age), She led me to find a lot of answers in old books found in my grandmother’s bookcase, at school, and downtown at the Salt Lake City Public Library, which became my home away from home once I got a library card. I grew up in a city that actually prized knowledge and education and books, despite being so fundamentalist Mormon.

I sometimes wondered if I was from a special tribe, the Tribe of Librarians or Book Lovers. My passion for books and for reading took up the first twenty years of my life. I read an average of five books a week, and most of them were about what people wrote on the subject of God, which I would then discuss with my Imaginary Friend. Sometimes I would test Her, just to see if She actually existed or if She was merely a figment of my imagination. I would open my mind wide, and ask Her a question; and each and every time, without exception, I found that merely opening a book, any book, to any page, would provide an answer of some kind to those questions I asked of Her.

Currently, I own my own library of sorts. I have collected more than twenty-five hundred books. They are mostly about God, written by people with varying points of view from every corner of the world. Most of the books call Her a He, but I am able to ascertain what is meant, despite that semantic error. God is a She, and here is my proof of that fact: I was made in Her image, which I found in the mirror where I went as a child to speak with Her. She was Me, and yet I was not Her—that blew my mind, and continues to do so. I’m a mystic, and find myself excited at the theory of physics that says the universe itself functions as a sort of mirror of consciousness. Of course, this does not surprise me at all, as I have always known that to be true.

If a Roseannethropologist comes along someday, and figures out how and where I was shaped by the odd world I found myself in, and how I did some shaping of that world myself, she’ll have plenty of ground to uncover. Your Domestic Goddess grew up in Utah during the ‘50s and ‘60s. It was such a fun-house mirror of sorts, where I saw the Truth completely reversed by women. I heard them talk constantly about how weak men were, how disloyal, cruel, misogynistic, and devoid of empathy. Yet they also talked constantly about how, if the apelike human male were molded correctly by them, could become more female, and therefore more human, then they, the women in my childhood sphere, could then rest well, assured that their Frankenstein monster would dutifully support them in the manner in which they wished to live.

As they attempted to remake all the males in the family, their oldest daughters were deemed to be their indentured servants and often the targets of their rage. They would never miss an opportunity to instruct me on how I needed to be groomed and dumbed down enough to get a husband of my own someday to mold into a guilt-controlled provider of my own. It was a perverted patriarchal world that I grew up in, and one that I wanted and needed to be free of.

How I did that—and keep doing it—is my story.

Preface

Right Is Wrong, and We Need to Straighten It Out

Does this sound familiar: Where does some old show-business spoiled brat get off blabbing her opinions about politics and economics and religion and the way the world should work? I’d like to telepathically air-smack people who say that, right in their cake hole! To anybody who asks me who I think I am to tell political bigwigs, captains of industry, and religious honchos where to get off, I answer: Who do I have to be? I am the Domestic Goddess, you impertinent creature, you!

Please listen to me, and listen to me good. I’m also your sister, your granny, your friend with the big mouth and the heart of gold; for some of you, I’m even your favorite TV mom. I’m someone who came out of nowhere, and had to cut through a jungle of old-growth bullshit, using nothing but my mouth for a machete. How many Vegas oddsmakers would have given a fat girl from Utah with a chip on her shoulder a chance of becoming one of the most famous women on the planet for a time? It happened because I was preaching a message that flew in the face of the proper, politically correct behavior that reigned before I flung the door open and came out swinging.

I dropped out of school, got a real education, took myself to the prom, peed in the punch bowl, and got rich doing it. And believe me, they don’t give big dough away—but they will pay if they’re sure you have something people want. And what did people want then that they still want now? They want a plainspoken message from somebody they figure is on their side, somebody who cuts people who think they’re better than the rest of us down to size.

The key phrase there is: on their side. There are more than a few blowhards raking in huge money, who are good at acting like they’re one of you, standing up to those in power. A recent example is the Sarah Palin phenomenon. Note to Sarah Palin: Telling a bunch of powerful men and their brainwashed lemming lackeys what they want to hear but doing it in a spunky, folksy manner does not make you a maverick! I got especially turned off when I saw some footage of Sarah P. in church, where along with some mundane, provincial happy talk about how super it was to be this congregation’s particular brand of Christian, she gave a rodeo-style shout-out to her son, who was shipping off to Iraq with his unit. It was so cheerleader! I mean, seriously, it was like he was going up the road to play the rival high school in football. And this was from the pulpit at church! It really demonstrates the truth that politics and religion in the United States work like the twin grips of a pair of pliers on a critical mass of the masses.

I have a feeling that before Dick Cheney and Cowboy George decided that the poor Iraqis hated our freedom so much that we had to go kill a bunch of them, Sarah P. couldn’t have found wherever her heavily armed son was headed on a map, even with both hands. But enough about Sarah, our geopolitically challenged, national pom-pom girl, who walked off the job she ran for and was elected to complete. I’m ticked off at Oprah for giving her so much attention as it is. Let’s move on to the bigmouthed men who are so good at spreading their fake populist BS that shouldn’t fool anybody, but does.

Now, before any of you Rust Limburg or Sean Cassity disciples and dittoheads tune me out or accuse me of blasphemy, you really owe it to yourself to give it all another look. Everybody knows that we took a wrong turn in this country awhile back, and we can argue for another twenty years about who and what was behind it. But damned if most working people don’t agree that something happened that didn’t lead us in the right direction—it did, however, lead us in the right direction (in the political sense).

Regardless of your politics, if you’re a fair-minded person, at least hear me out. If there’s anybody who loves their country and the American people, it’s me! Why wouldn’t I? I was able to scrape my way up from under the bottom of the barrel to the top of the heap, and I was able to do it by speaking my mind. I got more attention, love, respect, and opportunities to keep speaking my mind than a broke-ass, little fat girl from Utah had a right to even dream of having—not to mention a boatload of money and the good things in life that all of that brings. But I’m still speaking out and I’m doing it for the same people I always did it for: the ones like me, who felt shut out or different or looked down on or ignored or all of the above.

For working people, average Americans, the hundreds of millions of people who feel like lots of things are passing them by, can we at least agree that life’s getting harder instead of easier? People are getting screwed! There are places in this country where one family in three is upside down in their homes. They have to pay way more for things than they are worth, and the pile they owe isn’t getting smaller, because they’re mostly paying interest on their debt. That is damn near slavery!

There was a time when the expression Home Sweet Home embodied an ideal we could all aspire to and attain with hard work and careful planning. Owning your own home and the ground it sat on was a cornerstone of the American Dream. Home was where you put your feet up after a day’s work, raised your kids, found comfort and safety. There’s no place like home wasn’t just a line from The Wizard of Oz; it was a mantra we believed in wholeheartedly. But when did a home become like a chip in a casino? Where did we make a wrong turn?

Remember the movie Wall Street? Michael Douglas played a lizard of a finance big shot named Gordon Gekko—pretty subtle, eh? He was one of the Wall Street elite, a tycoon who loved to say things like Greed is good. Art imitates life, though, and all that stuff about trickle-down economics had been running through the national dialogue for a while (my friend Susan Bublitz, a funny comic, said it meant the rich piss on the poor), along with all the rest of that jazz that rich guys used to love Ronald Reagan for saying. They didn’t call Reagan the Great Communicator for nothing. Personally, I think they called him that because the Great Bullshitter was probably rejected as a nickname by the Carlyle Group or at a meeting of the Bilderberg Group or one of those other cabals consisting of ten or so guys who have more wealth, power, and insider information than anyone else.

Granted, Reagan was a likable sort—relaxed and folksy while oozing a grandfatherly vitality, as he simultaneously helped to reverse and dismantle a half century of hard-won social progress. I won’t bury you under page after page of bad-mouthing Reagan; the major point I’m trying to make here is the importance of distinguishing facts from opinions. (In that spirit, I offer the title of a book that’s a treasury of facts about how Ronald Reagan seldom missed an opportunity to steer resources away from public services and into private pockets: The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America.) The middle class has been shrinking like the dollar, union membership, and our standing in the world (with a few brief spurts of growth) ever since the Reagan era. Given the facts, how can the windbags on the extreme right justify describing the president who slashed public services and even took the solar panels off the roof of the White House as the greatest president in recent history? They’re as entitled to express their opinions as the rest of us—freedom of speech is, after all, one of America’s founding principles. But it’s up to the public to discern fact from opinion and make up its own mind.

Religion—yep, I’m going there—and allowing people of diverse faiths to practice their beliefs without fear of persecution is another defining quality dating back to the birth of our nation. I grew up with religion on steroids—two religions, in fact. Being a nominal Mormon among Mormons, but also, inescapably, a Jew, really affected me. I was in a hyperspiritual environment, where people would regularly insert phrases like The Lord this and God that and The Devil such and such, in the most mundane, casual conversation. It still comes so naturally to me to think and talk in the manner of my childhood. That was some powerful indoctrination. A lot of my attitudes and actions have either been because of those conflicting influences or in rebellion against them. As I get older, I can see where there’s overlap in what used to seem like two totally different religious cultures. One thing I know: Patriarchy runs deep in both systems.

I’m loving the show Big