ATOMIC DOG: Rude Bastards
by TC

China is freaking out. The Olympics are coming, and that means the world is coming.

Oh, they're well on their way to finishing the venues and they've stocked up on Mu Shu pork, but the government is worried because China's citizens, by and large, are rude bastards.

Don't get me wrong, most are extremely cordial, particularly in social one-on-one settings, but things get a little rockier once you stray from the gilded palaces and go into the hinterlands.

The vast majority of Chinese think nothing of taking cuts in line. The world is their spittoon. Most disturbing to Westerners is that "holding it" is largely an unknown concept to Chinese men of all ages. If you've ever traveled to China as a tourist, you were probably hard-pressed not to take a photo that didn't include some old guy in the background who happened to be taking a leisurely dump next to The Great Wall while puffing on a cigarette.

It makes me want to write the Photo Shop people and suggest a feature where by clicking on an icon of a Chinese guy crapping, you can instantly replace the offending image with a flowering pistachio tree.

Oh, and Chinese babies? They don't wear diapers. Instead, they wear these little crotchless pants — kai dang ku — and when they go, the mother or father just holds the little pissant out at arm's length like it was a leaky milk carton while it waters or poops the sidewalk.

Your travel agent didn't tell you about all that, did she?

Bitch.

So the Chinese Government, in addition to spritzing up the place, is also trying to bring a little Emily Post to its citizens so that visitors will have a better impression of China.

I really don't know what they're worried about. By the sounds of it, American visitors should feel right at home...well, except for the minefields of poop, that is.

You don't need me to tell you what a nation of boors and bastards we've become. Guys like me — probably guys like you — have to be careful when we go out lest we run into some of these rude bastards and lose our temper.

Personally, I haven't been to a nighttime showing of a movie for almost 2 years. I go during the daytime, say on a Tuesday, when there's no one in the audience but a couple of depressed old guys and maybe the occasional hooker who's too coked up to get any shuteye.

That way, I can be sure no one puts their stink-bomb Skechers on the back of my chair, mere inches from my nose. That way, I can be sure to avoid some John Facenda, NFL Voice of God wanna-be doing a scene-by-scene narration for his apparently brain damaged friend:

"Pedro is telling Napoleon that he shaved his head because it was hot. He took a bath, you see, but that didn't help so he shaved all the hair off."

Thanks. I hadn't caught the nuance of the scene.

By going to a daytime showing, I can avoid blowing an aneurysm; I can avoid being arrested for assault.

I don't even go to ballgames much anymore because most of the people there are too stupid to realize that every time they stand up — almost always in the middle of a pitch — to get yet another order of cheese nachos, they obstruct my view and the view of about a hundred people behind me. By the time the seventh inning stretch rolls around, I've usually missed 6 home runs, three triple plays, and a suicide squeeze bunt and I'm so red-hot apoplectic that my Arizona Diamondbacks face paint is running down my face in purple and teal globs.

I flew to San Francisco a couple of weekends ago and I bit the bullet and bought a First Class ticket so I could avoid some of the usual coach rudeness: the seatback jammed into my knees, the jockeying for the arm rest, and the spastic kid who's so happy to be temporarily free from his tether and padded helmet that he's chosen to channel all his joy into repeatedly kicking the back of my seat.

But noooo, the louts are in First Class, too. Some guy in parachute pants brings his wife and kid on the plane and junior spends the bulk of the trip running up and down the aisle playing Whack-a-Mole with the elbows and knees of everyone sitting on the aisle while his oblivious father reads People Magazine

Luckily, I've got a window seat or there would have been Air Marshals restraining me from ripping off his dad's pants, tying them to the kid and screaming, "LET'S SEE IF PARACHUTE PANTS ARE NAMED PARACHUTE PANTS BECAUSE THEY DOUBLE AS A PARACHUTE! FLY LITTLE PARCHUTE-PANTS BOY, FLY!!!!" while trying to pry open the airplane door.

It's all around me. There's the moron taking a cell phone call right in the middle of a funeral — the dead guy's family no doubt appreciative that the ring-tone version of Love in an Elevator makes a fine musical accompaniment to the eulogy.

And there's the mutt in the crowded restaurant who recognizes the people sitting at the table next to me. He wrestles his way through the crowd and squeezes between my table and his friends' table and stands there so his overflowing ass is in my face, not just through my spinach and pear salad, but all the way through my free-range chicken in raspberry sauce.

Hey buddy, if your ass doesn't look like the one below, I don't want it in my face, okay?

And as long as we're on the subject of asses, what's with guys who don't flush toilets in public restrooms? I can't remember the last time I walked into a stall and wasn't greeted by one of Mr. Hanky's relatives. Is this some sort of territorial thing? Some pathetic stab at immortality, your way of saying "I was here"?

The only humans who've reached some sort of true immortality are Richard Nixon and the Apollo 11 astronauts, whose signatures are on a plaque that was left on the moon. Leaving a pile of doodie floating in a toilet bowl is hardly the same thing.

The Internet is almost worse than real life. While telling someone to "fuck off" takes effort in real life — you have to put your pants on and leave the house and raise your middle finger — telling someone to fuck off on the Internet is oh-so easy. According to the mods on the T-Nation site, fuck off is apparently the most popular message, right up there with "I'd hit it!" but hardly as congenial.

The mods don't generally delete these poetic missives when there's some content to the post, but they'll sometimes edit them, particularly if the fuck yous are in such great number they're about to bring down the collective IQ of the forum.

That's usually when the offended creative writer — the author — sends me a personal fuck off message, along with the threat that he's going to spend his remaining days visiting every Internet forum on the planet and exposing T-Nation as the lying, cheatin', editin' bastards that we are.

For some reason, most of the rude bastards also have gym memberships. Of course, the gym is just a microcosm of the real world and it's natural that rudeness would feel just as homey there.

The list of rude acts is long: the weights that weren't put away; bumping into you while you're in the middle of some movement where balance and concentration is crucial; breaking wind right next to you and then doing a quick vamoose so that the cute girl doing dumbbell curls thinks you did it; personal trainers shouting out the rep count for his or her numerically challenged fat-ass client while you're quietly trying to count your own reps; insensitive bastards drilling eyeball holes at the ass of every cute girls who's bold enough to do leg curls...wait a minute, that last one's me. Ah, what the hell, nobody's perfect.

And I'm not just sensitive to rudeness directed at me. I get mad when I see people being rude to other people, like waitresses or clerks. Hey, you think that you're somehow higher on the evolutionary scale than that store clerk? Einstein was a clerk. Madonna worked at an ice cream parlor.

Madonna! She of the beauty's where you find it, not just where you bump and grind it! You wanna' be rude to the next Madonna, for crissake? Do ya'? Huh? Do ya'?

Well, maybe you do, but you get the idea.

I'm a cordial bastard. I open doors for people. I say thank you and I say hello, but when I don't get a response in kind, I get pissed. I feel like grabbing the offender by the lapels and screaming, "Don't you know I'm the guy who would help you if you were being mugged in a dark alley? But now, since you didn't say hello, I'll hear your pathetic screams, rush into the alley, notice it's you and say, 'Oh, excuse me, carry on,' to the mugger."

But I don't grab his lapels. Instead I eat my anger and grow a big honkin' tumor.

Maybe people got boorish and rude from watching shows like Beavis and Butthead and South Park and Hurl. Maybe they don't get that breaching behavioral norms in this way is funny on TV, but it's not all that funny in real life.

Maybe we're all suffering from an entitlement disorder. If we didn't get served right away, if the raspberry scones were gone and all that were left were cranberry, if traffic didn't clear out of our way, if the very heavens didn't break open and shower gold coins on our head, then by God it's a clear case of our civil rights being trampled on and so we are going...to...get...very...angry! Angry and rude.

Go ahead, be rude, but I'm not going to save your sorry ass from being mugged, and no woman who doesn't have a self-esteem problem is going to bed you.

David Kupfer, a Falls Church, Virginia clinical psychologist says this about the rude bastards:

"There's a failure to understand their own importance on the planet."

Amen.

Society often equates being a high Testosterone guy with being a lout who cares about no one other than himself. Maybe that's true a lot of the time, but I wish it were different. I know it's a pipe dream, but I'd love to see everyone, not just high T guys, adopt some of the notions of chivalry.

Keep in mind that I'm not talking about etiquette; you know, that stuff about what fork to eat your salad with or how to gracefully dispose of gristle at the dinner table. I'm talking about the medieval institution of knighthood where the knight was taught to be merciful, humble, and courteous...except when someone didn't deserve it, at which point he'd swing a mace at the ingrate's skull pan.

Yeah, Testosterone Knights. I like it.

So turn your car stereo down, dumb ass. You aren't cool. You're Nigel from Spinal Tap, looking for a knob that goes to eleven instead of ten.

Fuck your leaf blower that you pull out at 7AM. Toss it in the trash. Besides, it's a little known fact that there hasn't been any new trash produced in this country since 1963; we just keep blowing the same shit back and forth from coast to coast.

Don't cut me off in traffic unless you're rushing to the hospital because a loved one just got his arm lopped off in a tractor accident. You know what would happen to you if we were walking on the sidewalk and you suddenly leaped in front of me, forcing me to slow down? That's right, a foot up the ass. Just because you've got a shell of metal around you is no excuse; it just means you're cowardly.

Turn your cell phone off. We don't care if your stockbroker is trying to get a hold of you because Amalgamated Panty Shields just went up half a point. We're going to dinner to enjoy ourselves, not to listen to your drivel.

Just think about someone else for once.

I could go on for pages. So could you.

I'm telling you, being polite is bad ass. Being polite keeps your food from being spit into. Being polite gets you favors. Being polite would allow me to go to a ballgame again. Being polite gets you laid, despite what you hear about bad boys getting all the chicks. Bad boys might get laid once, but polite boys — chivalrous boys — get invited back again, especially if they say, "Thank you for that fine piece of ass, miss."

(And if she's equally courteous, she'll respond, "You are welcome, fine sir. Prithee come into my chamber and partake of my fine ass again.")

See? All good stuff.

Thank you for reading this.

The original version of this article was posted in 2005.

© 1998 — 2008 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.