Homecoming

America's Dad speaks

© 2011 World Affairs Council of Philadelphia used under a Creative Commons license

Thank you. It’s good to be here, in fact it’s good to be anywhere other than the state penitentiary. I want to thank my lawyers and my money. I am not going to lie to you good people. The money was extremely helpful. I mean, they had every kind of prosecutor over there at the Supreme Court, big ones, little ones, you go over there with a sack full of money and BOOMF —

[Evocative sound of a sack of money being emptied onto a hard surface; funny voice:]

“The defense rests!”

But to be serious now, I spent a few years in prison wearing that very unflattering suit — scratchy, too! The kind of scratchy where — [Gestures behind himself] the filaments reach through your underwear and kinda poke at you like little naughty children, you know, they go — [Comical voice] “Nyah hah hah, nyah haha haha! — BOOP, right in your privates, nyah ha ha ha!”

[Somberly] And in the facility I met a lot of men, young men, old men, who had, they had very, very rough lives, I mean all kinds of stories, every kind of hardship and bad families and bad breaks and I just want to say, I understand now why those young men out there on the street wear their pants halfway down their thighs because you see, you don’t get a belt in prison, in prison a belt is a weapon or a way to kill yourself – like that Mexican fellow in Cleveland, you remember, the real sex criminal who had those young girls locked up in his house all those years — somehow they let him have a belt, and it was like, [Funny voice] “OK, buddy, tomorrow you start the rest of your life in prison as a famous sex criminal” [Different, Hispanic funny voice] “Ohhhh no I don’t theeenk so!” [Hanging and strangulation sound] Adios amigo!

But we didn’t have any belts and the fellows in the prison all had their pants hanging down, every last one of them, and I must tell you, if I ever had any inclination, any inclination at all to be gay, the sight of all these male posteriors 24 hours a day, seven days a week — and these are not Chippendale models, either, I mean, you know, I’ve seen some weird-looking dudes in my day, like Old Weird Harold, you remember him, he was 6’-9”, weighed 50 pounds, and we would go to the Boys Club in North Philadelphia to swim in the pool and you have to understand, I had never really seen what my own rear end looked like, I mean I’d get just a glimpse of the side of it in the mirror sometimes and think, oh, that looks okay, I bet the girls like looking at that, and my brother Russell, he kept his underwear on at all times, that was just a permanent condition, so when it was time to change his underwear he’d take off the old ones and put on the new ones almost simultaneously like a magic act — [Gesture, funny noise] ZHOOP! “Thank you, Russell Cosby, appearing thrice nightly, ladies and gentlemen!”

But at the Boys Club locker room before the pool, when Old Weird Harold took down his drawers, I got my first good look at what the backside of a man looked like and [Making a long, funny face] it was so disgusting that my stomach came up through my esophagus and through my throat and turned inside out and made such a horrible sound that Old Weird Harold called the nurse because he thought I was having a seizure!

[Somberly] But I really am glad to be with you again and to have this opportunity to represent my beloved Pennsylvania in the United States Senate. I know a lot has changed in the Republican Party, but I can assure you a lot has changed with me too, and after my experience you know I’ll be a strong voice against cancel culture, because that’s where persecutions such as what I endured begin, and a strong voice for men wrongly accused of these horrible crimes. And I want you to know that I still believe in, and intend to stand for, those old terms, family values and responsible parenthood, and as a black Republican I’ll do everything in my power to get kids to pull up their damn pants.