Aaron McGruder

There is no opposition party. And the party that is in power is falling apart. Doesn’t that kind of mean the country’s falling apart? I don’t wanna be accused of being an alarmist, but if there’s nothing to replace the government with in terms of an opposition party, and you see it all falling down around you, well doesn’t that mean that we’re all kind of screwed? It kind of feels that way to me. And I’m pretty worried about it, to be honest with you.

Perhaps it’s time to start examining countries that have made democracy work while still having some kind of the same relationship in covenant with their population. Perhaps we need to look at the Scandinavian countries, or Canada, or something else, but whatever we have now, I think we just have to acknowledge, ain’t workin.

I went to Havana, and I was like, “Wow, there’s culture everywhere!” That was one thing that I did notice when I went to Cuba was that artists are paid to be artists, and poets are paid to be poets, and musicians are paid to be musicians by the government. The government – and I’m not saying that the Cuban government’s perfect – but the government does place a value on culture.

Meeting Fidel Castro was really cool. It’s cool because it’s Fidel, and it’s a world leader, and there’s so much history behind the man and who he is in this hemisphere. And then at the end of the day, he’s, I think, just like a big mayor. There’s only, like, 11 million people in Cuba. He’s a big mayor.

I think everyone’s kind of just whistling and pretending everything’s OK. At the heart of this is the cover-up, and the misleading the country to war in Iraq. And quite honestly, I don’t think Republicans actually did a particularly good or sophisticated job, but I think everybody wanted to be fooled. I remember being on the Bill Maher show talking about how ridiculous this was before the invasion. And, you know, a lot of people, even Democrats, had been so easily thrown into this fear frenzy that they lost common sense.

If your intentions are already bad, and then you still make giant mistakes, it seems like things just get worse. I get little joy seeing this, because what I don’t see is the public saying, “Wow, those guys are really bad, maybe we should re-evaluate everything.” I don’t see that response with the scandals, I don’t see it with the indictments, I don’t see it after Katrina, I don’t see the public going, “Wow, let’s really re-examine the entire direction this country is going.”

I just feel like the country is guilty. I think we should be deeply ashamed for what we’ve done in Iraq, and we’ve gotta reconcile that, and we’ve gotta find some way to make peace with this, and we can’t do that until we acknowledge what took place, and ultimately, I think that’s the poison that is killing this administration. And I think there’s a lot of people in the country who are guilty of allowing themselves to be duped in a very sloppy, sloppy manner.

Cuba was fantastic, at least just in terms of… Not to romanticize or glorify it, but just seeing a place that had not really been touched by the hand of American capitalism. Because it’s a genuinely different place. A lot of times when you travel, things start to feel the same from place to place to place, because the same people own everything all around the world.

Republicans lost it some time ago. What’s scary is when they lose their sense of good planning. Like dude, you know, if you’re gonna lie, really… It’s a big thing to fake your way into a war. Like, think it through. Do a better job at the lie, if that’s what it’s gonna be. Do a better job – I mean, whatever your goals were in invading Iraq, it couldn’t have been this. This can’t be all part of some master plan. Something went wrong.

We did our best to do a Fox show, frankly, I don’t think the difficulties we had at Fox would be exclusive to Fox. It’s tough to be funny, because there’s so many eyeballs and there’s so much money at stake that I think everything is just kind of over-thought. And it’s tough to be daring and do something different, either with regards to content or even structure.

The biggest thing that I don’t like about L.A. is the sort of 2 a.m. shutdown of everything. It really kind of stagnates the nightlife. It’s very hard to casually have fun in Los Angeles. If you want to go out and have fun it’s like a full-time job, you have to really prepare, and call ahead, and get on a list, and know somebody… It’s really rough to relax here.

I saw Nader shortly before the election and – I voted him the time before, because I liked the sort of long-term strategy of building a viable third party. So, okay, we’ll get enough votes, you get a little bit more money, and maybe, if there’s continued growth, then maybe eventually there’s hope for a viable, legitimate third party. I think the reason why I didn’t vote for him last time was because we tried that and it didn’t work. Ralph Nader is a very smart guy, and I think he’s got a lot of good ideas.

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