The Joy of Hate (14 page)

Or rather
their
local supermarket. The British looters apparently are so angry, they took it out on the only useful people in their communities, whom they called “rich”—which translates there as “anyone with more than me.” Yep, tolerance is a belief that doesn’t protect anyone who worked hard for their money. This is why President Obama’s “pay your fair share” rhetoric, in the end, was nothing more than stoking the fear of that kind of envy. If you don’t agree that the makers should give more to the takers, then the takers might come get you. Commerce is now extortion.

I lived in London (for three years, most of it fat and buzzed), and the cops were great. But without guns, what good are they, besides helping drunks like me back to the tube station before I peed myself? (Which is a vital public service that New York needs to institute.)

But couple that with idiots equating looters to victims and it’s no wonder riots continue unabated purely for lurid fun.

Looking at England, we see we’ve hit the edge of civilization—where, left unprotected, a city will burn, because there is no one impolite enough to prevent it. Letting it happen seems to be all we have left. So we watch it on TV and hope the mob passes us by.

But before I collapse into an existential heap, I want to poop all over this idea that the violence is linked to budget cuts. During the chaos, so many “experts” painted a grim picture of a forgotten generation left without hopes or dreams. Talking heads and scribes mentioned the root causes of the rioters’ rage (the killing of a young man by the police), conveniently avoiding the sheer ugliness of these “victims’ ” behavior.

Yeah. About these victims. It turns out the perps arrested aren’t as romantically disenfranchised as the progressive politicians would have wanted. Of course, when the movie is made about all this (and it will be), that won’t be the case. The criminals will be gorgeous students with lilting accents, heroic day laborers, poor black DJs—who, fed up with “the man,” take the streets back for one glorious week. There will be drugs, sex, and true love occurring among the flames—as two romantic teens unite in sexual congress while the Sony building goes up in smoke. I can’t wait to see how Justin Timberlake does with his accent!

In that movie, of course, you won’t see the local shopkeepers weeping over the fact that
their neighbors
destroyed their livelihood. You won’t see the sheer greed that drove so many to hurt so many others. You also won’t see how monumentally stupid and vicious these thugs are. All you will see is Sienna Miller handing out looted Cadbury bars to Welsh coal miners. I only hope that when Oliver Stone directs it, Colin Firth gets run over by a lorry.

That’s the movie, but in real life, do you want to know who the
“disenfranchised” really were? Here’s a short list: a millionaire’s daughter, a hairdresser, and a lifeguard.

Yeah, they were all looters, none of whom I’d call a victim of anything other than being an asshole. But my favorite one? An organic chef.

Yep, using pesticides on vegetables is evil, but trashing a restaurant (which is what the chef did) is just “brill” (that’s U.K. slang for something).

But who knows, maybe the eatery he targeted used additives in their lamb sausage appetizers! Maybe that breast of chicken didn’t once belong to a free-range bird who lived its last moments bathed in music by Enya. For that, they must pay.

My second favorite looter? A female ambassador to the Olympics. At least her mom turned her in (probably to get a reality show). But maybe Mom was wrong and her daughter’s looting was for a purpose. Throwing rocks at cops might be great prep for the shot put. Or the next austerity riot.

Remove the false sentimentality and you find no romanticism in the wreckage—only petty selfishness and envy, accelerated by opportunity, greed, and cowardice. And college students who didn’t want to take their midterms. It’s something you’ll see bubbling up again with Occupy Wall Street—justifying riots and assault under the guise of “injustice.” What a pathetic world we live in, when even our criminals are a joke. Still, you know England’s riots are destined for the Oscars and Danny Boyle’s mantelpiece. Which still won’t make up for his horrible 2012 Olympic ceremonies. What was that anyway—
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
for the clinically insane? It must have been, because I loved it.

I HAVE AN IDEA FOR A NEW GAME SHOW
called
Ruin Your Life
. In this competition, contestants try to see who can ruin their life the fastest. It’s kind of like
Survivor
, but in reverse. The winner is defined by how low their career, personal life, and bank account sink in the shortest amount of time. And more important, none of this can be repaired. Your life is over, even if your heart’s still beating.

You’d think right off the bat developing a drug habit would be the way to go. Get addicted to meth, and in a matter of months you look like a living scarecrow, in the back of a car, writing for the Huffington Post.

But there’s a much faster way to ruin your life, to lose your job, your friends, your family, your reputation: say something racist, or perceived as racist.

Let’s take Michael Richards, a well-known comedic actor who enjoyed a long TV career. I remember him from that
Saturday Night Live
rip-off called
Fridays
back in the 1980s (which, for reasons I could never understand, aired on Fridays). But he made his mark as the daffy Cosmo Kramer on
Seinfeld
. He spent years making an idiot of himself and ultimately a fortune. His success didn’t happen overnight, but his downfall did.

All it took was a bizarre outburst on stage, back in November 2006. According to my researcher (his name is Wikipedia), at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood, he dealt with a pair of black hecklers by shouting, “He’s a nigger!” to the audience—surely a comedy first. All of this got captured by cell phones.

And that was it. His career vanished like a Rob Schneider film, replaced with a permanent stain. Despite making public apologies by phone to Jerry Seinfeld on the
Late Show with David Letterman
, his goose wasn’t just cooked. It was cremated.

So what do you do when you can’t dig yourself out of a hole like that? Since one racist incident makes you a racist, surpassing leprosy in achieving total isolation, you’ve only one recourse: “retire.” I.e., scram. Generally to someplace humid and without many televisions. Which is what Richards did, heading off to Cambodia and assorted temples in the search of “spiritual healing” (translation: where Perez Hilton won’t find me). I get why he did it: Whenever you screw up, striving for healing, followed by some courses in raising awareness, tends to get you some gentle applause on
The View
. But once you yell the N-word a handful of times, to be seen by everyone, even that bullshit won’t fly. Especially with a pissed off Whoopi Goldberg sitting next to you.

Richards isn’t the only celebrity to spout racial crap and get nailed for it.

Do you remember Doug “the Greaseman” Tracht? If you never heard of him, it’s a good thing. He was once one of the country’s most successful, unfunny drive-time shock jocks—until, in 1999, he made a joke about Lauryn Hill, who had just received a bunch of Grammy nominations. He played some of her music, then said, “And they wonder why we drag them behind trucks,” a grotesque reference to James Byrd, a black man murdered in 1998 by being bound and dragged behind a truck.

The Greaseman was appropriately canned, then made the expected rounds of apologies. When that didn’t work, he performed penance, working at a soup kitchen. According to his bio on Wikipedia, he enrolled in intensive therapy and counseling. He flogged himself in public. He licked sidewalks clean. When he would finally find work again as a DJ, the station owners would ultimately have to take back the offer, because of public disgust over Tracht’s past. He disappeared into infomercials. But after a few years returned to radio—a changed man, of course.

So why was Tracht’s career ruined, when other shock jocks and talk show hosts weather similar calamities? Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony, Marv Albert have all run into trouble, but they weren’t ruined. That’s because race wasn’t part of the scandal. Opie and Anthony, after all, only insulted the Catholic Church. Generally, that’s fair game. If the Catholics were really smart, they’d install a black transvestite pope. Pope RuPaul.

You’re getting uncomfortable now, right? Thinking, “What the hell is Gutfeld doing defending this racist crap?” You’re waiting for me to defuse this and make my point, right? Here it is: You look at examples like Richards and Tracht and you could reasonably conclude that racism is alive and well in America. You would be reasonably wrong. For I argue that those examples prove that, for the most part, racism—the kind of awful blatant racism you used to read about and see in movies—is fading. And the proof of that is in the aftermath of each incident.

Consider previous acts of racism—back when it was okay to be racist. The victims of racism truly were victims. They missed out on many freedoms we take for granted. Some lost their lives. Others had to play in a backup band for a horrible white singer.

But if you consider the victims in these contemporary cases, they were able to see the perpetrators dutifully and appropriately
vilified. And erased from the public eye. Lauryn Hill probably has no memory of some jackass named the Greaseman. She might have been offended, but she’s way bigger than some sad, unfunny sack of crap spouting bigoted baloney.

Comedian Tom Shillue said it perfectly after our third beer at a local tavern: “The only people hurt by racism these days are the racists.” And thank God for that.

Even actual racists must crawl back under their rocks, knowing that if you express racism you are destroyed, never your target of derision. For this reason, I’m pretty sure there are very lucky kids these days who have no concept of racism, and aren’t even aware of the debates raging all over cable and blogs. Maybe they’d know racism if it were in a video game somehow. Jim Crow for Xbox. But otherwise, they look at all of that and just shrug. Blatant, crappy racism seems like rotary phones or the American auto industry—something people way older than you might remember.

Waiting for me to break the tension? To stop with the uncomfortable “racism-is-in-decline” schtick? Okay, let me let you off the hook. Racism is wrong and evil. So there, I said it.

But I also say this: Racism as a source for outrage exists these days because it’s a marvelous topic for talk shows, and it keeps Al Sharpton feeling relevant. Once Americans realize how outmoded this “racist culture” accusation is, Sharpton is out of work (of course, he can then rely on his vast array of skill sets to make a living).

But what about Janeane Garofalo? Making fun of her is old news, but she makes it so easy. She’s a smart chick who once had a career but has now turned into something angry and shrill. She’s transforming, like a slower version of Jeff Goldblum in
The Fly
. With tattoos, instead of the extra eyes.

I refer to an appearance she made on one of Keith Olbermann’s failed shows that aired sometime in August 2011 (this was before he was fired by Current TV, which you can get if you have the dish—it’s between the Hat Channel and the Sock Channel). When the topic of Herman Cain’s quest for the presidency came up, she offered a theory: that he—a black man—was a plant, created by the Republican Party, to show that the party isn’t full of racists. (If only they were that clever.) Cain was also created purely to paint a rosy picture of the Tea Party. Essentially, she was calling Cain an Uncle Tom. Remember, Cain is a successful black businessman who once captained Godfather’s Pizza. He’s also a rabid conservative, fiercely religious, and prone to speaking his mind, regardless of consequence. His targets are liberals, bloated government, and social programs that undermine individual responsibility. He is charming, outspoken, and in my view, sometimes wrong. But not as wrong as Janeane.

For her wacky conspiracy revealed her own repressive tolerance, which is nothing more than despicable racism: that a black man cannot truly think for himself and come to the conclusion that he’s a conservative. As a lily-white liberal, she knew better about what black men think. We know she has no idea what blacks really believe. Research will show you that blacks are way more conservative than she could ever fathom. And how many more she’s likely created, thanks to her misguided opinions!

And so, as a member of the tolerati who adheres to the tenets of liberal dogma, she can tolerate everything—except ideas that don’t match her assumptions. Thus, a black man must be dehumanized, turned into an automaton programmed by rich white men, perhaps created in a right-wing lab by the evil genius Thomas Sowell.

On one TV show, I defended the poor misguided actress, saying
that she was simply a Method actress, preparing for a role as a “bitter, narrow-minded idiot.” But I was wrong. It wasn’t a role. It was her liberal default mode set by the pernicious program of the politically correct, and an arrested development apparently spent trapped inside a Lisa Loeb song. She could no longer look at a highly successful black man and feel good about it. She had to tear Cain down. She had to ridicule him. She had to sap him of his value. She had to force the man to bow to her beliefs. She would only accept him as a worthy human being, if he agreed to disown his own conscience.

And here you have a really odd contrast. When Barack Obama ran for president, anyone who disagreed with his candidacy was usually labeled a racist. America, after all, is a racist country. Still, he won overwhelmingly—and he could only have won if a lot of white folks voted for him. But now he is president, and the accusations of racism still fly—even more frequently when he hits rocky political waters. Merely pointing out that the economy is getting worse under him—even if you voted for him a few years earlier—made you a bigot. How weird is it that we had another black presidential candidate and there is real racism afoot? Very weird. Emo Philips weird. I mean, Cain was insulted daily by those in the media because he’s a black conservative. Mind you, they didn’t go after him because he was conservative. They vilified him because he was conservative
and
black. He couldn’t possibly, as a black man, have believed in individual freedoms, in working hard, in an entitlement-free culture. He had to be a plant. Worse than a plant. A pod. He had to be a hologram—a fictive black conservative hologram projected from a special lens implanted in Walt Disney’s still-throbbing forehead!