The Joy of Hate (16 page)

God I hate dialogue. Especially productive dialogue.

But by granting GLAAD an interview, Martin validated their outrage—a pathetic response done solely to protect his career. I don’t think it was a gay slur. But that doesn’t matter. His response, in the face of mounting pressure, made it a gay slur. So what if the joke was about a soccer player, and that player has a great body, which apparently makes him a gay icon? Which doesn’t follow. I mean, I have a great body. Godlike, really. Yet, I’m not a gay icon. Or if I am, nobody told me. I think they’d tell you, right?

Twitter seems to be rough turf these days for jokes, both good and bad. Remember the hysteria over the rise of Jeremy Lin, the undrafted fourth-stringer who scored at least 20 points in each
of his first four games as a starter for the Knicks (this is lacrosse, right?). During that run, a sports columnist, Jason Whitlock, got a little too excited, tried too hard to be funny, tweeting this unfortunate but mildly humorous tweet:

The joke, for those who don’t follow, is a play on a stereotype that Asians have, on average, smaller penises than other ethnicities. Not surprisingly, this tweet set off the Asian American Journalists Association president, Doris Truong: “Outrage doesn’t begin to describe the reaction of the Asian American Journalists Association to your unnecessary and demeaning tweet.”

Okay, if outrage doesn’t begin to describe the reaction, I wonder how Truong would feel about something that actually
hurt
someone—like a violent crime. I mean, she’s talking about a stupid tweet, for God’s sake—a tweet that probably never would have been noticed if it hadn’t been for her knee-jerk, over-the-top response.

These are words, people. These are jokes. If that joke had been told at a comedy club, it would have garnered laughs—likely from the Asians in the crowd. That’s the beauty of some racial humor—it’s a test of how much you can take and how little really gets to you. Talk to anyone in the military, on a sports team, or on a police force—this sort of stuff is tame compared to the insults they fling at one another when drunk or sober. The fact that this is deemed beyond outrage shows you how wimpy our culture has become, and how we’ve let the purveyors of repressive tolerance clamp down on the conversation.

But in order to keep your job, you gotta bow to these forces of fragile feelings. And Whitlock did. Following the AAJA cry of outrage, he wrote his own “meh” culpa, asking for a little understanding: “… I then gave in to another part of my personality—my immature, sophomoric, comedic nature. It’s been with me since birth, a gift from my mother and honed as a child listening to my godmother’s Richard Pryor albums. I still want to be a stand-up comedian.”

Yeah, me too. But that dream is about as likely to happen as my dream of being the first transgendered unicorn. And for God’s sake, you think Richard Pryor would’ve apologized for this? It would likely have been the mildest thing he ever said.

But these incidents raise more sad questions about modern America. Are we becoming a nation of wusses if we let a silly tweet get to us? And isn’t this more about the high we get from outrage, and the attention garnered when we cry foul? Could it be that Truong isn’t really as outraged as she claims? Isn’t that the real point—that repressive tolerance and fake outrage now mean every joke is an opportunity for attention, for sympathy, for justification of your organization? Are we really that friggin soft? You think Putin, or the Chinese, have noticed? (Yes.)

But come on, if you really feel outrage over that joke, how are you going to feel about a real issue? If we are to believe you are truly “beyond outrage,” then this makes your real rage entirely meaningless.

And last, who is hurt by all this? Not Lin. Not Asians. Just Whitlock. But I guess that’s the point. In the modern world of phony outrage and repressive intolerance, it’s all about feeling important, and waiting for the next person to screw up so you can do it all over again. We’ve become a nation of scolds,
slavering to rat out whoever we feel is next to step out of line. How long until children start calling a hotline to report their parents for “insensitive remarks” overheard at home? If and when that happens, I’m moving to Alaska, where they don’t have phones.

IF YOU WANT TO SEE WHERE TOLERANCE STOPS
and insanity begins, make fun of a celebrity on Twitter. Within minutes, the open-minded will erupt into outrage—the kind of response you’d expect from a mom watching a stranger slap her kid (which I’ve done on occasion). But of course these idiots don’t even know the star, and the star—usually coked to the gills—wouldn’t care if their fan lived or died. Yet the hopped-up outrage takes full bloom as if you’ve taken a hammer to a basket of kittens. Celebrities, after all, are America’s mythological heroes—divine figures residing on Mount Olympus, behind the Hollywood sign, under the benevolent gaze of the Zeus-like George Clooney and Hera-like Barbra Streisand. And as we all know, you don’t insult your god.

My favorite example of such tertiary outrage happened in August 2011, when Chris Brown, pop singer and chick-beater, tweeted about planking—the faddish practice of lying perfectly still on various surfaces, a pastime that could only catch hold in a very wealthy capitalist society suffused with self-irony (one suspects little planking in, say, Sudan). He wrote, and I paraphrase, that he’d love to be planking a beautiful woman. My friend Andy Levy responded in a tweet, “You spelled punching wrong.”

Now, let me first say: Wow, do I wish I’d written that line.

In an instant Brown had sent his minions—angry and easily excitable fans known as Team Breezy—after Levy. For one solid night they graced Levy’s Twitter feed with condemnations and threats, all spelled as only the current products of America’s school system could manage.

The irony was rich: These were all women defending a man who brutally beat a woman (the hot pop star Rihanna, who has a crush on me, which is getting embarrassing) and sent her to the hospital.

The next night, after craploads of vicious tweets, Levy fashioned a delightful false apology, which he read on our late-night show, further inflaming the masses—by merely pointing out the fact that they were more upset about a joke than about violence against women.

The result? Death threats—the glorious Internet phenomenon of misguided, disproportioned outrage. The bulk of these dames were sad women, sitting at home tweeting support for a creep who doesn’t give a damn about them.

Why the fake rage? Because it felt good. It felt good to get angry, and it felt good to target that anger at some late-night “Jew.” Yep, you knew that would come up. Levy’s a Jew, which wasn’t lost on the outraged. What would they have done if they saw him on the street? Because manufactured outrage usually lives, then dies, on the Web—probably nothing.

But you never know.

And wishing death isn’t limited to groupies—even stars get into the act. Take Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong, a big star and a little person—in every sense—who, in front of thousands of fans at a concert in Lima, screamed that he couldn’t wait for Steve Jobs to die of “fucking cancer.” There was a video of it up on YouTube, but it’s since been removed. A year after saying that, Armstrong
got his wish, and Jobs died of cancer at the age of fifty-six. There wasn’t a lot of press coverage on what this whiny troll spewed. There’s a reason for that. It’s A-OK.

First, let’s point out that Green Day is an especially left-wing band, which condemns evil corporations and the mindless automatons who work for them. So they’re okay. They reflect the Occupy Wall Street mentality that anything that makes a profit while wearing a tie (as opposed to a nose ring) must be evil. But how funny is it that Warner Bros. has removed the video from YouTube, in order to protect their product (because that’s what you are, Armstrong: a product). At this point, Armstrong should thank his lucky tattoos he isn’t eking out a living at the Shoe Tree.

And last time I checked, you can buy Green Day albums on iTunes, the brainchild of the man he wished dead. The bigger point: in the current climate of repressive tolerance, you can wish people dead—if they are the right people to wish dead and you’re the right person doing the wishing.

When Heath Ledger died, Bill Maher’s thoughtful comment was wishing that it had been Rush Limbaugh instead. He did this on his show,
Real Time
, and it bummed me out that no one on the panel actually said anything remotely critical of it. I’d like to think, if I had been there, I would have smacked him in his marsupial-like face. But I was told, as a child, never to fight people with marsupial-like faces. The saliva is infectious.

The fact is, when someone on the right says something that stupid, he or she will meet universal criticism. From both sides. When a comedian on my show remarked that he wanted a low-rent bimbo celebrity placed on Obama’s terrorist kill list, I told him that was wrong. It’s ugly and stupid—and risky. There are too many crazies out there convinced TV hosts are sending them telepathic instructions. For the record, I’ve only ever beamed one
directive: to go out and buy this book. (Glad to see you’re paying attention. Stay tuned for further instructions concerning back rubs.) If you’re going to be intolerant of that kind of thing when it’s said about people you like, you gotta do the same for those you don’t.

The left isn’t so consistent. You can wish death or ill will on anyone from George Bush to Sarah Palin, and you’ll probably get a grin from every liberal blogger, comic, and talking head. But say anything like that about a precious liberal icon and you will be run out of town. See Hank Williams, Jr., who compared Obama to Hitler. ESPN promptly dropped him from the intro of
Monday Night Football
, a decision I get—they’re a private company, and if they want to fire someone who might harm their brand, they have every right to do it. It’s not a freedom-of-speech issue: Williams has every right to say whatever he wants. He won’t get arrested for it. But he certainly can get fired for it. Funny, though, how ESPN reacts differently when the targets aren’t liberal. When Mike Tyson made those lewd comments about Sarah Palin on ESPN, the hosts laughed uproariously. Maybe they were laughing at Mike’s facial tattoo, which I’m not sure he realizes is there. And when Kenny Mayne tweeted about how he almost rammed a car because it had a Palin bumper sticker on it, the media response was translated as “we feel the same way.”

Wishing death on anyone is, in my risky opinion, sucky (unless they screw up your drink order). Especially since you’ll get that wish, at some point. But what if you make a list of people you want to kill, some on the list being Americans—and you actually mean to kill those people? And then you actually
do
kill those people? The media response would be in unison: Impeach Bush! But what if it wasn’t Bush who made that list? What if it was Obama? Well, the universal disgust is strangely muted. Aside from a very few
consistent minds, you didn’t hear much from the left about the Obama kill list, which led to the welcomed drone-death of Anwar al-Awlaki. Tolerance for the murder of American citizens seems unimaginable under Bush, but totally acceptable for Obama.

That’s the beauty of Obama—he is impervious to accusations of brutality because he was the choice of the tolerati. Which allows him to kill at will (and avoid interrogating live people). The man has killed craploads of crappy people. He got Osama, and countless scumbags who work for him. It’s something I love about Obama, and it’s why I love anyone who helped him in the effort to crush these cockroaches—which includes Bush. (But not Eric Holder, who’s been too busy giving free guns to the Mexicans. No wonder we have a trade deficit!)

And this illustrates an interesting phenomenon about liberalism: Sometimes liberals can be just as deadly as the most warlike hawk and get away with it—because they’re liberal. If you’re the most progressive president we’ve ever seen, the tolerant masses will tolerate you pulling shit off they’d never let Bushcheneyhitler get away with. It’s a brilliant bit of sleight of hand, perfected in Hollywood by the likes of Maher and those twin sweathogs the Weinstein brothers, who may be the most unlikely lotharios since Chang and Eng.

I’m not knocking Obama. I’m absolutely for the kill list, and for wishing these people dead (I’d even add a few names to it, like Ahmadinejad and my editor). But I’d be for it if it was Bush doing the same thing. That makes me different from the left. For them, you can vaporize your enemies as long as you give us a little soaring rhetoric and a heartfelt autobiography or three. It’s a simple trade-off. I guess it’s a good thing Obama doesn’t write poetry. He might bomb Cuba.

WHEN FINANCE IS TRUMPED BY FEELINGS
, we are all screwed. According to some recent statistics, home ownership has had its biggest drop since the Great Depression, down to 65.1 percent. Forty-one states declined in home ownership since 2000, and it’s worse for blacks: home ownership fell to 44.3 percent. Whites are now 1.63 times more likely to own a home than blacks. (That’s it for my statistics. They were never my strong point. I actually fell asleep while pulling those numbers off a blog.)

How did that happen? How did we get to this horrible place, where tracts of homes lie vacant, overgrown with weeds, populated by bugs and mice—and in some areas of Florida, alligators and senior citizens?

Well, obviously the financial crisis, triggered largely by the massive housing bubble bursting, didn’t help. Sure, there’s high unemployment too, but how did so many people suddenly default on so many loans?

Because they shouldn’t have received them to begin with.

People blame the banks and Wall Street for bundling high-risk loans and selling them like poisoned pancakes, but those loans had to be approved for a reason. And the reason, was … wait for it
 … tolerance!

Right now Fannie May and Freddie Mac have all but stopped
encouraging loans to high-risk individuals. This is all but an admission that their earlier practices were what caused this mess. It’s like when I stop ordering takeout from the same place after three solid days of diarrhea. I see the link and make the correction.