The Joy of Hate (18 page)

Which is essentially what the city did. The city, so far, at that point, had done little more than grouse quietly. And so the defiant protesters, sensing blood in the water, dug in even more, and the much-needed cleanup was delayed, as local business owners took the hit (especially their bathrooms). The hippie sleepover
continued, rife with drugs, bongo-playing, naive late-night blathering, and assaults. Feeling emboldened from their recent victory, they later marched up Seventh Avenue, to protest on a pleasant Saturday in the middle of Times Square.

I watched a video of a young, comely protester explaining why she was there. “Imagine,” she said, “how much better the world would be if there was no money.” Of course, I have no idea how she paid for her education (my guess is, at some point, we will). You think she’ll still be dreaming of a world without money when she’s single and leaning on forty? The first capitalist pig with decent benefits will have her saying “I do” before you can say, “Jane Fonda, meet Ted Turner.”

In the interest of tolerance, the media has no choice but to encourage the myth that all protesters are victims—by overlooking the protesters’ own lily-white affluence, their expensive undergrad and graduate degrees, their trust funds, their iPads, their iPods, and so on.

One must also dismiss or obscure elements of the protest that would sicken 99 percent of Americans. Watching CNN, I caught them describing some crazy protest in Rome, as an expression of solidarity with the stuff going on here in the States. They referred to the unsavory violence (car fires, mainly) as performed by anarchists who had “infiltrated” the protests. But as far as I can tell,
infiltrated
is not an adequate synonym for
organized
. Because if you look at any or all of the protests, many of their mouthpieces call themselves anarchists. And the folks that started the OWS protests—the Canadian outfit Adbusters—are proud anarchists.

It’s not uncommon to find, among the young, an easy condemnation of capitalism and money. When you’re seventeen, saying “Money is the root of all evil,” especially when accompanied by a
hit off a bong—well, it sounds so romantic. It isn’t until you grow up that you find that evil is the root of all evil, and money makes life good. And if you haven’t realized that as an adult, you generally either have made no money or you have too much of it. See George Soros.

This is the laziest and dumbest kind of repressive tolerance: a hatred of corporations and people who work within them. I’ve not done years of research on the idea of a corporation, but I get what it is—and I want to explain it as simply as possible so the next time your tattooed nephew returns from Cornell to lecture you on corporate greed, you can slice and dice him like an egg in a Slap Chop.

The simplest definition of a corporation is that it is a group of people performing an activity that one person cannot do alone. In return for this activity, they get money. The money then goes to the people in the corporation to provide for their families, the largest sum going to those who started the whole damn thing and generally took the most risk at some point.

Now, what’s the difference between a corporation and a protest? They are similar: both are organized activities performed by a group of individuals. And they both make things. One makes a product that enriches your life. The other makes a scene, and a traffic mess.

One makes money. The other makes noise. So yeah, they are the same—except one really sucks.

Is making money bad? Would the world be a better place without money, as the young lass hoped (she was so cute—like a puppy explaining brain surgery). Well, without money, we would have to trade for stuff, a solution some protesters put forth as a replacement for our present system. If I wanted a glass of milk, I suppose
I could offer you my hat. But you don’t need a hat. You need to pay for your daughter’s braces. I could give you my belt for that milk, but then my pants would fall down. And you still wouldn’t be able to pay for your daughter’s braces (plus, you’d be awestruck). If only there were a symbol of worth—a currency, if you will—that someone could use in exchange for product, that he could save and then spend on something he really needs! It would be so much simpler!

For fun, the next time you have a discussion with your anti-capitalist nephew, offer to “buy” his Che Guevara T-shirt. In exchange, offer something he would not find the least bit appealing (this book, for example). Then after a series of nos, finally offer him a hundred dollars. He will take it. He can now buy another Che shirt, an MP3 of the new Tom Morello acoustic set, and perhaps a veggie, gluten-free burrito. Meanwhile, you can go into the yard and burn the shirt in front of him. That’s the only way to make that shirt worth a hundred dollars.

Repressive tolerance isn’t the only problem. We actually put up with protests because we’re an easygoing nation. People reacted to the protesters not with anger but with curiosity. People took pictures. Tourists took pictures of people taking pictures. To them, a protester was like that guy or gal in silver paint who looks like the Statue of Liberty. But with a nose ring. They’re scragglier versions of the Naked Cowboy. People gave them money the same way you’d toss coins to a street juggler. They were emblems of a big city that tourists find quirky and neat. But after ten minutes, visitors from Iowa would get bored by the chanting, or unnerved by the unstable men eyeing their daughters or sons, and depart quickly to buy a 50-pound drum of chocolate at the M & M store.

The media, however, continued to indulge the dippy drama,
including all that whining about college debt. Sorry, they made that choice. By the time you’re twenty, you should know that a degree in Peace Studies is not going to feed the cat. It likely means, at some point, you’ll have to eat the cat (marinate it first—trust me).

So what happens when you indulge a tantrum? The answer is always: more tantrums. In the British riots over the summer, the criminals beating the crap out of people got away with it because lefty scribes identified their actions as part of a greater struggle—against greed, corporatism, capitalism, racism, and royalism. But everyone actually participating knew: the riots weren’t about rage but about looting and maybe some groping.

This isn’t the first time the media has done this. Remember how the Rodney King riots seemed justified—when in reality it was people stealing electronics and burning down strip malls. Through the prism of repressive tolerance, the next step is a paralyzing guilt that permits all kinds of behavior. And it’s behavior directed at those who work hard for a living: shopkeepers, deli owners, small businesses that keep a community alive.

So why do people who work always end up being the bad guy? I mean, it’s the person who never works who’s the jerk. In your own life, there’s always one lazy dope who lives off everyone else. We see this person as a loser. And the person who brings home the bread is, well, the breadwinner. That’s how life works. It’s in our DNA to despise dirtbags who want to get over on the rest of us. It goes all the way back. There was always one caveman who faked an injury, then suddenly jumped up when his buddies returned with the armful of berries. The difference is, he wasn’t a hero because he spent the day lying around doodling in the dirt. He was the moocher. And, quite rightly, he was generally fed to a mastodon.

But out of some sense of liberal guilt, the media, and the entertainment industry, in particular, have reversed the belief. They romanticize the shiftless and demonize the wealthy and industrious. If you look at most movies these days, the villains don’t wear black hats—they carry BlackBerrys. A briefcase in a movie is short for “soulless corporate ghoul.”

Edward Jay Epstein nailed this in a
Wall Street Journal
piece called “The Corporate Exec: Hollywood Demon.” There he listed a number of examples where Hollywood repeatedly casts moneymakers as the bad guys of society. In
Syriana
, the villain was Big Oil. In the remake of
The Manchurian Candidate
, the original Soviet Union villain was replaced by an American company “loosely modeled on the Halliburton Corporation.”

Ahh … evil Halliburton. A shibboleth that could gain you entrance into Arianna Huffington’s blogs or cocktail parties. But if you asked anyone what Halliburton really does, they’d probably tell you it doesn’t matter, because they are evil. (I think they make fish sticks or something.)

Epstein notes that Jonathan Demme, in his DVD commentary that accompanies the
Manchurian
remake, admits to copping out when choosing the villain. He avoided making Saddam Hussein’s forces the bad guys because he didn’t want to “negatively stereotype” Muslims. I’d call Demme an “idiot,” but I don’t want to stereotype “idiots.”

Never mind that this is insulting to Muslims (Demme must assume all Muslims see themselves in Hussein’s henchmen).

Trying to avoid appearing intolerant pretzels you beyond physical possibility. Let me quote Epstein’s piece, about Demme’s film:

Good lord. So in real life we have terrorist acts, which are committed by terrorists. But get this: In Hollywood, that’s idiotic. Yep, perhaps we were all brainwashed into thinking terrorists are Islamic! Remember, in New York, that beautiful September morning, when planes flew into those buildings?
Ha!
That
never
happened. Well, at least the way you saw it. Through collective brainwashing, the entire country was made to believe that it was al Qaeda when in fact Dick Cheney was operating those planes from an underwater volcano sea lab made of human skulls. I’ll bet he had a calico cat in his lap as he did it.

There, I just created, in five minutes, a treatment for Demme’s next film. I expect a producer’s credit, and a cameo as an angry dwarf.

So why are corporations the perfect villain for movies? They don’t complain. If you make a gay villain, GLAAD will write seventy versions of the same nasty letter and then picket your children’s piano recital. Remember
The Sopranos
, and all the guff they got for making mobsters Italian? (What the hell else would they be, Swedish?) Something tells me corporations like Halliburton don’t employ representatives who review scripts with the studios. It’s not that they don’t have better things to do (which they do). They realize no one will listen.

But there’s a root issue here: the evil corporations are really a stand-in for hatred of America. As Calvin Coolidge once said, “The chief business of America is business.” But for Hollywood, we’ve just been too good at it. How dare we devise the best political
and economic system in history! Don’t you know the disparities that creates with Marxist collectives struggling for a neutral carbon footprint?

And, once again, “America” for most of these people is really a stand-in for “Daddy.” Who was successful, made money, and sent me to an expensive liberal arts college.

So what’s the endgame for proponents of repressive tolerance when it comes to OWS? My guess is, unless they were hard-core anarchists of the Adbusters variety, they might not have one. But it does give us the sense of a world where everything is permitted, and no one dares to question the damage caused by those who seek to destroy rather than create.

More to the point: What happens when Mommy and Daddy no longer care if junior shits in his pants?

You get a lot of shit, at least in Los Angeles.

As the weather grew colder, the cops knew it was time to strike—as even the most liberal mayors were starting to regret cozying up to anarchists and drifters. Which is what was happening in Los Angeles, at the start of December 2011, where sanitation officials started hauling away 30 tons of debris from the Occupy L.A. encampment—not including the protesters.

Now, 30 tons is a lot of trash. To give you an idea of the mass of that, I did some calculations. Then I lost them at a bar.

But if all you see is heaps of garbage, then you’re missing two bigger points. The first is an old one: No one cares about things they don’t own. To quote the great Milton Friedman, “When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition.”

Milt was a smart guy, and that one sentence succinctly explains why you would never poop in your driveway, but a protester will.

The second point is less philosophical but more relevant to this book. Why was the trash left, and why did the city have to pick it up? Why weren’t the protesters forced to clean it up?

Because that would have been mean. The L.A. mayor had already expressed allegiance with these fighters of injustice, and he was willing to have the city absorb the cost of cleaning up their messes—rather than risk appearing intolerant of a group of folks the media had already deemed saintly.

Worse, after a monumental mess was made, do you know who the victims are? Yes, still the protesters. According to the
L.A. Times
, in a piece filed on December 3, 2011, despite many of the three hundred protesters being released from jail after only a few days, the writer explains, struggles lie ahead for these aggrieved souls. One of the movement leaders suggested the protesters may actually need therapy. Several protesters claimed that they were forced to urinate in bags while being taken to various jails (funny that this evacuation was probably little different from what they were doing at the camp, but if it was, it was more sanitary than whizzing against tents). Add to the trauma being forced to endure hours wearing plastic handcuffs and you can see why the media believes they are today’s Freedom Riders. My God, even I feel traumatized having to write about their trauma. Perhaps you are now feeling equally traumatized reading my own traumatic words about their trauma. Perhaps I am guilty of creating a trauma daisy chain! Does Obamacare cover post-Occupy stress disorder? This nation is desperately short of occupational therapists!