The Joy of Hate (19 page)

On one show back in 2012 I said that OWS would likely be a “make or break” moment for Obama, our most tolerant president. How can our man—who totally “got” the movement—now reject calls for revolution?

But then I remember, a few years back, him saying to bank CEOs, “Be careful. My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.”

Well, now it appears like he’s not only gotten out of the way, but through the use of the language of class warfare (constantly repeating “fair share” and ragging on the successful), is acting as their head cheerleader. When you consider what OWS has come to represent: the rapes, the assaults, the attacks on police, the sexually transmitted disease outbreaks, the widespread vandalism, the Cleveland bridge bomb plot—and an attack planned on his own campaign office in Chicago—someone should tell him he backed the wrong team.

FOR SOME REASON, ADULTS CAN ONLY
address two political alternatives. Left and right. Liberal, conservative. Democratic, Republican. Unicorn, gryphon. Colin Quinn aptly pointed out that our American system has only one more option than the USSR had during their brutal days (days gleefully endorsed by the
New York Times
’s Walter Duranty, earning him a Pulitzer and Stalin’s enduring affection—but more on that later). Fact is, that extra option means
everything
—it’s what separates us from Berkeley. But what does it say about us that we let this narrow, binary thinking cloud our ability to discern what’s funny and what’s offensive?

My feeling is, nothing is offensive … until it’s not funny. Then it’s lame. Making a pedophile joke isn’t offensive. But going up to the mother of a victim and telling one is lame. So a hint: Don’t do that. It’s bad form.

But it’s all about what side of the duopoly (a word I stole from
Reason
’s Nick Gillespie, along with his iPhone) you’re on. If you’re a conservative, you will laugh at what Dennis Miller says and scowl when you read a tweet by Alec Baldwin. If you’re a liberal, you’ll scream with fits of laughter over a Bill Maher gibe but then announce, solemnly, as if you’re a comedic historian, “Dennis
Miller just isn’t funny since he found conservatism.” You’ll get pissed off if someone you really like deviates from the assumptions you assume you once shared with them.

There is an in-between area in there, somewhere. It’s a little place I like to call “In-Betweenville.” Righties who think Baldwin is a troubled mind but a great comedic actor (me), and lefties who get the weirdness of the stuff I do (comedians like Pete Dominick and Greg Proops). But In-Betweenville is overwhelmed by the other two sides.

Are both sides equal in the sins of fake outrage, launching darts of repressive intolerance? Or is one guiltier than the other? Yes, I’m leaving In-Betweenville, to criticize the left.

I say this only because the left have been great at churning outrage for a far longer time, and without impediment. In a few years, the right may be just as obnoxious and humorless as the left (I hope not). But for now, the left are the New York Yankees of repressive tolerance and manufactured outrage—the right are the Bad News Bears.

But I need to ask myself: When I get mad, do I get mad because something really bugs me? Or do I just hate the people getting me mad? Because outrage-wise, I’ve been to Barney Frank and MSNBC. But I’ve never been to me.

Let’s once more compare the Tea Party and the Occupiers. I count as friends people involved in both groups. I favor one over the other. I admit to mocking the Occupiers in a simplistic fashion, but the mockery comes from real concerns I have about their methods. I can also admit that the way people ridicule the Tea Party over being old and racist, I label the Occupiers as dirty and naive. No doubt, philosophically, I have more in common with the Tea Party. I’m a small-government kinda guy. And I admire and
love many of these newbies, and it took a lot to get them out of that Barcalounger.

Their adversaries conclude that the Tea Party’s anger is racist in origin. This, in my opinion, is a vicious smear. The origin of their anger is, well, anger! People get “fed up” when they feel cheated, or their future threatened. But calling them racist is what you’d do if you just can’t stand them, period. It’s shorthand for “I don’t need to talk to you.”

For the left and the mainstream media, these people protesting at the health care town halls were idiots. For those on the right, they were legitimately speaking truth to power. For me? I hate confrontation. I hate shouting. I get uncomfortable around this sort of thing. It’s why I can’t go to the DMV. And so I have two cars and no driver’s license. (I’m not kidding.)

But when I saw the liberal media ripping these people, I sensed unfairness. The Tea Partiers are older. And unhip. These were polyester protesters and getting mocked because of that. That’s funny for the first ten minutes, but lazy and boring for the rest.

This kind of ageism (and I hate myself already for using that term) blanketed the criticism against the Tea Party movement. The fact that their events were clean and well behaved made them corny and dorky. What do you expect from people with AARP cards in their wallets and Winnebagos in their driveway?

But these were the “benign” insults. The stuff got way worse as the movements spread across the country. That’s when the accusation of bigotry became as common as a Keith Olbermann meltdown.

Because of this, I aggressively defended the Tea Partiers on my show. I pointed out how little evidence of bad behavior there was. No doubt there are white people who hate Obama, but it’s entirely
possible they just hate what he stands for, not his color. Remember, as the movement kicked off, TEA stood for “taxed enough already.” That’s a coherent, defensible message. What’s wrong with starting there, instead of, you know … racism claims?

I have a lot of friends who are Tea Partiers, so I took the racist thing seriously. It would “offend” me, to the extent that these critics were smearing people I knew. I didn’t like that. One of my closest friends ran two bars in New York. She never engaged in any political activity in her life. She was too busy making a living, providing jobs for blacks, gays, Hispanics, even little people. (On St. Patrick’s Day, she hired a leprechaun. The green tights gave me a rash.) So now that she became part of the Tea Party, she’s racist? If worrying about the future of our country is racist, then we’re all wearing white sheets.

But I also found the charge lazy and dirty. If you call someone racist, you shut down the debate before it ever starts.

A similar thing should happen with the Occupiers. As a protester there, you’d end up spending more time on blogs trying to quell stories of rape, overdoses, and fecal warfare than extolling the movement’s attack on corporate greed. That was their racism equivalent. But the criticism was never as bad for the OWSers. The media rarely focused on their scary stuff. A racist sign at a Tea Party meant so much more than murder at an occupation.

Occupy Wall Street is clearly the antithesis to the Tea Partiers. These people are younger, messier, more disorganized, and well, let’s face it, cuter, if you like the flea-bitten type. If you brought your “people I would have sex with” geiger counter, you might get more beeps in the beginning of the occupation than at the Tea Party events. Well, unless you’re into elegant grannies, which I am. The geiger counter would stop working, however, as the OWS
movement went on and on—and the cuties were replaced with transients, junkies, and worse: whiny beta males.

The parallels are obvious. First, there’s the age. For every old joke aimed at the Tea Party, you could retort with the naivete of the self-absorbed student. With age comes experience. And with aging, come fanny packs. Young people can happily spend thousands of dollars on electronics and clothes, then complain about economic unfairness. Old people know what it’s like when the bill comes. Which is why the young people always seem to have more fun. On the other hand, old folks have forgotten what it’s like to be idealistic, to really believe big changes are possible or even advisable. That’s wisdom.

The easiest jab against the Occupiers is hygiene. The imagery was vivid: disgusting piles of trash, dirty tents, weird homeless men creeping around for prey. And that was just the press pen. If you didn’t see the YouTube video of the dude squatting for a poop in the middle of Occupy Boston, you haven’t lived. (Well, maybe you have, but your life is somewhat impoverished.) But I admit that the movement wasn’t all about soiling yourself and others—and that it’s too easy to dismiss the entire movement over bowel movements. And to their credit, the Occupier phenomenon forced me to read more books about the financial meltdowns. Thanks to all that reading, I now know less than ever, but I sound like I know more.

But we cannot ignore the assaults, rapes, and assorted other criminal acts occurring within these occupations. This was the
real
serious charge against the Occupiers—and the media that coddled them. “Oh, it’s just a few bad apples” seemed to be the refrain.

Perhaps the Occupiers initially embraced revolution, but the
newer members seemed to embrace a more sordid, violent reality that accompanies said revolution.

This stuff makes the “racist” charge against the Tea Partiers seem tame. For me, I can tolerate one racist among 10,000 old farts, but when a way larger percentage of a movement is made up of anarchists and criminals who want to upend society, there is cause for concern.

This is where the self-examination matters. If the OWS movement admitted to the horrible stuff going on, then I would admire and respect them. But they haven’t, so I hate that they adore their ideology so much that they let their own supporters fall victim to assaults by more unsavory members. If I were sitting in a tent with an abuser, I wouldn’t just ask him to leave, I’d drag him to the cops by his oily dreads.

The thing that gets me is this simple question: Why does the media prefer one group over the other? Why did the media find the Tea Party hilariously stupid but the Occupiers heroic? If you’re liberal, you’ll say, “Because the Occupiers are right.” But that’s not the issue. The issue is excusing mayhem. You can’t sit by while bad stuff happens.

Actually, I think I have the answer: The Tea Parties represent your parents; the Occupiers represent sex. One is slow and cranky; the other is brash, young, and unpredictable. The bottom line: One is square, the other is fun. One is clean, the other delightfully dirty.

And so this duopoly presents itself once again. It’s not left and right. It’s uncool and cool. It’s high school. The mainstream media loves the cool, even if we know the uncool end up paying the bills.

For the apologists of the OWS movement, if they had an inspirational figure to look up to, it would have to be Walter Duranty,
the creepy writer for the
New York Times
who won awards for whitewashing Soviet crimes. While people died by the millions, he wrote sunnily of the communist utopia, ignoring the multitude of horrors simply because it would destroy the story—the one that says capitalism is evil and socialism is lots better. And if that better way requires hiding the deaths of millions—well, that’s not the fault of the system. We’ll work out the kinks along the way, so let’s not make a big deal out of it, okay? Better to tolerate a little evil if the end result is really good. Besides, I’ll win a Pulitzer, and Uncle Josef will like me!

Sound familiar? That’s the opinion of every person I talked to about Occupy Wall Street. They all kept accusing me of “cherry-picking” incidents to taint their fluffy, wonderful uprising. To them OWS was the Snuggles Bear, misunderstood. When really it was the Big Bad Wolf, with gastritis.

Mind you, these are the same people who desperately tried to find just one example of a Tea Partier yelling the N-word, and when confronted with the demand to supply one, simply couldn’t. On my late-night show back in the fall of 2011, a liberal guest made the startling admission that he had been at a Tea Party and personally witnessed “hours” of racist behavior. I asked him for examples. He demurred. I gently asked again. Nope, he just wasn’t going to go there. I texted our ombudsman, who monitors the show for mistakes, and wrote, “Ask this guy again, I don’t believe him.” So during his segment later in the show, he politely asked this fellow (the author of a wildly successful humor book) for evidence. At this point, the guest looked a little unnerved. And again, the guest pleaded no contest. He wasn’t going to offer evidence.

Perhaps because he had none.

Unlike that guest on my show, I find it almost too easy to
chronicle the hundreds of crimes, both big and little, committed by the Occupiers. It’s no longer cherry-picking when you’ve got a truckload of cherries, ready to tip the whole truck over. At Big Hollywood, the late Andrew Breitbart’s website, as well as a blog called
Verum Serum
, they catalogued a thousand of them. Here’s a sample of cherries:

In Manhattan, cops picked up a twenty-six-year-old Crown Heights man after two women reported two separate sexual assaults
. How was he able to commit two, when the first attack was already well known among the camp? Don’t ask—you’ll just smear the movement.

In Hartford, Connecticut, the cops received a tip about a sexual assault at that camp
. The victim was located, and told of a man aggressively groping and kissing her. The victim never called the cops. Why? Well, who wanted to draw negative attention to the movement? Tolerate, tolerate, tolerate.

In Lawrence, Kansas, a sexual assault might have taken place, but Occupiers just aren’t sure if the suspect was a member of the group, of course
.

Oh yeah, there was a murder in Oakland, at Frank Ogawa Plaza, home to the grittiest of the protests
. More crimes followed in Oakland—so many, in fact, it would require another book. Or another Oakland, which is something nobody wants.

Also, in Oakland, activists trashed the outside of a Whole Foods (a tony supermarket catering to customers who embrace social
justice)
. Men’s Wearhouse even closed their store in solidarity with the activists, but that didn’t stop protesters from smashing their windows (appeasers always get it in the end, history shows). That could explain why the Occupiers all seemed to be wearing really cheesy suits the next day.