The Joy of Hate (2 page)

However, Super Bowl parades are warranted, because the team actually achieved something, thanks to billions of well-spent dollars on adults with an affinity for strip clubs and pit bulls. It kills me that people actually objected to parades to welcome our military home from Iraq, but wouldn’t make a peep about a parade celebrating Anti-Semitic Dwarves with Lupus. At least it was a very short parade.

Religious judgment
. I totally respect religious folks, and it’s your club, so you have a right to tell members how to live. But you can’t use your doctrine to tell me how to live. It can only influence how you live. If you want to argue that my promiscuity, drug use, and cross-dressing are wrong, go for it. But don’t use the Bible to do it. Not only will I not listen, but
I don’t have to listen
. You can make coherent moral arguments against my sordid life without religion as your tool. It’s more of a challenge—and it’s one you should embrace. But all of that that pales when compared with …

Religious extremism
. People who use their religion as a framework to kill people, simply, are not nice people. Yes, that’s quite a stand I’m making, but the idea that people are systematically executed because they don’t share your God is beyond barbaric. The fact that there are people in our own country who seem to tolerate that, while being intolerant of a Christian’s biblical stance regarding gay marriage, makes me want to leave the United States and go to a more sensible place, like Texas.

There are more things I refuse to tolerate (pretentious music criticism, clove cigarettes, slow-moving ceiling fans, restaurant hostesses who pretend they own the joint, people who walk and text on a crowded sidewalk, Hostess Snowballs, people who drop
subzero
into their conversation when they aren’t talking about the Arctic winds, people who bring their own bedroom pillows onto flights, pharmacists who yell out your prescription in front of other customers, Time Warner Cable, Sting’s chest hair), but I’ll get into that later, in the chapter “Arguments for Capital Punishment.” I may not do that chapter, though, because I refuse to tolerate lists. They’re lazy. And listy.

At any rate, that will be a short chapter, because this book is,
among other things, about how modern tolerance sucks—and how it has become a shield for some of the most loathsome behavior you will ever find. It is a fetishized tolerance that is at the root of every single major political conflict we’re experiencing now—from terrorism to climate change, from birth control to the left’s weird indifference to large-scale, destructive evil. As opposed to small, lesser evils like obesity. Wherever you go, and whatever you say, there will be somebody nearby with a tolerance meter, gauging your behavior, deeming you either acceptable or evil. And then the faux outrage is unleashed. It’s the one-two punch that governs everything we do in public life.

The definition of tolerance should be simple: Just treat people the way you like to be treated—who cares if they’re different, as long as you don’t bother me about it. My definition of tolerance is simpler: I leave you alone, you leave me alone. Works pretty much all the time. Unless I need to borrow underwear. I have such testy neighbors.

Of course, there’s that other kind of tolerance—a capacity to endure stuff, like loud music, red wine, and prescribed medications (within that meaning, I am truly the most tolerant man on earth).

But now tolerance means something much greater—and all-encompassing. It’s considered, by
dictionary.com
(nothing but the best research, people) to be “a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc. differ from one’s own.” That’s covering all the bases, right? Of course, this definition has a big smiley face all over it. Tolerance is seen as a totally positive thing—the opposite of bigotry, the kind of good behavior that every noble television character expresses in spades. It’s how you tell the good guys in a movie.
They’re the ones who are nice to the gay character. It’s the gist of every after-school special, and behind every one of those old, nauseating “the more you know” public service announcements. It’s the modern nag, now hip, thanks to celebrity endorsement. If a sitcom star wants to be more than a sitcom star and land a role in the next Sundance-approved flick, they can simply come out against “hate.” Even better: Paint
NO HATE
on your face and you’re instantly afforded extra points on the “caring scale,” even if you’re an obnoxious, selfish, no-talent jerk when the paint washes off.

Intolerance, on the other hand, is portrayed as bad. In fact, intolerance is so rotten, it cannot be tolerated.

Well, that’s not quite true. A funny thing about tolerant people? They’re really only tolerant when you agree with them. Suddenly, when they find out you disagree with just one of their assumptions, they become intolerant of you. Which kind of misses the whole point of tolerance, but I’ll tackle that later.

Here’s the curse of tolerance: the “permissive” part. In effect, the modern tolerance movement has forced millions of open-minded liberals into contortions even well-lubricated, multi-jointed circus performers wouldn’t try, no matter how many tequila shots and muscle relaxers you supply. (I have boxes.)

And so, in the following chapters, I will examine how the idea and concept of repressive tolerance and phony outrage infect all parts of life, to the detriment of said life. I will include an examination of tolerance’s polluting effect on pop culture (in both music and humor). I will show how it was used to demonize the Tea Party, and how this truly organic protest movement was met with virulent, intolerant animosity from the tolerati left. I have touched on many of these topics on my blogs and articles. Some will sound familiar to you if you watch certain shows I regularly appear on,
where some began as monologues or commentary on the stories of the day. Many I will reexamine and expand upon, to show you how tolerance has screwed with our common sense, our political leaders, and our policies here and abroad. And where is tolerance often most destructive and/or annoying? The media. Or rather, the mainstream media, which regularly paints Americans as intolerant while they themselves are truly the guilty party. For they traffic in an elitist, detached bubble where everything normal is viewed as quaint and silly. They tolerate everything but the country that must tolerate their sorry and, most likely, flabby asses.

My goal, then, is to help you fight against these tolerant/intolerant masses and their surplus of manufactured outrage, by supplying you with buckets of joyful intolerance. Because the only solution to this tolerant mess is to lovingly embrace intolerance. Smart intolerance, that is. What we used to call “common sense.” We need to replace the idiocy of open-mindedness with happy judgmentalism, and embrace the “narrow” mind that finds pleasure in rejecting stupid ideas, notions, and people. We need to get over the need to be liked by others, especially by countries whose own incompetence requires that their violent, toxic prejudices be ignored. We need to monitor our own outrage, and focus it only on stuff that matters. Most important, we need to be jerks, smart intolerant jerks. (But always possessing good manners, decent hygiene, and the willingness to buy a round. All go a long way to bolster an argument.)

And if there’s ever been an expert in being a jerk, that’s me. I’ve spent a twenty-five-year career perfecting the craft of jerkiness—from my days at
Men’s Health
(where I penned a precursor to this book, “Be a Jerk”), to my captaining of the reeking battleships of offense known as
Stuff
magazine, and
Maxim UK
. My fervent
intolerance became infamous at the launch of the Huffington Post, helping to generate most of their traffic in the early days, when their audience was limited to Arianna’s attorneys and Ed Begley Jr. If you happen to catch me hosting a few, mighty successful TV chat fests on cable, then you know I won’t pipe down when it comes to current events, pop culture, and of course ambrosia recipes (which I am famous for).

In short, I am the perfect pilot for the Good Ship Intolerance and will gently guide you through a world where tolerance-driven outrage threatens to turn us into weak-willed cowards. Hopefully, by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you will be safe from harm. Or at the very least, finished with a book.

BEING A TEENAGER IN THE SEVENTIES
can be boiled down to two words: shoulder acne. But also something called “feelings.” Feelings, nothing more than feelings. That’s what it was all about. For most of us, that decade amounted to one big encounter group, where every day was a reminder that you were really mean, you were an oppressor, and you needed to heed other people’s feelings (and then, of course, your own, as a method of important self-discovery). If you didn’t cry in front of a group of men with beards, then you hadn’t really done anything in life. And there had better be Dan Fogelberg playing in the background.

I have no proof of this (other than having had two normal parents and sets of grandparents), but I get the feeling previous generations would have found the idea of putting feelings before thinking as silly. They had other crap to deal with, like fighting diseases and war. There was also that Depression thing (not the coastal health problem, but the historical period), which, from my research, entailed a lot of young children with dirty faces selling newspapers with the word
DEPRESSION
above the fold. They must have been annoying. Too bad they were (technically) not edible.

But as a teenager, I was now being taught, by folks with little
common sense but a lot of acoustic guitars, about other cultures and how superior they were to ours. The flip side was, of course, how mean the United States was toward the rest of the world, and how mean I was, as a tool of that insidious military-industrial complex. (Note: When I first heard “military-industrial complex,” I thought it was the coolest thing. How could that be seen as wrong? A country that prides itself on both the military and its industry has to be awesome. Somehow, we went from having a military-industrial complex to having a complex about our military and industry.)

At school, I learned—by accident, really—how to fake caring. I went to a Jesuit Catholic all-boys high school (the team name: Padres), which might conjure up a repressive atmosphere full of belt beatings, angry elderly priests, and hours dangling from a gym rope in tight red shorts. With the exception of the tight red shorts—a fashion that’s stayed with me, incidentally—all of that is false. Most of my instructors were earnest types—students of the sixties, well versed in feelings, interested in opening your mind and your soul (translation: Please smirk whenever Ronald Reagan’s name is mentioned). This meant sex ed that went a little too far in some places, and religion classes that dove full force into politics. By the early 1980s, we were speaking less about God and more about Central America. There was stuff going on in El Salvador—which I thought was a
Lucha libre
wrestler—and America surely was at fault. As a student, I edited a school paper devoted to that very idea. I wrote a column called “Frisbee Warfare”—a clever title about importing American values into places where it shouldn’t be. Teachers loved it because it showed I had “feelings” about the world that matched theirs.

Not that I was an expert in this stupid crap, but I knew it “felt” right. It must be right—the “cool” teacher likes me! Surely America
was big and El Salvador was small, so we had to be the aggressor. The David–Goliath story line drives everything in the media. And why not? People love it when the little guy beats the big guy, even if the big guy is good. Even if the big guy is
you
. If you ask me now what the whole mess was about down there, I’d be lying if I told you I had a clue. But pretending to care got me a pretty good grade, and taught me that liberal teachers were a soft touch. Expressing your feelings, coming from the nexus of manufactured rage and tolerance—this was the thing that paved a way to academic success. (And later, Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency.)

It was around that time, in high school, that the idea of nuclear disarmament was gaining momentum across the liberal parts of the nation, and especially California. And so I collected signatures for something called “the nuclear freeze.” If you asked me what it was, again, as with most things political, I’d have no clue. You could have convinced me it was something you get off an ice cream truck, or even a Finnish sex act involving a popsicle. I think it actually had something to do with getting a bill passed that would make it illegal to transport nuclear arms on California turf. From a lefty point of view, it’s a perfect cause to get behind: after all it’s based on the simple romantic notion that all weapons are bad, even if those weapons might protect you from bad people who are busy making the very same weapons to kill you with. But by having those evil weapons, that makes you no better than the bad people who want to kill you. To accept this premise, you must ignore the reality around you—i.e., the fact that what kept our enemies at bay was the fear that we would annihilate them. Because of that fear, we never had to actually push a button. Just having the button was enough. It’s like owning a Prius. You don’t have to use it. Just having it is the statement. (But this Prius actually had purpose, for it could protect the Western world.)

Did I believe in the nuclear freeze? No. But I believed in getting extra credit. And that’s what I would be getting if I collected the signatures. My memory is about as clear as bog mud, but I remember that I could boost my grade (taking a B to a B+, for example) for my religion class if I gathered twenty signatures from in front of St. Gregory’s Church on Hacienda Street. You could say I found religion. It helped that I wore a sleeveless half shirt. Like a rat getting its edible pellets, I discovered that fake caring could reap rewards. In this case I’d get a higher GPA, which would ultimately get me into a college, where these liberal assumptions would surely be further reinforced (in my case, Berkeley, home of the Cal Bears and homeless defecators who track their own carbon footprint).