The Joy of Hate (20 page)

In Spokane, Washington, cops responded to a possible sexual assault
. A woman had returned to her tent, only to find some dude running out of it. Inside, a woman was passed out, nude from below the waist.

Back in New York, the
Post
reported a pervert assaulting a woman in her tent one early morning
. Protesters chased him out of the park but never bothered to call the cops.

And if you think Sharia law is just a scary thing employed by radical Muslims who eschew the laws of any given country, then you haven’t been to the Baltimore protests. There the activists distributed pamphlets telling protesters how to handle sexual assaults among themselves, rather than going to the cops. After this “security statement” was exposed, they revised it to list services victims can use, you know, after they’ve been victimized. How thoughtful. Repressive tolerance means never having to file a report. OWS was the best thing to happen to perverts since mirrored boots.

That’s just a handful. But there are other examples—from your basic vandalism to arson amounting to millions of dollars in damages. Whether it’s assaults, rapes, fistfights, pooping, vandalism, or arson, OWS offered a prurient parade of pungent perversion.

Now, you can still favor it over the Tea Party if you want, but
since there weren’t any rapes, assaults, vandalism, pooping, fistfights, or arson, you’re going to look really stupid (as if that might actually stop Susan Sarandon anyway). Even more, consider how much larger the Tea Party gatherings were and you realize, simply by proportion, that the OWS protesters, pound for pound, had more problems, more perversity, more poop. Maybe the Tea Party events had one bad apple among tens of thousands. Among OWS, the places reeked of rotten cores.

But no one cares—at least in the media. The violence at the protests was the most underreported aspect, even among women reporters. Where were the feminists? Why wasn’t anyone worried about the women in these parks? Had they put tolerance before safety?

Or are people just scared? Could it be that if you raise a concern, you’re testing your tolerance bona fides? If it means the rich get less rich, the poor get free college tuition, and America becomes the utopia where everyone gets everything they want, minus the notion of hard work—go for it.

But historians know: What begins as a utopian vision, always—
always
—ends in bloodshed. Because you have to force a utopia on a free people. Free people want to pursue their own happiness, but a one-size-fits-all approach requires herding the free, against their will, into the state’s idea of what’s right. Then it’s not utopia. It’s Uganda. It’s 100 million dead.

And it’s not like the folks behind the movement have hidden their intentions. Adbusters, the Canadian activist group, has made it clear: they don’t like capitalism, and want revolution. And they know how to foment it. YouTube clip by YouTube clip.

Take the infamous pepper-spraying at UC Davis in November 2011. That was the movement’s desirable money shot—it
had
to
happen. Sure, it made the cops look bad. That was the goal—to create a David vs. Goliath story. Even though pepper spray was created with the purpose of preventing physical contact that would put people in the hospital, it’s considered barbaric.

But there’s no permanent damage, the discomfort fades fast, and it effectively de-escalates confrontation. That’s what it was invented for. Only the media could elevate pepper spray to a human rights violation. Which denigrates real human rights violations. When you see no distinction between pepper-spraying an unruly protester and Bashar al-Assad killing his fellow Syrians, we’re firmly in Walter Duranty territory.

I will wager that most of the students who were sprayed wouldn’t have traded that moment for a million bucks. They got instant fame, superiority, sympathy from all the right places. For some majors, they would have earned 16 credits for the arrest. And in twenty years, they will still be bragging about that moment. I’m sure many will brag about being there when they weren’t (as seen with 1967’s Summer of Love; we would have needed a “half decade of love” to accommodate all who claimed to have been there. Most of them were undoubtedly on their parents’ sofa, reading the liner notes for
Meet the Monkees
). As for the actual cause they were protesting, that will be forgotten, for it is far less important than gaining the admiration of their anarchist peers. And later, a job in media or academia.

After all, the actual cause really has no positive goal. It’s run by radicals, and radicalism isn’t about creating something new, but destroying the old.

Consider: the Americans for Prosperity Conference that happened in D.C., in mid-November 2011. As far as I can tell from reading its press releases, the whole focus of the thing was to
promote economic opportunity. These were people who got together to talk about becoming more successful, and helping others become more successful. You know, capitalism.

So what happened? The D.C. protesters descended on the place in an attempt to do … what? I’m not sure.

What I did see in the Daily Caller video: hordes of angry left-wing protesters pressing up against the doors of the conference building, screaming at and intimidating innocent participants. This aggressive free-flowing tantrum resulted in two elderly women being injured, one of whom had traveled a dozen hours by bus. I’m sure she was simply a rich bitch capitalist oppressor. Because, you know, they always take the bus.

And so the protesters’ assault revealed their true aims: attacking individuals who do, rather than demand. I mean, if you’ve never made anything in your life—except debt and poorly worded protest signs—I guess it makes sense to go after the doers. OWS became the takers wreaking havoc on the makers.

And so I will cherry-pick once more, because I just can’t stop. At a San Diego protest, the activists took up real estate where street cart vendors once had been working. The vendors, in a gesture of goodwill, fed these protesters for free. But when they stopped (inevitably, as handouts must), the protesters became irate. These vendors are no better than the one percent!

The protesters trashed the carts with, among other things, urine and blood. Which, among some Californians, is actually considered street food. This was Greece, in a nutshell. The incident was covered locally, but the mainstream media overlooked this stuff, because, like the protest organizers, they knew it would detract from the positive message. You won’t find that example or any of the others I just mentioned in those tony compendiums
on the OWS movement. Instead, you’ll find inane essays on the importance of the movement written by hipster authors trying to score progressive points. It’s the blind writing about the stupid.

Right now we’re experiencing the age of anti-bullying enlightenment. This can be a good thing. Bullies suck. But someone needs to explain to me how celebrities can focus on isolated incidents of bullying without condemning this other widespread intimidation. Shouldn’t Lady Gaga get out there with a bullhorn?

Better to focus on the peaceful or camera-ready stuff—like when Lou Reed shows up, or Philip Glass decides to do a mic check. Just a month or so prior to me writing this very sentence, David Crosby and Graham Nash performed at a New York protest. I had no idea they were still alive. (Alas, their performance did little to confirm this. Even when captured on videotape.)

THE FIRST TIME A JOKE WAS EVER TOLD
, you can bet someone died from it. They didn’t have picket signs or letter-writing campaigns back then, but they had hurt feelings. They registered it by bashing your head in with a club.

My good friend Joe DeRosa is a successful comic and actor who happens to live two floors above me. I see him in the elevator a lot, and we often end up accidentally drunk—before we reach the ground floor. He tells me about a phenomenon called selective listening, when he tells a joke one way but the audience hears it another way.

“I tell a joke about Jesus Christ. Basically I make fun of people who pray to Jesus for stupid shit, when basically this guy died on the cross for their sins. The whole point was, telling people to stop asking this poor guy for shit. He’s a tough dude; he had nails hammered into his hands! And you’re praying for a job promotion.” So what is essentially a salute to Jesus Christ is misconstrued as the opposite, because all people hear is a joke that has Jesus in it. “It doesn’t matter what the message of the joke is,” Joe says. He says the Jesus joke is his parents’ favorite joke, and his dad is a deacon. The fact is, people just get angry, because all they hear is something they believe should make them angry. It’s blasphemous,
when in reality, it’s actually honest and perceptive. Jesus might have laughed.

People get angry not because of the joke but because it hits too close to home. Think about it: When someone cracks a joke, it is meant to be taken as a joke. It’s not real. Yet that is ignored—selectively. Offense over a joke is a dog whistle, selectively heard by those with a dog in the hunt. (And if that metaphor confused you, as it did me, you can selectively tune it out.)

Meaning, the same person who laughs uproariously over a joke ridiculing the ethnic background of the scamps on
Jersey Shore
will get pissed when you target the Kardashians. Because they’re Armenian, and the offended person had an aunt who was Armenian. Who died in a fire. So you’d better not make any Armenians-who-died-in-a-fire jokes. (There goes half my act.)

Now, should every comedian demand his audience fill out questionnaires regarding areas that are off-limits? Perhaps a checklist that reads, “Are you black, gay, Hispanic, transgender, missing a limb? Do you have a relative with arthritis, have you worked in a labor camp in China, do you have thirty-four toes, can you see colors, do you have a fish-smelling disease or overgrown eyebrows, are you too short for roller coaster rides, do you have an unattractive unibrow or a penis shaped like Florida, do you have a mom who was a prostitute, a sister who was in the Manson family, or a dad who ran Jonestown?”

The assumption is that when someone makes a joke, it’s a joke. We’re all adults and we understand no one is actually trying to “hurt” someone.

So why the outrage, then? Why does someone get mad when Rush Limbaugh makes a joke about Barack Obama? Why do groups get angry when Louis C.K. unloads a crass, drunken tweet
about Sarah Palin? Why did Gilbert Gottfried lose work over earthquake jokes? Why do people have to apologize over things that don’t inflict real pain on people?

Perhaps it’s not about outrage. In a way, it could be about jealousy, which is the basis of much manufactured grievance. The anger toward a comedian erupts not because the comment simply strikes a nerve, but because the angered person feels unable to say the same thing, and that’s unfair. Why should you have the freedom to say something sick, but I can’t? I don’t mean “won’t” or “wouldn’t.” I mean “can’t.” It’s a joke I can’t make, because it might get me in trouble.

See, it’s not that people can’t say it, it’s that people can’t take it. So I’ll shut up about it.

Sure, I’ve been guilty of this in the past. Someone will say something I don’t like, and I will write something about that person, ridiculing them. Later, I realize I was mad I didn’t come up with it first! But I stopped getting outraged, because I realized it wasn’t worth it.

First, the worst sin for a comedian is laziness. That explains all the Palin jokes, churned out by the dolts who write Bill Maher’s material. But it’s nothing to be outraged about, really. And don’t get me wrong, I think creepy jokes done on women simply because they’re conservative are shitty, but they are far from outrageous. They’re just lame. But they are also providing a service. When someone laughs at one of those jokes, you know that person doesn’t get out much. In scientific terms, they are called “dumb-shits.” It’s like when dogs sniff each other’s asses. This ritual inspection is how they identify each other. Once you hear Maher make a lame Palin joke, you know he’s a dope without even having to sniff his ass (the way many of his guests do so painfully on his show). It’s a real time-saver!

But if someone writes or tells a joke that’s funny, and it’s about someone you like, you owe it to yourself to laugh. Sure, you should expect a wider range of targets from today’s comics, but don’t hold your breath. I’d like Louis C.K. to make fun of Obama as much as he does Palin, but he’s a liberal, so he won’t. I’d like to see Ricky Gervais make fun of liberals as much as he ridicules the religious, but that’s not what he cares about. After a while fans of Gervais like me will find his schtick tiresome, but he doesn’t care, nor should he. He is obsessed with atheism, and what he perceives as the harmful effects of religion—and so what? The existence of God and the origins of the universe are the real questions that keep us up at night, so why shouldn’t he devote all his talents to that? It’s not offensive as long as he makes me laugh and think, or even get angry. But yeah, it can get tiresome. And he may end up being pretentious, like if you saw his cover shot on
The Humanist
magazine, in which he was crucified—the nadir of his self-satisfied martyr complex. I’d still love him though. Were I capable of love.

The second worst reaction is to turn into a prude bent on admonishment. When you watch Bill Maher’s
Real Time
and he goes there yet again, calling Palin a twat, or Bachmann a bitch, turn off your outrage meter. Instead feel satisfied in the fact that Maher has lost whatever gift he had for real ridicule. And watch something else, for God’s sake, like
Hoarders
. Now there’s feel-good television. It makes me feel well adjusted. And it’s cheaper than paying a therapist.

IT WAS A STORY DESIGNED TO OUTRAGE
right-wing nut-bags like me. According to
LA Weekly
, a former “porn star” appeared at an elementary school in Compton, California, to read to children.

The porn star is not just any old worn-out slapper—it’s Sasha Grey, a “new kind” of adult actress, who prides herself in doing both hard-core stuff and mainstream muck. She’s a jackoff-of-all-trades, if you will. Because of her unique persona, she became the obsession of Steven Soderbergh, who devoted a whole movie to her (I confess to not seeing it—I’m waiting for the musical). He must have found her fascinating, as men with film cameras often do when they come across a hot chick who will screw men with film cameras.