The Joy of Hate (22 page)

One loud “yuck.”

While this is an understandable and perfectly natural reaction, please remember, War is yuck.

And, no doubt, what they did was wrong. I get it, it’s disgusting to pee on corpses, but I don’t get the outrage from the media and the left concerning
how
disgusting it is. And while I don’t get the outrage, I’m used to it: whenever anything negative pops up surrounding the military, the left never lets it go to waste. They hate our awesome military, for it represents how awesome America is, which they hate, too. In a perfect world, America would be powerless, without a military, and our enemies would crush us. Because in a progressive world, we deserve every bit of it.

The media revulsion regarding the video, though, reminds me of bystanders who yell at a police officer as he tries to cuff a PCP-addled perp. They react to the violence of the event without understanding what the job requires to maintain order or keep you safe. Do not expect Miss Manners to kill bad guys or wage war.

My primitive concept of war is that it’s at its most merciful when it’s over fast—which requires an impulse to shred your enemy to pieces, then howl like a crazy person at the moon.

You send a twenty-year-old to war, who is trained to think this way, do not expect civility.

And instead of condemning them, maybe consider what you would do in similar circumstances … if you could even stand it.

Of course I don’t condone the behavior, but I
understand
it. Even if you’ve never been to war (like me), you know that a warlike mentality allows for a whole host of unusual behaviors. If you saw these behaviors on a street in your hometown, they would seem odd. Pissing on a corpse in Green Bay—is weird. Pissing on a corpse in Afghanistan after a firefight—it’s unseemly, but I’m not there for the whole movie. Pissing on a person pretending to be a corpse below Manhattan’s Twenty-third Street—45 dollars.

But you won’t find that sensible understanding from the left. Which I’d accept—if they were consistent about all types of atrocity.

Here’s where the tolerant left falls apart once again. You never see them express outrage when our enemies behead, mutilate, or hang our soldiers. You never hear them express outrage over what these beasts do to women, gays, and whomever else they consider worthless, according to their caveman mentality. They are vicious, backward, murderous assholes—but according to the left, our guys are worse because they peed on those assholes’ corpses. (By the way, here’s another bizarre inconsistency: How is pissing on a corpse worse than turning that guy into a corpse? I mean, we accept that our troops go there to kill people, and I can safely say that being killed has to be worse than getting splashed with urine. It defies logic that drones are preferable to water sports!)

I think the wisest commentary came from war hero and all-around badass Representative Allen West, who wrote in a letter to
The Weekly Standard:

My God. I love this guy. When the hell is he going to run for president? The whole Middle East would be calling us “sir.” You think Allen West goes on an apology tour if he makes president? Only to accept some.

So I’ll take his opinion over the hand-wringing by the disgusted folks who only take an interest when whatever’s discussed reflects badly on the military.

This is because the military kills people, which is intolerant, and involves the following value judgment: “They should die so we can live.” Thanks to tolerance, Venezuela’s president isn’t fertilizer, Ahmadinejad isn’t the beloved martyr of Shia wife-beaters everywhere, and every Iraq war movie has the following subtext: “Our culture is no better than theirs—we just have bigger guns.” And yes, we got bin Laden, but that was thanks to methods that were once considered by the now victorious administration as outrageous and, well, intolerant. If they’d listened to their own advice, bin Laden would still be breathing, and watching MSNBC.

And for some, the military’s main objective—to efficiently kill while preserving their own safety—is made secondary to tolerance. It’s all about equality, not victory. Who cares if we’re no longer awesomely deadly? We’re awesomely correct! Why, we’re so awesomely correct, we’ll let Major Hasan correspond with Anwar al-Awlaki!

As I write this, Congress still officially bans women from serving
in combat roles. But this may be changing, with California Democratic congresswoman Loretta Sanchez having prepared an amendment to the defense budget bill that would change all that. Now, before I tell you why this is a lousy, stupid idea, I want to say that I adore women in the military (particularly the ones with pixie haircuts who can kick my ass—it’s a thing I’ve been into since I saw
Tank Girl
as a boy) and salute their amazing service for our country. But I’m not going to let politically correct notions of “what’s fair” undermine my basic common sense about biology, about the sexes, and about how important women are above and beyond combat. They aren’t here to kill, they’re here to create. But men? Men are earth’s Doritos.

That’s the simple biological fact. With one male you can create a city—a heterosexual boob creates enough sperm to populate Manhattan (and some men have tried—a shout-out to Eliot Spitzer). But women only have two eggs percolating at a time (I love when I attempt to write coherently about science), and so you need plenty of women to keep the species going. The role of women dictates the role of men: we fight so they don’t have to. In essence, they’re just more valuable.

There’s this metaphor I always bring up, which I stole from a mathematician. Imagine a man and a women enter a casino with a thousand dollars. The woman has two five-hundred-dollar coins; the guy has a thousand one-dollar coins. That casino is life, with all its reproductive options. This is why women are more scrupulous about the choices they make (they incur more loss with less choice), and why they’re so damn important. Men, with a thousand one-dollar coins, can pretty much gamble all over the place, even with their lives. That’s why so many of them die building bridges, mining for coal, replicating
Jackass
stunts (which men do
for the attention of women), and yeah—war. Women shouldn’t be in the fighting part of that business, but the tolerati declare that we must overlook this whole biology business.

And here I thought it was the right who denied science. I mean, come on, liberals: if science tells you women are more valuable, denying that is worse than refuting evolution, global warming, the moon landing, and unicorn villages living under the Atlantic combined. (Note: The unicorn villages are indeed real. Try the seahorse sushi.)

Yeah, that sounds unfair and intolerant, and I’m a complete Neanderthal. But the only way we got from being Neanderthals to now—is that women didn’t fight.

Let me use an analogy—clumsy as it is—that I’ve used a dozen times on TV and at bars when I’m too drunk to shut up.

Imagine if your favorite football team decided to allow women to play, to champion equality. Now imagine they do that despite
no other
team following suit. So the Steelers have women in the backfield, and what happens? They get destroyed by the Raiders, who kept an all-male team. You lose. That doesn’t matter, though, in the war against intolerance and inequality. Now imagine that the Steelers are the U.S. Marines, and the Raiders are the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. You think those Iranians are going to “sub” in women because the Marines did? Yeah, I’ve noticed how tolerant they’ve been in the past. They only kill women when they’re victims of rape—a tribute to total tolerance, for it includes a tolerance of rape. The only way Iranian women see combat is as human shields. Otherwise, they’re in the rear with the gear, as the saying goes. In fact, in Iran they are the gear.

So we can put women on the front lines but our enemies don’t have to. And I don’t care how tough a 200-pound woman is—a 200-pound man will win. (I’ve tested this out in a number of contexts
and can more or less confirm its accuracy.) But we’ve come to realize that, these days, winning isn’t on the chalkboard. Repressive tolerance is.

The saddest thing is, the one agent that preserves our ability to be tolerant wusses is our hugely intolerant military. Our military is intolerant of bad guys, and kills them. And somehow that’s horrible. And where does it culminate?

Let’s turn to the professors at the University of Washington’s Department of Global Health, who, according to a story on
mynorthwest.com
, believe that military recruiters are no different from sexual predators in their “grooming” behavior of students. A young guy serving our country is just like a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association. Probably worse. Certainly in the eyes of this “tolerant” professor, who probably sees NAMBLA as falsely maligned (and perhaps understaffed).

To back up this innovative claim, the researchers point out that recruiters are encouraged to get involved during field trips and do the scorekeeping—which is what pedophiles might do in order to entice new victims.

But let me point out, it’s what parents do, too. And uncles like me (I’m not allowed anywhere near AYSO soccer matches since the incident with the oranges). But the professors left that piece out, for it would have ruined their atrocious exercise in moral relativism.

So what does this tell you? Well, that academics can say just about anything they want about the military, because by virtue of their vocation, they are not required to allot the same benevolent tolerance you would give to other groups—like gang members, inmates, Occupy protesters, or San Francisco nudists. Because, after all, American soldiers probably kill innocent women and babies. They don’t deserve the tolerance you’d give to, say, a terrorist those
troops are trying to capture. That’s the true, insidious irony: the left is more tolerant of the people who want us dead than they are of the people trying to protect us from those who want us dead. This intolerant view toward our most giving citizens is never exemplified by your average American, but is expressed only in secluded teachers’ lounges populated by men in their forties who still think a ponytail makes a statement about colonialism.

On that note, let’s head over to Iowa State University during the wintry months of 2011. That’s when
Townhall.com
reported that the College Republicans kicked off their annual Support Our Troops Care Package Drive to gather donations for stuff to send to troops overseas for the holidays. It’s the usual stuff: trail mix, candy, socks, stocking caps, foot powder, toothpaste, puzzle books, and wet wipes. (I hear wet wipes are treated like gold overseas, which is understandable—they’ve made my life a lot easier when I forget to do laundry.) Now, normal people would find this drive to collect stuff for the troops to be wholly positive. But academics are not normal people. They are not even people in my book (see my book,
Academics: Rodents Masquerading as Humans
). Here is “instructor” Thomas Walker, who wrote a letter to the school paper mocking the endeavor. In it, he said, “Aren’t GIs paid enough to buy what they need, and even what they want?… What are the troops doing for us? Nothing. But against us they’re doing a lot: creating anti-American terrorists in the countries they occupy.”

Oh yes, there’s that
occupy
verb again. Why is it when you hear that word, it’s always coming from a tenured, self-absorbed twit whose achievements are measured by years of not working? And dandruff?

My gut tells me this creep only wrote this letter to impress naive coeds who fall for anything that might be considered deep.
And unfortunately, to a lot of America’s current student body, this nonsense qualifies. And a lot of repressive tolerance rhetoric is geared toward that—your condemnation of injustice, masked as traditional American values, makes you a winner at cocktail parties, coffee shops, and Green Day mosh pits. The instructor wrote this pap because he felt he could write this pap. He must have felt really special when he pressed send.

Repressive tolerance, among the dumb and gullible, gets you laid. Isn’t that why most of these guys become academics? The girls stay the same age—as the academics get older and smellier. You fashion some fashionable hate, and that coed (it’s her first time away from home) can find you really “deep.”

This condemnation of charity toward our military repeated itself, according to
FoxNews.com
, at a place called Suffolk University, in Boston, where another professor became enraged over student groups sending care packages to troops over Christmas. So he sent an e-mail to his colleagues saying how awful it would be to help those who have gone “overseas to kill other human beings.” The college didn’t reprimand the professor, which led to a resignation from another member of the faculty, who was irrationally upset, of course. That guy must be the truly intolerant one. Don’t these assholes have classes to teach and papers to grade? That’s the problem with professors and actors. Too much time to demonstrate to us what jackasses are.

Academia traffics in the illusion of tolerance. But the stereotype of the college campus as a place where ideas can flourish is bullpoop. Sure, if you believe Che Guevara is awesome and al Qaeda just a subversive reaction to American hegemony, that’s cool. But if you’re young and conservative, the tolerant become intolerant. Conservative groups get kicked off campus, the ROTC
gets banned from schools, and speakers are harassed or hit with pies. The world of the open-minded suddenly shuts closed when faced with people who don’t match their assumptions about how much America sucks. Our campuses have gone from incubators of first-class talent to Useful-Idiot-U. And the Occupy Wall Streeters are shocked they can’t get jobs? They’ll be lucky to be churning out iPads in a Shanghai sweatshop in a few years.