The Joy of Hate (24 page)

(“More fools they”? Okay there, Falstaff.)

Yep, she made music you loved, but now that she doesn’t share your assumptions about politics, she must be stupid, a fool, brainwashed by “the man.” I’m telling you, we should’ve told Gore, “No thanks.” Here’s a more sympathetic comment:

Of course, it would never occur to that writer that she might be the one fooled. I mean, could it be that Moe realized how bereft of common sense hipster life was, and moved on? I’d bet a hamster that writer was over forty years old. Who cares? It’s Moe who is misled. And therefore she is no longer part of the in crowd.

So where did the tolerance of “opposing viewpoints” go? Weren’t artists supposed to be truly rebellious—meaning that they should also rebel against the status quo of the hipsters around them? Shouldn’t they be admired for rejecting the litmus test? In short, music bloggers, aren’t
you
the machine they should be raging against?

Nope. Apparently the lockstep liberal pop stars and their slavish followers must ensure that every single pop legend shares their oh-so-predictable worldview. If you don’t, you’re obviously misguided. This ostracism—intolerance from the self-proclaimed
open-minded—is driven not by the coolness they believe only they possess but by a sheep mentality—something real rebels would openly mock.

Now, caution: we’re about to enter a name-dropping zone.

As a former punker, I found nothing more glorious than when Johnny Rotten showed up to do my three AM show. This man, in my opinion, is the greatest rebel in modern music. The Sex Pistols created the singular antiestablishment record of their age—something that has never been repeated and probably never will be. No one, in my mind, was cooler than Rotten—he was smart, scary, and funny—and the songs were awesome. When he told me how much he enjoyed doing the show, I almost died. We went out drinking until the wee hours of the morning at a local Irish bar, and he told me how much he hates hippies and hipsters. I realized the guy I had posters of on my wall when I was in my teens felt like me. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think Rotten was a conservative. I doubt he labels himself at all, and he really likes Obama. But I don’t think he trafficked in the repressive tolerance that flourishes around him to this day. He just hates phonies.

When I drank beer with Billy Zoom, the legendary guitarist from the L.A. punk band X, and found a like-minded soul, I realized how cool “cool” really was. Zoom is a taciturn fellow whose stoic guitar stance transforms him into a far cooler icon than James Dean. This guy shits cool. And even his shit shits cool.

And he’s about as liberal as Allen West. The same goes for Joe Escalante, who’s been on my show many times. A founder of The Vandals, Escalante is both a punker and a bullfighter—but also a Catholic, and a God-fearing one at that. He’s so punk that other punkers steer clear of him. I almost forgive him for being a bass player.

I am still a slave to pop culture. I listen to nothing but punk,
metal, and obscure electronica. I watch weird movies in the middle of the night, and I continue to fight the war against hipster intolerance by persuading my favorite bands to come on my show. I’m pretty sure I helm the only show on any news cable channel to have Fucked Up, the essential Canadian punk band, as a guest. They’re as left-wing as you can get, but I adore their music.

But in this war, I found a cohort in the battle—Gavin McInnes, the founder of
Vice
magazine, a subversive piece of filth that erupted in the nineties and became the hipster bible. But as a hipster, Gavin does not hold to the hipster code. He does not think Obama is a savior. And he hates big government. He’s a conservative-leaning libertarian who thinks drugs should be legal and supports Occupy Wall Street—although at the same time condemning self-destructive stoners and anarchic violence. He writes frequently on the necessities of hard work, and how young adults these days are more interested in looking cool than actually “doing” cool things. He’s covered in tattoos but raises his kids like a normal dad, and finds no pleasure in anyone denigrating others for being “weird.” Gavin is a hipster, but he’s also the hardest-working capitalist I know (I just wish he wouldn’t strip so often in public). When I took him to an event for conservatives in the entertainment world, I joked about how nerdy it was. He frowned at me and said, “I’ve been around hip all my life. I’ll take this over that. This is good.” It’s like he knew, instantly, what real noncomformity was—and it has nothing to do with tattoos, nose rings, or shouting “the world is watching” at cops. I felt bad that I was embarrassed.

Nobody got this more than Andrew Breitbart. It was his mission, in a way, to call bullshit on the whole facile notion of “cool” being the defining principle for adult behavior. Cool sucks. And Andy knew it. So does Gavin. And Johnny. And Billy. And that makes them way cooler than anyone else I knew, or know.

Among phony hipsters, tolerance for other people ends where their fear of real rebellion begins. “Hip” people who happen to be conservative tend to reject the stereotypical “hip” assumptions, and therefore are the least tolerated phenomenon you will find. According to the sheep with nose rings, you can’t possibly love The Clash and have voted for Bush (I did). You can’t possibly have seen Gang of Four and sung along to every song, then worked at
The American Spectator
(I did). There’s no way you are obsessed with both the Melvins and Congressman Allen West (that’s me). The fact is, these hipster weasels don’t get those possibilities, because they reject real, authentic rebellion. The people they hate are truly
authentic
in their questioning, in their rebellion—and they are not.

And it’s got to hurt them. I mean, imagine being a lefty rocker who adores X and finding that the guitarist, who is far cooler than you, thinks your politics stink. It’s gotta fry your brain. No wonder you wear board shorts and wallet chains to the beer garden.

But the bigger and final message here is what happens when someone from The Velvet Underground—the band that Václav Havel credits for creating the Czech Republic (personally, I haven’t been able to establish the link)—gets crap for showing up at a peaceful political event. And what does it mean when a member of the most naturally subversive band of the last forty years shows up at the most naturally subversive movement in recent memory?

By witnessing the shocked reaction, you see where true rebellion lurks.

It’s wherever Moe’s at.

And, really, how can you not follow someone named Moe?

AS PEOPLE STARVE ALL OVER THE GLOBE
, we are demonizing chubby kids. Don’t get me wrong, being fat is unhealthy, but last time I checked, fat kids weren’t spreading disease, mugging the elderly, or beating the crap out of people on subways. At least, not as a general rule. There are a lot of bad eggs on this planet, but don’t blame the kids who seem to be eating too many of them. Remember, the fatter they are, the harder it is for them to run from a crime. (It’s why I went on Atkins.)

Repressive tolerance is a weak, weird thing. Like water, it flows along the path of least resistance. And apparently no one can stand a fat kid, so that’s where the tolerant express their easy, lame intolerance. If a kid is fat, the most tolerant liberal has no trouble passing judgment, and perhaps a tax, to register their disapproval. In a world where you are expected to tolerate all behavior, somehow fat kids didn’t get the note from Congress exempting them from condemnation. Fat kids are now a big target, and it has nothing to do with their big pants purchased at Target.

This intolerance toward the chubby means little until you compare it with other behaviors that are accepted, or even encouraged, among the community of tolerance.

In Georgia, a series of depressing anti-obesity ads created
controversy, according to the
New York Daily News
, because they featured unhappy fat kids talking about being fat. The ads offered messages like “Some diseases aren’t just for adults anymore,” and “Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid.” (Which is untrue. If there’s any time to be fat, it’s when you’re a kid and don’t care about being attractive.) Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta made the ads, intending their grim message to spark parents to see how serious this “epidemic” is. Here’s a quote from Linda Matzigkeit, a senior vice president at Children’s Healthcare:

Hey Linda, here’s an arresting campaign for you: you’re the problem.

Yeah, okay—fat kids are a problem. But imagine for a second an ad campaign that features a provocatively dressed teen talking about how her/his sexual conquests have left her/him empty and unwanted. You can’t, because it never happens.

Now, they might do the ad for the sexually active teen, in which they warn of consequences like STDs or unwanted pregnancies. But the fact is, they will never say “
Don’t do it
.” They won’t say that, on a moral level, such behavior leaves you empty and used up, just as everyone else is discovering what you’ve already exhausted. The concerned just say use protection. In the upside-down world of tolerance, eating a sloppy joe is wrong, but screwing one is okay. Being tolerant means eating sugary food is evil, but anything in the bedroom is none of my business. Frankly, I don’t care what you eat or who you screw, but please remain consistent in your condemnations of personal behavior. If you say, “Don’t eat Big Macs,” then you should just as easily say, “Don’t do
Big Mac.” (This is good advice: anyone named Big Mac is probably a long-haul trucker who’s a bit rough in the sack.)

I don’t give a damn what kids do, as long as they don’t hurt me. And fat kids don’t hurt me. However, violent kids do. We’ve seen a wild spurt of teenaged packs rumbling stores and subways. We’ve seen countless kids pregnant with kids—there’s a show on MTV that has turned teen pregnancy into the Olympic trials for our sad, stupid culture. We’ve got a system that’s spending craploads more than what we spent in the seventies on education, but producing dumber and dumber kids, who know little more than how to create texting abbreviations. We’ve got teachers, immune from the demands of discipline or competency thanks to unions, doing little more than monitoring classrooms like they’re unruly ant farms, while surveying their student bodies for the best student body.

But what is the White House concerned about? Fat kids … the “epidemic” of fat kids. What horseshit. Look, all you have to know about the U.S. is one thing: each year a person born usually lives longer than a person born the previous year. So we are doing something right. A lot of that has to do with not starving to death. It’s yet another Gutfeld scientific theory: available food = less starvation. I feel confident in this one.

But not tolerating fat people really is about not tolerating a fat, bloated America. When I lived in England, the joke was always how fat we Yanks were. It was like every bulging Bostonian was emblematic of a sweaty, heaving America. Look at us, eating our way to freedom, devouring Iraq and Afghanistan, while pooping out imperialism. Our jokes about British teeth were a jab at their medical services, but their jokes about our weight were a summary of our greedy lifestyle.

I guess that drives lean beans like Obama crazy. Why can’t we
be skinny, like those alluring Belgians! Sure, they do nothing for the world but produce artery-clogging chocolate, but they can buy their jeans at Gap Kids.

To Obama and the hard left, it’s all a metaphor for the hated American exceptionalism. Truth is, if America is fatter than other nations, it’s because we can be. Now, that doesn’t make it desirable, for health reasons and for reasons related to the wearing of Speedos. But the reason this incites such a visceral reaction from the Kathleen Sebeliuses of the world is that it sets us apart as having a more successful economy than places where the people subsist on 120 calories a day. We’ve created a system so successful that the most universal problem in human history—the acquisition of foodstuffs—has been erased by the issue of having too much of them (only America pays farmers so much money not to grow food). For the Obamatrons out there, every time a fat kid eats a scooter pie, a child in The Hague cries. I blame Bush. The president and the baked beans.

Again, imagine if you mapped this same strategy for sexual activity—taking classes where you’d be credited, say, if you remained a virgin until graduation. Or only gave out two blow jobs, instead of, say, seven. That would never happen, because it’s too judgmental, too intolerant, too intrusive. It’s also a bit tougher to monitor, I’ll admit, although I’m available if needed. More important, it doesn’t agree with the wisdom received from that boxed set of
Sex and the City
, which dictates that casual sex makes you happy, smart, and successful. And the possessor of a bigger apartment than mine. (Hell, I’d sleep with Chris Noth too if I could get the kind of digs they had on that show.)

However, when it comes to edible things that you put in your mouth, that’s different. This is why in school superintendents can
tell you that a hot dog is a no-no at lunch, but in the sex ed class, it’s okay if it wears a condom. I’m beginning to think sex ed is taught so teachers can make sure the students have condoms on when they run into them after class. I wonder: Would these teachers be okay with eating a hot dog if the kids slipped a condom on it?

Right now, in New York (geographically part of America), we’ve got a mayor who demonizes giant sodas. We have experts up the wazoo saying we should do the same with all fattening foods—their argument being that if fattening foods lead to fat people, who then greedily utilize more health care and thus are a burden on our society, then why shouldn’t their greasy blubbery lifestyles be taxed?

Okay, then. Why not then tax sexually transmitted diseases? I venture the cost to society from sexual behavior has to be every bit as high as eating at McDonald’s or Wendy’s, so why aren’t we “going there”? At least when I eat a Quarter Pounder, I’m not getting herpes from the Quarter Pounder (sadly, I can’t say the same thing for the Quarter Pounder).