The Joy of Hate (26 page)

The report says that Fox News tended more toward the “critic” side than the “proponent” side, but in my opinion that is BS. Something tells me that any opinion that deviates from the proponent point of view will be disregarded as “disproportionately dismissive.” If you don’t blindly swallow the climate change pill whole, and agree to spending hundreds of billions of dollars of your cash, then you’re just not to be taken seriously. And you’re biased.

How funny that nearly all these apostles for global warming mock those who believe in a higher being. How stupid is it to cling to something you can’t prove? Well, maybe that’s why they cling so desperately to climate change. It has become their religion, replacing the gaping maw in their own life that something more substantial was meant to fill. Like God. Or pilates.

It’s probably something else. A need for some kind of directed outrage—a place to park your intolerance. Like cigarette smoking, climate change skepticism is an easy and acceptable target for those seeking to exercise their intolerant muscles. These muscles, so atrophied from years of accepting everyone in the fold, need a workout. They need someone to headlock. The tolerati seek skeptics as targets because, in effect, they’re bullies seeking release. And worse, they are cowardly bullies, in that they only go after the sanctioned targets.

So I guess it’s just better not to talk about it. Frankly, it bores the hell out of everyone in the room. And face it, there are bigger things to worry about. For example, global cooling is apparently on its way—temporarily, before we get hit with more global warming. And then, after that, it’s back to cooling again. Some might even say we’re probably going to see some sort of “ice age,” although that might have been a Nordic male stripper I met last night in line at Port Authority. He needed a place to crash.

But what happens if you’re a normal guy who has a change of heart about global warming? What if you go from apostle to apostate? You become a delightful gentleman named Harold Ambler. If you don’t know Harold, you should. Harold is an editor/writer who’s worked at all the right places, including
The New Yorker
, and does all the right things. He’s a singer in a band, he’s a rower, he runs his own blog, and by all accounts he’s a liberal. If you needed a charming, good-looking person to star in one of those commercials for the
New York Times
Sunday edition, he’d be there—probably wearing a denim shirt with an Obama Hope and Change button in plain view. But there’s a problem with Harold. As cool and edgy as he sounds, he’s really a leper—a man who chose his own leprosy, by voicing skepticism regarding climate change.

A few years back the Huffington Post was looking for someone to blog (for free, of course) about climate change, and Ambler was recommended. A self-taught expert on climate, he ran a witty website about all things weather. He e-mailed Arianna several times. Arianna was receptive (as she always is to free writing), and cc’d an editor to “coordinate” with Harold. The piece got published, and it garnered a huge amount of attention—for the wrong reasons. Ambler had trashed every left-wing notion of climate change. It was two days later that Arianna disowned
Harold—and said that he was published without her absolute knowledge. She made it clear that climate change was a subject where dissent could not be tolerated.

How did he respond to the intolerance of the tolerant? “The treatment I received at the hands of various U.S. leftists at the time removed the scales from my eyes somewhat about how groovy these supposed hippies were. I found Arianna herself and her henchmen, and others I’ve run into since on the Internet, to be pernicious bullies interested in accruing power for themselves and their brethren and more or less totally out of touch with regular people.” Harold, where have you been all my life?

And for those of you who think Harold’s just a skeptic for the sake of being different, the fact is, he’s read more about about the science than most of the folks who make a real living off climate change. He’s read scores of scientific articles and books, and interviewed scientists as well. He’s beyond articulate on the cosmic-ray theory of cloud production—something we’ll leave for my next book,
The Cosmic-Ray Theory of Cloud Production
. In short, he knows his shit. He knew it enough for Arianna to hire him. “I understand why people would be concerned … but it turns out carbon dioxide is just a lot less powerful than most regular folk have been led to believe.” And he makes the simple point that the planet has been warmer than today, dozens and dozens of times in the past, without a single SUV in existence. Mentioning that, however, will not be tolerated in places like the Huffington Post. “If you tell them that we’ve been cooling since 6,000 years ago, they get offended because it messes with their narrative. How dare you bring that up?”

And that really is how repressive tolerance works. Intolerance springs into action whenever their assumptions are threatened by
facts. It’s the equivalent of plugging your ears with your fingers and humming loudly. Even better, by claiming that everything can be linked to global warming (rainstorms, windstorms, snowstorms, Hannah Storm), a skeptic becomes the heretic for not seeing the threat that’s right in front of his ignorant eyeballs.

Hatred toward skepticism also arises from another dark and dreary place: the human ego, which is in no short supply among the liberal left. “People living in the early twenty-first century want to believe they are living in a special time, being special people,” says Ambler. “This is a matter of profound religious faith that has come to dominate the sphere of Western media to an astonishing extent.” Because it makes you feel important: not only is the world in peril, but you can do something to stop it. And anyone standing in between you and that goal must not be tolerated. “It’s witch-burning all over again,” says Ambler. Maybe that’s what instigated global warming—all those witch-burnings way back when!

And what do you do with witches? “A Canadian blogger recently said in a discussion in which I’d had the audacity to bring up a few facts that maybe someone might want to burn down Harold Ambler’s house,” says Harold. “I looked into prosecuting him for hate speech, seriously, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. But it was Christmastime when he said it, and it didn’t add to my sense of the season!”

Where does this leave the heretic? “I can’t comfortably describe myself as a liberal anymore. The nearest thing I might be able to convey in terms of where my politics are now is something that I say all the time: I’m a man without a country.”

The good news is, wherever you are, it will be delightfully cooler than anywhere else.

THIS JUST IN:
Bullying sucks. I know this—not from common sense—but from the tidal wave of talking heads telling me it sucks. It’s like I’m being bullied into admitting bullying is wrong. For example, I recently received a press release, sent to me by a PR flack trying to get her client on my show. The client is an “anti-bullying” expert, which puts her in a pool of about 4 billion people claiming to be anti-bullying experts. The gist of the release: Bullying is an extreme version of intolerance, and intolerance is an extreme version of bullying. I really didn’t read the whole thing—I was too busy beating up someone less fortunate than me (my stunted half-brother Gunnar).

But this all fits nicely into the world of modern grievance: If you ignore the laws of tolerance, or do not bend to the cries of manufactured outrage, then you run the risk of being called something supremely horrible: a bully. I’m used to it.

Yep, if you do not express the required amount of sympathy for something you hardly care about, then clearly you are mean. And if you’re mean, you’re a bully. You never have to lift a finger or call someone a nasty name. Just saying anything considered disagreeable by the powers that be makes you a bully. And that makes you a cash cow for experts who make money off this sudden bullying epidemic.

Let’s focus on the anti-bullying crusade that’s sweeping the country. From high schools to the White House, the topic of bullying has elbowed its way to the front of the grievance parade. City councils are passing “anti-bullying laws,” and the term is now used to describe all sorts of bad behavior. The movie
Bully
is making big news as I cobble these words together, for it is a controversial, sobering look at what many people call a frightening trend. I haven’t seen the flick. I prefer German art films, but you can’t get them here anymore after the crackdown.

And of course there is a bigger picture here. America is always accused of being the world’s bully, despite the crap we take from just about everyone. Because America is bigger, we are naturally the target of blame—even if the tiny countries we’re dealing with are jerks. The UN operates on the assumption that America is a bully, which is why we continue to subsidize that awful enterprise. The only way to get out of being called a bully is to agree with the tolerati’s assumptions about your own innate bullying. Like I said, you are bullied into being a bully.

To overuse a cliché, size matters. In my life, I’ve rarely met large men who were bullies. Sure, there were assholes on the football team, but they generally kept to their asshole selves. But take someone the size of genius magician Penn Jillette—who, I would guess, is about eleven feet tall. I come up to his shoelaces. What he told me about bullying, however, is something I pretty much knew already (as a little guy): It’s often the big guys who get bullied most, because their size prevents them from fighting back. A little shrimp like me can taunt Penn all I want, and if he strikes me, I get the sympathy—and he looks like a big bad bully. So he has to take it, and I get to look cool for picking on someone whose front pocket I could sleep in.

My point: Penn Jillette is America, and Iran (or Cuba, or Venezuela) is me.

So why has the anti-bullying movement become so popular among the tolerati? Well, it’s an easy thing to get earnest about: no matter how much of a jerk you are (and I’m at the top), you can’t say, “Bullying is awesome.” You can say it builds character, but don’t tell that to a parent of a terrified kid.

But it’s also a cause célèbre for your assorted mid-level celebrities looking for a leg up in their faltering careers. It makes for legitimate, you-build-it outrage that even the shallowest dope can get behind, because it requires a minimum of vocabulary (“bullying is bad” is all a typical starlet might have to say, if she were sober long enough to say it). It kills me, however, that nearly all celebrities fit the bullying profile, especially when you get between them and their goody bag at an awards show. In fact, many of these idiots got into show business so they could establish bullying as a lifestyle—they hire people specifically to yell at other people. That guy telling you “it gets better” in a PSA ad was just moments ago throwing a Naugahyde sandal at his hapless Senegalese driver. For the driver, it only “gets worse.” It may also get “weird.” It often gets “uncomfortable” and “disgusting.” It may even become “actionable.” But it never “gets better.”

What is most laughable, however, is how every celebrity prepares for that talk show or magazine interview moment when they must remind us that they were once bullied too (which seems to me to be an argument
for
bullying—it’s the keystone of success!). The anti-bullying cause becomes about their own personal expression of inner torment, just like everything else does. So my guess is, they have recast their past to where now, looking back, they’re the ones who got ridiculed in the hallways of their high school, instead of the other way around.

And this leads me to a simple discovery: There’s a bully gap
going on. Everyone claims to be bullied. No one claims to be the bully. Ever.

Look, I was bullied once. His name was Patrick. And he was a bona fide moron, who would sometimes force me to let him cheat off me (this happens a lot when you’re a good student who wants to keep his teeth). During one summer, he followed me home daily, demanding money from me. When I finally stood up to him, he sulked off convinced, no doubt, that I’d bullied
him
.

So I guess everyone on the planet was bullied. I’m betting you were bullied, too. Which leads me to my only question: If we were all bullied, where are the bullies?

The answer: We’re both. We can be bullied and bullies. I remember being bullied, yep. But if I try harder, I can also remember Spanish class at Serra High. The teacher’s name was Mr. Fojo, a Cuban refugee. He went through hell to make it here, and I made it worse. Sorry, Mr. Fojo. I know he’s no longer on this earth, but I remember the crap I pulled in his class (surrounding his podium with snails, on which he slipped), and now it makes me feel sick to my stomach. That’s what an honest memory does: it tells you truths about yourself you’d rather not know. Sort of like a wife you’ve had since childhood.

So perhaps I should start some sort of special grievance group—made up of former bullies. We can all come forward and talk about the guilt we carry for being a jerk. Perhaps if I make it acceptable to confess, and turn it into a badge of victimhood like everything else in life, this bully gap will disappear.

At any rate, in the world of the manufactured grievance industry, the bully card will be played more and more—as yet another effective and insidious weapon in the arsenal designed to force you into an enhanced realm of tolerance. Remember, if you’re against
Obamacare, you must be cruel. If you won’t pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control pills, you’re heartless. If you talk about immigration without linking it to full-on amnesty, you’re a really mean person. If you vote Republican, you hate the poor—and therefore are the worst kind of bully.

So yeah, I must say that bullying is wrong. But only when it’s real. But the way it is bandied about now, like an amorphous emotional version of chronic fatigue syndrome, it’s as fake as your recovered memories of victimhood. The world is a churning mess of emotional responses, thoughtless actions, mean people. But it’ll only “get better” if we admit most of it dissipates like memories of the flu. And that we gave as good as we got.