The Joy of Hate (6 page)

But more important, Fluke did not need his help. In the age of the tolerati, the victim of a slur like “slut” never emerges as the victim but as the victor. Can you imagine
Newsweek
running an unhinged cover photo of Fluke, the way they did to Michele Bachmann? Not on your life. Rush calling Fluke those names (albeit jokingly and crudely), and President Obama calling her for comfort, are the greatest things to ever happen to Fluke. And likely will be, until her Guggenheim grant comes through.

If she doesn’t get a job on MSNBC or Current TV by the time this here book is published, I will eat my hat. (Provided it’s a small hat and made from a variety of marzipan. I love marzipan.) As I edit this book, she’s about to take the podium at the 2012 DNC.

Having said that, I’m sure Fluke is a nice lady. I just have a quarrel with the entitlement mindset. And remember, she’s only thirty. Maybe when she grows up, she’ll get it.

I WAS BORN IN 1964—A GOOD YEAR
for America (for that reason). But I remember none of it because back then I was too busy pooping and peeing in places I shouldn’t. Not much has changed. But being born in that year made me a teen in the mid-seventies, where I witnessed the romanticization of the hilariously decadent decade that came before. I didn’t remember the sixties, but I didn’t have to—the entertainment industry and the media did it for me, creating a metastatic myth of the heroic protester, the Summer of Love dude who somehow became more majestic than men of similar age fighting in places where many never came back alive. The 1960s began the love affair with the outspoken liberal, the raging professor, the “one who would speak truth to power.”

Were I naive enough, I would think that this noisy activity would be viewed as heroic, no matter the cause. If you were angry about the war—or abortion—it didn’t matter as long as you made your voice heard, loud and clear. It didn’t matter if that voice was shrill, clueless, self-indulgent. But I was wrong. It seems speaking truth to power is only tolerated if it’s for the right causes, the right ideology. Sorry, by “right” I mean causes of the left. Yelling about the war—good. Yelling about unborn babies—bad.

Look, I know the media wants us to think the 1960s were
some kind of organic garden of natural protests, but I have my suspicions. My gut tells me the whole era has been exaggerated, like a shitty bachelor party in the eighties that now has become the stuff of legend. (There hasn’t been a good bachelor party since … maybe ever.) And I know I’m right. There hadn’t been a truly organic protest movement in decades, and then around 2009, we had one. And the media laughed.

It was a volatile period a few years back, when the health care bill was rammed through Congress like a torn-up dollar bill in a Coke machine. In response, a few angry people dared to question the modes and methods of this bizarre event. The bill was written to be enormously long, so in fact no one dared read it for fear of dying from exhaustion. Even Nancy Pelosi, the real commander in chief (at least domestically) at this point, and the bill’s main promoter, confessed to not reading the monstrosity. Hell, she couldn’t even lift it. The way the bill was forced through passage made Caligula’s method of government seem positively modest—and he appointed a horse to the Senate. America sensed they’d just been snookered, and they were angrier than a wolverine with hemorrhoids.

And so all around the country, folks showed up at town hall meetings to question their representatives—and granted, it got pretty goofy. I hate it when people yell in public, especially when it’s me and I’ve had too much to drink and not enough clothing on. And normal folks shaking with rage, unnerving congressmen with shouted questions and insults, looked unseemly and rude.

But I had to give them some credit. In this case, they were right. They got bamboozled. I also forgive them for their rawness. It was a first-time thing, for almost all of them. They were not seasoned pros like Bill Ayers, Van Jones, or Barack Obama. These
were soccer moms, small-business owners, factory employees. You know, the 99 percent.

Now, you’d expect this sort of natural expression of outrage to be championed in the media. You’d expect reporters to look at these outbursts and draw teary-eyed comparisons to protests of the past, and announce in the paper of record that “the public is alive and well, and willing to confront government overreach.”

Yeah, right. The media saw the whole thing as comical. Who were these funny old people, and where did they come from? Some of them look like stunt doubles from late-night Hoveround commercials.

It became clear that tolerance for speaking truth to power only exists if it’s the power the media dislikes. Sure, you can laugh when an Iraqi throws a shoe at President Bush, but you’d better not call a Democratic congressman on the carpet. And worse, you’d better not question the imperatives of President Obama—the media’s Jesus, whose religion, of course, is big government. It’s the only religion the media seems to really fear (besides Islam).

Which is why, on some networks, you’d find a mocking smirk play on the faces of those reporting on the events. When these protests grew into Tea Party events, so did the media’s disdain for them. Remember CNN’s Susan Roesgen at a Chicago Tea Party back in 2009, accusing the crowd of hating her network, and interrupting the very people she came to interview? After getting nailed for it, CNN was forced to respond. A spokesperson named Christa Robinson said of Susan, “She was doing her job, and called it like she saw it.”

Yeah, that’s the problem. To quote Madge the manicurist describing how Palmolive softens your hands as you do the dishes, you don’t notice the bias, because, “you’re soaking in it.”

Why were the media so hard on the Tea Parties and the folks at the town halls? Well, the media loves it when a story matches their assumptions perfectly. And that story always starts and ends with race.

Fact is, the moment you bothered to question Obama, simply by questioning the bill, you were a hater—of black presidents, old people, infants, and ferrets. The health care bill was supposed to be good for us, and we refused to see it because of our unconscious hatred for anything different.

Or black.

And so if you didn’t support Obama’s massive health care overhaul, you were pretty much rejecting peace, love, and understanding. The idea of tolerance only applies to those who blindly follow the new agenda. But even more vile, your right to critically ask questions became inextricably linked to an undercurrent of bigotry: you hate health care reform because Obama is black. After all, most of these protests were filled with older white folk—certainly they must hate a black man. By using repressive tolerance as a weapon, many in the media were effectively trying to silence those who simply were expressing themselves over a messy, horrible bill that even liberals like Nancy Pelosi admit they didn’t read (can’t say I blame her—hard to move those eyes when they’re stuck in one position). These were the most benign protesters in the history of protesting, yet they were portrayed as an army of Archie Bunkers.

So if you want to see intolerance masked as tolerance, witness how the media treated the first real protest movement in years. If that uprising had been a liberal one, it would have garnered complete, slavish coverage, complete with tears, embedded reporters, and over-the-top documentaries. There would have been
analogies to the sixties, profiles of the participants, celebrity visits, and journalistic defectors.

And it did. That uprising did take place a few years later, in the form of Occupy Wall Street. The media took to it like basmati on rice. Hilariously, the media identified with the protests, and were more than willing to pay them the respect they refused to afford the health care protesters or those folks at the Tea Party events. But because the Tea Partiers were not young leftists, not under or over grads, or completely ignorant of the entire Rage Against the Machine discography, they were mocked.

Probably the most insidious part of all this is that the Tea Partiers were new to the world of political agitprop. Unlike those who agitated for animal rights, or at the WTO protests, these folks worked for a living. Amazingly, the media chose to mock those who for the first time in their lives left their living rooms to carry a sign. Meanwhile, they backed the clichéd establishment protester, the career sign-carrier, the one who protests for anything or everything as long as its motto somehow denigrates America. You would think the media would have been more tolerant to the newbies, and would have grown tired of the sameness of the predictable hacks that came before. Not on your life.

It’s why, to this day, in movies, you will never find an academic portrayed as a socialist propagandist. It’s why in any TV series, you will never find a journalist portrayed as a left-wing hack with preconceived notions about the innate badness of our country. You will never ever see a conservative who isn’t batshit crazy. You will never see a Christian who doesn’t want to jail gays (or isn’t secretly gay himself). Even though all of those examples are far more real than anything you’ll find being pumped out of Hollywood, or what Andrew Breitbart accurately called “the complex.”

This is because all of these examples—all representing a make-believe world where common sense reigns—cannot be tolerated. The town hall protesters and the Tea Partiers represented everything that the media had been ridiculing for the last forty years. They were their parents. These virgin protesters represented the media’s narrow-minded stereotypes of idiot Americans previously fabricated in classrooms. The Tea Party was just another example of the racist, closed-minded asshole. Now he’s off the recliner and in the street. And God and Abbie Hoffman help us—there are a lot of them. A flabby, gray army.

Compare that to how the media portrayed the union protesters in Wisconsin, where ghoulish signs and aggressive behavior were “tolerated,” because they were up against those who hate the “working man.” Never mind that those who were up against the unions were also “working men,” who grossly outnumber the sliver of the population belonging to public unions. They were deemed offensive because they were taking food, health care, and paychecks from struggling teachers. Teachers who have the whole summer off. It’s an intriguing contrast: As long as you’re on the side of those deemed most tolerant, you can pretty much act any way you want. If only I had known this earlier, I would have fully embraced leftism and become a protester, and I’d probably be having sex right now in a tent with a girl named after a flower. Or a guy. I’m sure, at that point, it won’t matter. I’ll have already ingested the bath salts.

HERE’S A JOKE:
Why did the feminist cross the road? Because the pedestrian light turned green and opposing traffic had stopped, making the distance traveled perfectly safe. (By law, all feminist jokes cannot be funny.)

Anyway, as you probably already know, feminists demand apologies over insults to women they like, but drag their heels if the victim herself isn’t part of the feminist brood. In a strange kind of mental contortionism, the concept of tolerance demands that you accept intolerant slander.

And this slander is spewing from people who, by proclaiming themselves feminists, get the FFP from the media. The Feminist Free Pass is the most insidious form of tolerance: as long as you toe the progressive line, you can be a FOP (a Full-On Pig). The most obvious offender was Bill Clinton, who proved that as long as you accept all the feminist tenets, you can treat women who aren’t your wife as receptacles for your errant, undisciplined sperm. If you’re a progressive, you can be the Johnny Appleseed of sexual conquest—from randy politicians like Teddy Kennedy, to celebrities who speak about women’s rights while banging drugged-up teens in hot tubs (see Roman Polanski). But what I find most entertaining, of course, is how celebrities, talking heads, and
assorted brainless activists can unload vicious vitriol on anyone who may not fall in line with their political assumptions—and get away with it.

Let us not forget America’s favorite rapist, Mike Tyson, who on ESPN radio brought down the house one day with his cogent analysis of what it would be like to manhandle Sarah Palin.

We won’t quote the maniac in full, because it’s gross. On the program, the hosts nimbly brought up a rumor about Palin. The conversation turned toward the wholesome, as Tyson figured Palin needed a stronger lover. He’s like a therapist! With a rape conviction!

My point: imagine, if you will, a conservative athlete had said the same thing about, say, Michelle Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or Hillary Clinton. Everyone at ESPN would have been fired. Especially since most of them were guffawing like pimply-faced teens in homeroom. But we can forgive them, for their hearts are in the right place. They’re libs. And so, instead, here in the primordial slime that spawned Keith Olbermann, they got a pass. Modern tolerance dictates that a liberal—even one that was convicted of rape like Tyson—gets away with this muck because his target is so reviled for being who she is. And who is she? Just a conservative chick who dared to challenge their anointed flag-bearer, Barack Obama.

Now, it’s hard to find someone who’s lower than Mike Tyson on the food chain. In fact, you’d have to venture into the animal world. I’d vote for maybe a mole, or perhaps some kind of hermaphroditic worm—so luckily there’s Larry Flynt. If Larry were a conservative, it would be perfectly acceptable to make light of his paralysis—he was shot, and now gets around town sunk in an expensive electric wheelchair. But since the man—famous
for a cover featuring a nude woman dropped in a blender—is for women’s rights (I’m fairly certain that boils down to letting chicks degrade themselves in
Hustler
), he’s now a folk hero with an Oscar-nominated movie about him. The great thing about tolerance: You can create the most vile pornography on the planet, and Hollywood will fall at your feet—in the name of … tolerance! Hence, he can get away with saying this about Palin and her disabled child: