The Joy of Hate (8 page)

Which raises an interesting question: Would Stewart have announced his event if those Tea Party events had had a decidedly liberal tilt?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Nooooooooooo.

The evidence for this is pretty simple: there would have been no rally at all, if the Dems were doing great. There would have been no rally if no one raised a hackle (whatever that is) about health care reform. Stewart was responding to hostility to the Obama administration. The anger, to Stewart, seemed disproportionate to the actual cause. And he could be right—except that he’s never done it before.

Which makes the joke wear thin, at least to me. Think about it: What Stewart is doing is not speaking truth to power but poking fun at the people who are speaking truth to power. I mean, Stewart isn’t going after politicians, he’s mocking people who are. While the Tea Party is a bottom-up phenomenon, Stewart is actually on the very, very top looking down. His rally was a reaction from the establishment, not against it. He’s saying, “Come on, man—we got a cool president. You people are raging dorks. Why are you rocking the boat? You’re not the ones who get to do that—we are! You aren’t the ones we were waiting for!”

Here’s more proof: Leading up to Stewart’s event, Democrats actually complained that the rally might hurt their chances in the midterm elections. They worried that their supporters would be more inclined to focus on the rally before the election rather than campaign or vote. The rally would, in effect, replace the election
in that feel-good exercise called “doing your part.” It would be like eating dessert before dinner.

And maybe the Dems were right. They got trounced. But I’m pretty sure those results had to do more with anger toward the administration and less with Stewart’s goofing around with his celebrity pals on the political stage. In the end: no one cared. A bunch of libs got to have their “cool kid” status confirmed, Stewart boosted his ratings for a few days, and Colbert trotted out his talking-like-a-republican-is-a-parody-in-itself schtick. I guess to some it never gets old. And even I admit it makes me giggle.

But this is what passes for rebellion in media, which is really just making fun of people in fanny packs who prefer Sarah Palin over Sarah Silverman. That’s the line that’s drawn, and it’s one I cross all the time. I think Palin is delightfully quirky and Silverman viciously funny. I also sympathize with Palin’s constant humiliations by the tolerant cool set (I can’t think of a single public figure other than Palin whose disabled child is such a gleeful object of derision), and see Silverman resort too many times to lazy PC humor in order to get a drive-by laugh from a pliant audience. I find both women invigorating, but it’s clear one is more a victim of intolerance than the other. And someone needs to tell Silverman that her fascination with her bodily functions isn’t mirrored in the public at large (exception: the fat dude at tech support. I wish he’d stop telling me about it).

So that rally was not for me. The bottom line of its existence: “We’re cool, they’re crazy.” In other words, we pretend to be tolerant, but everyone who disagrees with us is a crazy racist in a tricorn hat. The true irony: In an event where the goal was to celebrate getting along and peachy-keen tolerance, they invited Yusuf Islam, previously known as Cat Stevens, to sing. A beacon
of intolerance, he encouraged the assassination of Salman Rushdie over his tome
The Satanic Verses
, which he found to be critical of Islam. He is about as peaceful as the guy who hangs out on the corner of my street shouting at lampposts. But he’s been around long enough, and he used to be Cat Stevens so he’s cool. He’s one of them! A violent extremist—but fun nonetheless! He plays acoustic guitar! How cool is it to have the guy who sang that song you used to make out to in the dorms back in the eighties! And how lucky we are to have prolonged our college years indefinitely!

The media, however, was having too good a time with the whole circus to really give a damn about that, because that circus was one that they wanted to be part of. And I’m including even a few of my friends who attended the rally. (And by “friends,” I mean people I now plan on mailing unsolicited magazine subscriptions to.) According to them, it was good, clean, hip fun. People were friendly, the mood was upbeat, the girls were pretty. The event was a huge success. And a 100,000-strong circle jerk.

Which, because that takes stamina, reminded me of my past at Rodale—a health publishing company. While I was an editor there, I was one of a handful of conservatives, out of a company of thirteen hundred people. The folks there were mostly young, cool, and sinewy—just like the others I worked with while running
Stuff
and
Maxim UK
(but without the cocaine). Some were “make our voices heard” types, or “awareness raisers,” or “rally attendees.”

My point: Every single day of my life was a Jon Stewart rally. I knew Jon Stewart, figuratively—before the world did. Everyone around me was pleasant, usually white, and always reveling in their reflexive assumptions about the “rest” of less hip America. Which translates, of course, as most of America, particularly
between the coasts. Yep, they were my people when we drank and did assorted narcotics in various Midtown dive bathrooms. But when they would find out who I would be voting for (usually by asking me, and then staring at me in disbelief), they’d give me the “You can’t be serious. Come on, man.” And when I didn’t respond the way they wanted, they’d turn into Jon Stewarts en masse.

That’s why, when I watched Stewart’s rally, I just thought, “Same old same old.” Who needs it? I also finally discovered where all those people I stopped hiring for freelance work ended up.

There was a real divide between two groups: The Tea Party was about candidates; the sanity rally was about celebrity. More important, the Tea Party was a civilian reaction to our government’s sprint toward progressivism. The rally, however, was a celebrity reaction to those civilians.

The rally boiled down to a comical intolerance of people who just aren’t cool. The Tea Party! I mean, these people bowl—unironically! It was all just too Marie Antoinette for me—rich, smug celebrities and their Coldplay-loving acolytes giving a collective smirk to their hapless parents, who just never got with the program.
Mom, Dad … what are we going to do with you?

So the real title of the event shouldn’t have been The Rally to Restore Sanity but The Rally to Ignore Insanity. Because that was the message. The Tea Partiers are reacting to alarming stuff: the insane spending, the bottomless deficit, weird appointments of people like Van Jones (with a deep antipathy toward Western values), political arrogance—it’s real anxiety over real trouble for future offspring. True, the problem started way before Obama, but did it get any better? We’ve got trillions more in debt, and a brand-new entitlement bill engineered by Nancy Pelosi that no
one bothered to read. And those who were ringing the alarm were just average citizens.

Stewart’s rally says, “Ignore that. Check out Cat Stevens!” With a load of flashy entertainment and edgy personalities—they’re the band playing on the
Titanic
, enjoying the applause while we approach the iceberg (i.e., Greece, or an actual iceberg).

Of course, maybe I’m just biased. Back in June 2011, Jon Stewart debated a news anchor at my place of employment over media bias. He stated that doing
The Daily Show
is harder than what my coworkers do. But, sorry, in my opinion, the first and only preparation
The Daily Show
does is making jokes about people the writers disagree with. Though I didn’t do a survey, I can bet that all of his writers are liberal—so all you’re going to get are jokes targeted at people they find ridiculous. Conservatives. The uncool.

Stewart—in his tussles with various anchors at the nework—made a big issue about them laying off President Bush while going after Obama—which, as I’ve said before in other places, is nuttier than squirrel poop. Let’s not forget that while Bush was president, he was trashed by a left-wing posse who delighted in military defeat, for it meant their side was winning. To them, dissent was patriotic even if it meant dead troops. As many have pointed out, if the casualties during World War Two were reported the same way they were during Iraq, we’d all be speaking Belgian. (We fought Belgium, right? Or was it Mexico? I majored in English Lit.)

My network wasn’t ignoring Bush’s actions. Maybe it was reacting to what I would call Patriotic Terrorism. I saw a fully realized, anti-America lynch mob who would rather win an election than a war, and that made me more of a righty than 9/11, my life at Berkeley, and all my head injuries combined.

Want to see proof of my point? Ask yourself where is this feverish antiwar movement now that Obama got into power. Obama has killed more terrorists than anyone in recent memory (God bless him for that), and you don’t hear much of a peep from anyone other than Michael Moore (who even Karl Marx would have termed a commie pinko). Gitmo is still open, doing more business than your local Hampton Inn, but that ceases to be an issue now that their guy is in office. Remember, Gitmo was the albatross around Bush’s neck—now it’s the puka shells around Obama’s neck (a shout-out to his tiny island nation, Hawaii). As of this writing, we’re still losing troops in Afghanistan, for purposes ever more attenuated from our original mission there. Where’s the outrage? The “not in our name” marches? The judging on
Dancing with the Stars
gets more scrutiny.

On one of my shows, a cohost took issue with my accusation that Stewart was smarmy. He said, “Smarmy is one word. I’d say brave. He came into the lion’s den and defended himself.”

Which isn’t surprising. My cohost, whom I love like a demented little brother, is like everyone I worked with in media—someone who considers himself apolitical, until he runs into someone like me, who isn’t a liberal. Apolitical, in the media, means decidedly liberal and not used to being challenged. So I get that he sees Stewart as brave. But this is no lion’s den—because the lion’s den is the world that contains my network. Think about it: A few years back, the
New York Times
ran a piece pointing out the dearth of conservatives in journalism, theater, therapy, and academia. Which, considering the collective output of those fields, I would take as a resounding compliment. You’ve had, for a long spell, a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, a Democrat for president, a liberal media, a left-wing
Hollywood, a liberal arts and music culture. You’ve got it all, and you’re mad because one entity isn’t playing ball? What happened to that whole “Dissent is patriotic” thing? It seems we only look right because everything else is left. Stewart (and my cohost) are both blissfully unaware of their own biases because, cue Madge, they’re soaking in it. Stewart coming into the “lion’s den” of an atypical network was about as “brave” as the Soviet Union invading Hungary. And no matter how hard a time Stewart may have gotten there, he knew 95 percent of the media had his back. His “schooling” of those guys was heroic. I’ll bet the columns lauding Stewart’s rally were written the night before it happened.

And more amazingly, even with the deck so stacked in their favor, the left still can’t seal the deal. Because their message just doesn’t jibe with the American public, whose center-right stances are revealed in poll after poll. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory—this is a collapse of Red Soxian magnitude.

A perfect example of the mythical tolerant media type can be found in the JournoList scandal—a blip in the battle of media bias that you probably never heard of (nor had to hear of, if you, unlike me, have a life). The JournoList scandal was a microcosm of the media’s inherent bias. Imagine if a group of conservative reporters conspired to undermine their political adversaries by making up rumors that they’re racist scum. Once unmasked, they would be condemned to unemployment. However, JournoList was a group of liberal writers and bloggers who did that exact thing. In short, it was a group of insider-y writers and bloggers who belonged to an online salon—something dorks do to feel less dorky. But within this goofy cabal, members were secretly encouraging one another
to call out anyone they disagreed with as intolerant, as a bigot, as a racist. Once exposed by other bloggers, they disbanded—but not without a strong defense made by friends in the media. Fact is, here you had a tolerant group of people preaching intolerance against those who disagree with them—and actually encouraging a particularly vile dishonesty to achieve their ideological objectives.

And can you just picture them meeting to plan this thing? How palpable do you suppose the “dangerous lefty cell” pretensions were? I bet they were smoking their allotted four cigarettes a year, wearing berets. I can almost hear the zither music.

But the bigger issue … was that it wasn’t seen as a big issue. Come on, they’re the cool kids, just going after the uncool kids! If you disagree with them, you probably are a loathsome bigot, so even if you’ve never said a racist thing in your life, you’re thinking of it anyway. We can tell. But the fact is, if you’re so confident in your beliefs, then this idea of creating a secret society of journalists to go after your enemies would be unnecessary. Apparently, McCarthyism is entirely acceptable, if you’re cool.

This thinking can be found elsewhere, primarily with the left-wing outfit Media Matters, which, in memos, has expressed a desire to pry into the personal lives of conservatives in media, simply because we don’t share their assumptions. This should have been a bigger deal than it was, but it wasn’t because everyone in the media feels the same way. If Media Matters had targeted a Brooklyn food co-op, it would be another matter. The fact is, MSNBC relies on Media Matters so heavily, as do other liberal writers at various major networks, that it allows this modern McCarthyism to exist. And I’m not referring to Joe McCarthy. I’m referring to the dummy—Charlie McCarthy. For Media Matters
is the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and the liberal media is the dummy, moving its lips while the noise is supplied by the most progressive outfit since the Nehru jacket. At least Charlie was more of an independent thinker (something that I don’t think Edgar ever got used to—tragic how that ended).