Demonic
Page 29
The media so lost their composure with Sarah Palin that they slipped and gave away their contempt for people who live in places they would never visit and know nothing about. They simply forgot themselves. Noticeably, no Democratic politicians ever attacked Palin the way the media did. Politicians are well aware that there are a lot more people in the country like Sarah Palin than there are like Frank Rich.
Naturally, the people most ostentatiously bothered by Sarah Palin’s purported idiocy were the most aggressive social climbers. Their pinup is Keith Olbermann, who was practicing radio at age six, while other boys were learning how to throw things and prevent girls from beating them up. Keith neurotically cites his nonexistent “Ivy League education” while ridiculing others for their stupidity.
When he was still employed at MSNBC, Keith had a four-page typewritten sheet taped to the outside of his office door titled “People Who Watch This Show,” followed by a list of low-level celebrities. He is the sort of person who would write Mensa to argue that he should be admitted (and misspell “Mensa”). Now his fans are lost, adrift, unsure whom they’re supposed to hate in order to impress Rolling Stone magazine.
Appealing to the herd is irresistible to the alternative prom crowd on MSNBC. These are people who have been awkward throughout their entire lives. They laugh a little too hard at jokes that aren’t funny, and get too excited at minor flubs by their enemies. Usually, the socially maladroit don’t hurt anyone and, with luck, will eventually find someone who appreciates their license plate collections.
No one enjoys picking on dorks. But the nightly smirkathons on MSNBC canceled out the usual solicitude. Things change when the lonely nerds decide they will lash out at the world from their sets at MSNBC.
As the famous psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says, “We are impressed not only by the innocence but also by the cruelty of children. An adult who delights in picking the wings off flies is correctly deemed sadistic and suspected to be evil. A child of four who does this may be admonished but is considered merely curious; the same action from a child of twelve is cause for worry.”31
Sure that someday he would be quoted like Oscar Wilde, in 2009, Olbermann manfully ripped into twenty-year-old Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean, night after night, giggling mercilessly with the Village Voice’s Michael Musto in their gay coffee klatch about how stupid Prejean was.
Musto: This is the kind of girl who sits on the TV and watches the sofa. She thinks the innuendo is an Italian suppository.…
Olbermann: The moral in this is, what, never cross a beauty pageant official who knows you’ve had implants?
Musto: Yes, exactly, that’s it. This has escalated to a public shaving.… They also paid for Carrie to cut off her penis, and sand her Adam’s Apple, and a get head-to-toe waxing.… Now he’s a babe who needs a brain implant. Maybe they could inject some fat from her butt? Oh, they have?
Olbermann: I didn’t like her earrings.32
That’s not Oscar Wilde: That’s what gets your face smashed in and your lunch money taken away in high school. But Keith thought he had achieved such comedy gold that he replayed that segment on four other shows.33
I guarantee that Carrie Prejean is no dumber than Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, or Naomi Campbell, who are treated like a virtual Bloomsbury group by the elites. This is not a criticism, just a suggestion to cut the crap with conservative Christians like Prejean.
Liberals are people whose entire lives are consumed with following the crowd. Otherwise, how will they get a reputation for speaking truth to power?
Ever since David Letterman has become a tired old hack, watched by people about to collect Social Security, he has specialized in cheap applause. In June 2009, Letterman told this knee-slapper about Sarah Palin going to a Yankees game with her daughter: “There was one awkward moment during the seventh-inning stretch: her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”
Except Bristol, the Palin daughter who got pregnant out of wedlock, wasn’t at the game. Fourteen-year-old Willow was. And Rodriguez hasn’t gotten anyone pregnant out of wedlock. The only way the joke works is if you’re willing to accept that being a compulsive womanizer is close enough to getting girls pregnant and Willow Palin is close enough to Bristol Palin.
But Letterman was bullying the daughter of a hated Republican, so the audience knew it was supposed to laugh at the lame joke. The New York Times “ethicist” couldn’t even acknowledge it lacked the basic elements of a joke, explaining that even though Willow isn’t Bristol, and dating women isn’t impregnating them, “a joke is a form of fiction, the punch line a contrivance: the bartender was not actually talking to the duck. A premise, too, can be invented: a man with a duck did not really walk into a bar.”34
Yes, but if the talking duck runs into Alex Rodriguez and Willow Palin in the bar, Willow can’t suddenly become Bristol and Rodriguez can’t become John Edwards.
How about a joke about Obama getting smashed? Did I miss something—is he a drinker? No, it’s just funny that he’s drunk. But he isn’t known for being a drunk.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Obama were cleaning a gun and it went off and hit Michelle in the shoulder? But that didn’t happen.
What if Harry Reid was in a hotel room with Nancy Pelosi? Then we could go to town! Yes, the only problem is: It didn’t happen.
How about a joke about Amy Fisher being at Yankee Stadium with Palin? But she wasn’t there. Neither was Bristol Palin.
This isn’t a question of whose ox is gored. A joke is supposed to start with actual events and then veer into fiction for the punch line. Here’s Jay Leno’s joke on Palin’s pregnant daughter: “Governor Palin announced over the weekend that her seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. And you thought John Edwards was in trouble before!”35 That makes sense because Palin’s seventeen-year-old daughter had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and Edwards, unlike A-Rod, had impregnated his mistress.
If art is going to confuse anyone, by rights it should confuse stupid people.* But the only people who could possibly find Letterman’s Palin joke funny were idiots who don’t know Bristol Palin had a child out of wedlock and who don’t know that A-Rod hasn’t gotten any of his girlfriends pregnant. Stupid people get to laugh and smart people can’t because they’re wondering, “Wait—was Bristol at the Yankees game? Did A-Rod get someone pregnant? Did I miss a news story?”
Letterman’s writers have gone from Olympian in the early days, to imitators in the middle years, to finger-in-the-wind hacks who want to go home early in the later years. But as long as they attack mob-approved targets, everyone pretends not to notice.
Indeed, like the high school bullies studied by researchers at University of California at Davis, some liberals were psychologically compelled to describe Letterman’s provably unfunny joke as hilarious out of a desperate quest for popularity.
Pleading over the airwaves for Letterman to have him on, Dick Cavett—inventor of the “name drop”—called the lame joke “witty” and “wonderful” and said he would do the joke himself if he had one as good “as delivered by Letterman’s writers.” Being his own Boswell, Cavett then repeated the jokes “most people remember” from his own column on Palin. (Illustrating why he’s not in the top status group, Dick Cavett said, “I thought that referring to Sarah’s slutty stewardess looks probably was over the line,” adding, “I think he should apologize for that. Not to her, but to the stewardesses.” Ba-da-bump!)36
Air America’s Sam Seder proclaimed Letterman’s bomb of a joke—“in the final analysis”—“a funny joke.” He boasted that jokes about Palin were “like T-ball … it’s not even softball. I mean, she just literally holds it out there.” (Literally!) And yet, he was unable to come up with any jokes himself, easy as it was—literally.37
How about a Top Ten list for Dave’s “Late Show interns I would have knocked up if they weren’t on the pill because no woman could stand having a child who
looks like me”? Just a few months after making nonsensical jokes about Palin’s daughter getting “knocked up,” it came out that Letterman had been carrying on with interns and other Late Show female employees for years, despite having a wife—who had also worked for him—and child on the side. The only way Dave can get a woman to sleep with him is by preying on women underneath him professionally, who want to move up.
A certain kind of idiot thinks he’s made a great intellectual point by saying, “Follow the money.” Every bush-league Marxist assumes the only reason anyone ever does anything is for money. But as we have seen, lots of people also behave certain ways to be megalomaniacal and suck up to the New York Times.
Once you have a certain amount of money, all kinds of things become more important to you than the next dollar—being thought of as a sensitive, cool, deeply caring person, for example. People will spend a lot of money to hang out with actresses. They will never spend so much that they become part of the middle class themselves, mind you. But the very rich have a long way to go before facing that calamity.
It’s a simple equation: Do you, fabulously rich person, want to be hated like Republicans Richard Mellon Scaife and David and Charles Koch—or do you want to be widely admired as a great philanthropist and lover of mankind like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates?
As Eugene Lyons described the posh opinion in favor of the Soviet Union in the thirties, “Marx and martinis, bridge and dialectics, social consciousness and social climbing were all mixed up on the banks of luxurious private swimming pools.”38
Poseurs are everywhere—Wall Street Marxists, the chubby college coed wailing about global warming, the MSNBC host posting on his door a list of semifamous people who watch his show, other MSNBC hosts holding nightly smirkathons in order to bond with their insecure viewers, and professors defending morons with ed school degrees while denouncing actually educated conservative speakers in the name of freedom of speech. All this is the result of groupthink.
Mobs “stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects,” Le Bon says, and the “popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain.” The power of prestige “entirely paralyses our critical faculty, and fills our souls with astonishment and respect.”39 The weak-minded just go with the crowd, ridicule the designated scapegoats, and then pass out awards to one another for their courage.
The same mob mentality that leads otherwise law-abiding people to hurl rocks at cops also leads otherwise intelligent people to refuse to believe anything they haven’t heard on NPR. To improve their social standing with the crowd, people will passionately assert whatever the official groupthink position is. Power today comes not from the guillotine, but from self-regard.
*Anonymous.
FIFTEEN
INHERITORS OF THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION
LIBERALS MOBS
Democrats are heirs to the French Revolution, the uprising of a mob. Conservatives are heirs to the American Revolution and the harmonious order of a republic. (Even the flakiest, most out-of-step, financially irresponsible founding father, Thomas Jefferson, was an apparent God-believer, immediately taking him out of the running as a modern Democrat.)
That’s why liberals avoid mentioning the French Revolution, except to absurdly claim that it was in the great tradition of the American Revolution—everyone move along now, there’s nothing to see here.
Every single American knows about the Third Reich, a more recent and more efficient barbarism than the French Revolution. But Hitler got his playbook from Robespierre, as did all the great liberal “reformers” of the twentieth century, from Lenin to Hugo Chávez. It was the Rousseauian idea of a few select individuals exercising the “general will” that gave the world the gulag, the concentration camp, the killing fields, the reeducation camps, and corpse upon corpse, without end.
And yet for all it is studied, the French Revolution might as well be a history of the Maori settlements of New Zealand.
Cornell University doesn’t have a single course on the French Revolution in the 2010–11 academic year. It has fifteen on Asia, including “Pop Culture in China” and “East Asian Martial Arts.” Isn’t the French Revolution at least as important as “A Social History of Food and Eating” or “Women and Black Nationalism in the United States”?1 The French Revolution was the precursor to Women and Black Nationalism in the United States! But liberals don’t want anyone to make that connection, so we never hear about the French Revolution, except in chirpy op-eds on Bastille Day claiming the French Revolution was the spitting image of the American Revolution.
With dozens of course offerings, UCLA’s history department doesn’t have a single course on the French Revolution, or even a course that would seem to cover Western Europe during that period. There are courses on European history in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as from 1450 to 1660. And there’s a Western Civilization class covering the period up to 1715. But if you want to know what was happening outside of the United States circa 1750 to 1800, you’re limited to Latin America or Africa. The UCLA history department doesn’t seem to be short on teaching staff: It offers classes on American Indian Peoples, Philippine History, History of Chicano Peoples, and Armenian History.2 But no history of the French Revolution.
Even at America’s premier university, Harvard, the history department offers only one course on the French Revolution. There are three classes on Germany, two on Vietnam—and seven history courses on “women” or “gender,” including “Women Acting Globally” and “Gender, Migration and Globalization in 20th Century U.S. History.”3
It would be as if the nation’s math departments decided algebra was superfluous knowledge. The French Revolution is not only a gripping story, full of warnings for any civilized society, but remains the template for every bloody totalitarian dictatorship to this day. France was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, important nations in the world in the eighteenth century. And then the rabble destroyed it. Isn’t that an interesting story?
In the blink of an eye, a great civilization was reduced to rubble, its most valuable citizens dead or living elsewhere. In the course of France’s short revolution, 600,000 French citizens were killed and another 145,000 fled the country.4 That’s in a country with between 24 and 26 million people, about the current population of Texas. In terms of population loss, that would be the equivalent of the United States having a 9/11 attack every day for seven years.
In the American Revolution, fewer than 10,000 died in battle and another 10,000 died of disease or exposure during the war. And our king was fighting back! France’s king capitulated immediately, but the revolutionaries proceeded to liquidate more than half a million of their fellow citizens anyway, in what the revolutionary leaders themselves called the “Terror.” Tories fled America during our Revolution, but no one tried to massacre their remaining relatives.
How did the nation of Voltaire, Descartes, Pascal, and Molière transform itself into a bloody saturnalia overnight? This is a question liberals don’t want us to think about.
The inheritors of the French revolutionary tradition always adhere to the same basic program. Psychopaths from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong to Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro have used the rabble to grab power, with essentially the same justification, the same objectives, and the same bloody results.
All these monsters were praised in the pages of the New York Times and enthusiastically supported by the Democratic Party.
Stalin’s crimes were lied about in the famous reportage of the Times’s Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for calling the forced starvation of an estimated 15 million Ukrainians a false rumor.5
In 2003, the Pulitzer Prize board came under pressure from Ukrainians—those Stalin hadn’t killed—to revoke the prize based on Duranty’s having covered up genocide. That’s a rare transgression even among Times reporters.
In response, the New York Times hired a Columbia University history profess
or, Mark von Hagen, to review Duranty’s articles and recommend whether the Times should return the prize. Von Hagen, an expert on early-twentieth-century Russian history, reviewed most of Duranty’s articles from 1931 and produced an eight-page report.
He concluded that Duranty had uncritically parroted “the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime”; that his objective had been to goad the United States into establishing formal relations with the USSR; that he had a lover working for the Soviet secret police; that he inflated Stalin’s accomplishments while hiding mass murder; and that he gave his imprimatur to a “dull and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources.” Von Hagen concluded, naturally, that the prize should be rescinded, saying, unironically, “They should take it away for the greater honor and glory of the New York Times.”
The Times came back and asked Von Hagen if he thought the prize should be returned, taking into account only those articles for which the Pulitzer had been awarded. Von Hagen said yes, the prize should be returned on the basis of those articles alone.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the Times, then wrote to the Pulitzer board that he had decided to keep the award. To return it, he said, would be the same as the “Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories.” Times executive editor Bill Keller agreed with the nincompoop’s rationale, saying, “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps.”6
Von Hagen replied incredulously in a letter to the editor, “Airbrushing was intended to suppress the truth about what was happening under Stalin. The aim of revoking Walter Duranty’s prize is the opposite: to bring greater awareness of the potential long-term damage that his reporting did for our understanding of the Soviet Union.”7 The Times held Von Hagen’s letter for two weeks before publishing it.