by Greg Gutfeld
Having love in your heart doesn’t count for much if what comes out of your mouth is ugly and bigoted. I will be taking real action over the coming weeks and months in an effort to do everything I can both professionally and personally to help stamp out the kind of thoughtless bigotry I’ve so foolishly perpetuated.
What a performance.
Ratner continued:
I am grateful to GLAAD for engaging me in a dialogue about what we can do together to increase awareness of the important and troubling issues this episode has raised and I look forward to working with them.
Note: Whenever you see the word dialogue in a political context, you are in the presence of pure, unadulterated bullshit of the liberal variety. This is a scientific axiom, which I just made up.
Now, I have no proof to back this up, but I don’t believe Ratner wrote that letter. Also, the letter sucked. The suckiest part? Groveling to GLAAD. For saying “fags,” a hurtful word if words do “hurt.” Me, I would prefer a well-hurled epithet over a rock, crowbar, or empty wine bottle cracked over my head. But I realize that is not a fair comparison, and I apologize in advance. I will text you from Cambodia.
I said Ratner probably didn’t write the letter, and I may be wrong. But all the catchphrases are in there, and I can’t believe Ratner had that amazingly complex lexicon at the ready. Nope, he sat down with an expert in this malarkey and was told what to cut and paste. Either that, or Ratner went through the world’s fastest brainwashing session ever. Or perhaps he secretly worked for GLAAD all along and had planned the whole thing. If so, I take back everything I said: the man’s a genius.
Apparently, Ratner learned something in the last four or five years, other than how easy it is to sleep with B-list actresses. He knew the thing you gotta do, no matter what, is take the medicine, do the penance—even if the penance far outweighs whatever infraction you committed against the almighty tolerati.
For repressive tolerance, when violated, is the worst possible sin on the planet, and the penance must reflect that.
Two words must have echoed in Brett Ratner’s cavernous but empty skull: Isaiah Washington. You remember him, no? He was the actor who once starred in that hit show lonely women and their cats watch, called Grey’s Anatomy. He played the dreamy—I mean cocky—doctor Preston Burke.
Until he made a remark deemed outrageous by the Offense Police.
In October 2006, details emerged that Washington had called his costar T. R. Knight a faggot, or something like that. Washington apologized for the words, especially since Knight had only recently come out of the closet. But the apology wasn’t enough, because when you appear intolerant, you must suffer. You must lose something valuable, like your job. And yeah, Washington is black, which you’d think would offer him a little immunity, but in this day and age, gay trumps skin color, and he was going to suffer just like everyone else. Welcome to the tolerance sweepstakes, Mr. Washington. One wrong word and out you go.
Being interviewed on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, Washington joked that he wanted to be gay. “Please let me be gay,” he implored, probably beginning to understand his place in this new universe. He then denied he ever called Knight a “faggot.” But then Knight, in an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, said everyone heard him say it. So Washington apologized again, longer this time. Despite undergoing something called “executive counseling” (was it done at an airport Sheraton, with a free continental breakfast?), ABC announced the actor was dropped from the show.
So fast-forward five years and here I am at the gym, a few weeks or so after the Ratner controversy, and I look up at the TV in front of my stair-climber, and whom do I see? Mr. Washington, looking dapper with a beard and stylish glasses and a colorful shirt, appearing subdued yet relaxed, about to be interviewed by the delightful Fredricka Whitfield.
According to the CNN anchor:
It has been four years since actor Isaiah Washington starred in the hit television show Grey’s Anatomy as the self-assured Dr. Preston Burke. That is, until he made an offensive remark back in 2007. In his book A Man from Another Land, Washington talks about life after Grey’s Anatomy, the defeat, self-discovery, and his reawakening in West Africa. We talk face to face.
I guess Cambodia was too crowded with celebrities seeking “spiritual renewal.”
And there you have it. The penance for an argument in which the word faggot was used was a pilgrimage to Africa—that lasted four years. Yep, four years. For one word, that’s almost seven months per letter.
I’m sure what the actor did was ennobling—in the interview he talks about how he’s already “saved lives.” He said, “In fact, I have five hundred students in my school. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years. And to get excited about saving real lives, that is the biggest adrenaline rush that I could have for someone like me.”
And of course, none of this could have happened if it hadn’t been for him getting canned from Grey’s Anatomy, right, Fredricka?
WHITFIELD: Had that experience at Grey’s Anatomy not played out the way it did, would the inspiration to talk about this self-discovery or your mission and commitment to Sierra Leone have happened?
WASHINGTON: Obviously, my exit from Grey’s was a catalyst for sure. Even in loss you gain, even in loss you win, even in the “L” you get a “W.”
No. What we got was a “B” and an “S.”
And, there you go. From the utterance of one bad word, to self-imposed exile, to returning a changed man with a new book. Thank you repressive tolerance and cultivated outrage. Do you see the equation? The man says an offensive word and five hundred lives are saved. Hell, maybe that’s a good thing.
These are phenomena so powerful they forced Washington to get in touch with his own victimhood—how he felt “Unattractive, all of it. Broad nose, full lips, the whole thing,” from being a black man. And this guy’s a handsome guy, for chrissake. If this guy had misgivings about his looks—Jesus Christ—then what hope do I have in this world? On a scale of one to ten, he’s a thirteen! I must be hideous.
Anyway, this journey wasn’t just about his own homophobia but also his own insecurity, his own pain (conveniently focused on racial characteristics, which was Washington hopefully floating a little victimhood of his own past the tolerati). And maybe now that story will erase the story that forced him to create this story. And he get can back to acting!
And so what Washington has just gone through is the path that awaits Ratner, and Ratner knows it.
Does it help? Who knows. It probably doesn’t matter. Because the great thing about the whole cycle of Tolerance, Violation, and Penance is that there’s always a new culprit, a new flub that surfaces and threatens to swallow a career because it has hurt the wrong feelings. Why? Because another special interest group emerges every couple of years. It used to be, legitimately, blacks. Currently, it’s clearly gays. In a year or two, who knows? You’ll recognize it the first time you hear a celebrity telling an interviewer how he or she was made to feel “inferior” growing up but has now “come to peace with who I am.” “Comfortable in my own skin” is the modern go-to cliché. It could be dwarves (sorry, I mean little people). Or maybe very tall people (who now have support groups), or even Belgians. But it’ll arrive, rest assured. And as soon as some gay celebrity says the word midget and then appears crying on The View before boarding a plane to Cambodia or Sierra Leone, you’ll know we’re onto a new cycle. (Note: As I edit this, Rosie O’Donnell is just getting stick for the very thing—ragging on little people. She apologized.)
But you don’t even really have to hurt anyone’s feelings—the perception that a comment might is all that it takes. Consider CNN’s Roland Martin (wasn’t he on Laugh-In?), whose tweets were deemed offensive to gays.
Martin was suspended by CNN after GLAAD complained about his tweets during the 2012 Super Bowl. In response to an underwear ad featuring six-pack meat bucket David Beckham, Martin tweeted:
AIN’T NO REAL BRUHS GOING T
O H&M TO BUY SOME DAMN DAVID BECKHAM UNDERWEAR! #SUPERBOWL
He followed that with this charming missive:
IF A DUDE AT YOUR SUPER BOWL PARTY IS HYPED ABOUT DAVID BECKHAM’S H&M UNDERWEAR AD, SMACK THE ISH OUT OF HIM! #SUPERBOWL
As a middle-aged white guy, I don’t know what “ish” is—I assume it’s some sort of high-carb dip. At any rate, GLAAD tweeted to Martin that
ADVOCATES OF GAY BASHING HAVE NO PLACE AT @CNN
GLAAD smelled blood, and then issued a statement demanding Roland’s removal from his network, citing the fact that he once referred to homosexuality as “sinful behavior.” Martin claims he was only cracking on soccer—and by looking at the tacky tweets (and not being able to read his mind), we should probably take him at his word. It didn’t matter. CNN threw Roland to the wolves, writing:
LANGUAGE THAT DEMEANS IS INCONSISTENT WITH THE VALUES AND CULTURE OF OUR ORGANIZATION, AND IS NOT TOLERATED. WE HAVE BEEN GIVING CAREFUL CONSIDERATION TO THIS MATTER, AND ROLAND WILL NOT BE APPEARING ON OUR AIR FOR THE TIME BEING.
So how did Roland react? Did he jump up and fight back, condemning both his network and GLAAD for a witch hunt based on innocent, albeit stupid and unfunny tweets? Nope, his job was more important than his spine. And so he quickly announced he would be meeting with GLAAD, even adding that he would look forward to “having a productive dialogue.” There it is again—dialogue! Gutfeld’s first scientific axiom.
God I hate dialogue. Especially productive dialogue.
But by granting GLAAD an interview, Martin validated their outrage—a pathetic response done solely to protect his career. I don’t think it was a gay slur. But that doesn’t matter. His response, in the face of mounting pressure, made it a gay slur. So what if the joke was about a soccer player, and that player has a great body, which apparently makes him a gay icon? Which doesn’t follow. I mean, I have a great body. Godlike, really. Yet, I’m not a gay icon. Or if I am, nobody told me. I think they’d tell you, right?
Twitter seems to be rough turf these days for jokes, both good and bad. Remember the hysteria over the rise of Jeremy Lin, the undrafted fourth-stringer who scored at least 20 points in each of his first four games as a starter for the Knicks (this is lacrosse, right?). During that run, a sports columnist, Jason Whitlock, got a little too excited, tried too hard to be funny, tweeting this unfortunate but mildly humorous tweet:
SOME LUCKY LADY IN N-Y-C IS GONNA FEEL A COUPLE INCHES OF PAIN TONIGHT.
The joke, for those who don’t follow, is a play on a stereotype that Asians have, on average, smaller penises than other ethnicities. Not surprisingly, this tweet set off the Asian American Journalists Association president, Doris Truong: “Outrage doesn’t begin to describe the reaction of the Asian American Journalists Association to your unnecessary and demeaning tweet.”
Okay, if outrage doesn’t begin to describe the reaction, I wonder how Truong would feel about something that actually hurt someone—like a violent crime. I mean, she’s talking about a stupid tweet, for God’s sake—a tweet that probably never would have been noticed if it hadn’t been for her knee-jerk, over-the-top response.
These are words, people. These are jokes. If that joke had been told at a comedy club, it would have garnered laughs—likely from the Asians in the crowd. That’s the beauty of some racial humor—it’s a test of how much you can take and how little really gets to you. Talk to anyone in the military, on a sports team, or on a police force—this sort of stuff is tame compared to the insults they fling at one another when drunk or sober. The fact that this is deemed beyond outrage shows you how wimpy our culture has become, and how we’ve let the purveyors of repressive tolerance clamp down on the conversation.
But in order to keep your job, you gotta bow to these forces of fragile feelings. And Whitlock did. Following the AAJA cry of outrage, he wrote his own “meh” culpa, asking for a little understanding: “… I then gave in to another part of my personality—my immature, sophomoric, comedic nature. It’s been with me since birth, a gift from my mother and honed as a child listening to my godmother’s Richard Pryor albums. I still want to be a stand-up comedian.”
Yeah, me too. But that dream is about as likely to happen as my dream of being the first transgendered unicorn. And for God’s sake, you think Richard Pryor would’ve apologized for this? It would likely have been the mildest thing he ever said.
But these incidents raise more sad questions about modern America. Are we becoming a nation of wusses if we let a silly tweet get to us? And isn’t this more about the high we get from outrage, and the attention garnered when we cry foul? Could it be that Truong isn’t really as outraged as she claims? Isn’t that the real point—that repressive tolerance and fake outrage now mean every joke is an opportunity for attention, for sympathy, for justification of your organization? Are we really that friggin soft? You think Putin, or the Chinese, have noticed? (Yes.)
But come on, if you really feel outrage over that joke, how are you going to feel about a real issue? If we are to believe you are truly “beyond outrage,” then this makes your real rage entirely meaningless.
And last, who is hurt by all this? Not Lin. Not Asians. Just Whitlock. But I guess that’s the point. In the modern world of phony outrage and repressive intolerance, it’s all about feeling important, and waiting for the next person to screw up so you can do it all over again. We’ve become a nation of scolds, slavering to rat out whoever we feel is next to step out of line. How long until children start calling a hotline to report their parents for “insensitive remarks” overheard at home? If and when that happens, I’m moving to Alaska, where they don’t have phones.
I’M OKAY, YOU SHOULD DIE
IF YOU WANT TO SEE WHERE TOLERANCE STOPS and insanity begins, make fun of a celebrity on Twitter. Within minutes, the open-minded will erupt into outrage—the kind of response you’d expect from a mom watching a stranger slap her kid (which I’ve done on occasion). But of course these idiots don’t even know the star, and the star—usually coked to the gills—wouldn’t care if their fan lived or died. Yet the hopped-up outrage takes full bloom as if you’ve taken a hammer to a basket of kittens. Celebrities, after all, are America’s mythological heroes—divine figures residing on Mount Olympus, behind the Hollywood sign, under the benevolent gaze of the Zeus-like George Clooney and Hera-like Barbra Streisand. And as we all know, you don’t insult your god.
My favorite example of such tertiary outrage happened in August 2011, when Chris Brown, pop singer and chick-beater, tweeted about planking—the faddish practice of lying perfectly still on various surfaces, a pastime that could only catch hold in a very wealthy capitalist society suffused with self-irony (one suspects little planking in, say, Sudan). He wrote, and I paraphrase, that he’d love to be planking a beautiful woman. My friend Andy Levy responded in a tweet, “You spelled punching wrong.”
Now, let me first say: Wow, do I wish I’d written that line.
In an instant Brown had sent his minions—angry and easily excitable fans known as Team Breezy—after Levy. For one solid night they graced Levy’s Twitter feed with condemnations and threats, all spelled as only the current products of America’s school system could manage.
The irony was rich: These were all women defending a man who brutally beat a woman (the hot pop star Rihanna, who has a crush on me, which is getting embarrassing) and sent her to the hospital.
The next night, after craploads of vicious tweets, Levy fashioned a delightful false apology, which he read on our late-night show, further inflaming the masses—by merely pointing out the fact that they were more upset about a joke than about violence against women.
The result? Death threats—the glorious Internet phenomenon of misguided, disproportioned outrage. The bulk of these dames were sad women, sitting at home tweeting support for a creep who doesn’t give a damn about them.
Why the fake rage? Because it felt good. It felt good to get angry, and it felt good to target that anger at some late-night “Je
w.” Yep, you knew that would come up. Levy’s a Jew, which wasn’t lost on the outraged. What would they have done if they saw him on the street? Because manufactured outrage usually lives, then dies, on the Web—probably nothing.
But you never know.
And wishing death isn’t limited to groupies—even stars get into the act. Take Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong, a big star and a little person—in every sense—who, in front of thousands of fans at a concert in Lima, screamed that he couldn’t wait for Steve Jobs to die of “fucking cancer.” There was a video of it up on YouTube, but it’s since been removed. A year after saying that, Armstrong got his wish, and Jobs died of cancer at the age of fifty-six. There wasn’t a lot of press coverage on what this whiny troll spewed. There’s a reason for that. It’s A-OK.
First, let’s point out that Green Day is an especially left-wing band, which condemns evil corporations and the mindless automatons who work for them. So they’re okay. They reflect the Occupy Wall Street mentality that anything that makes a profit while wearing a tie (as opposed to a nose ring) must be evil. But how funny is it that Warner Bros. has removed the video from YouTube, in order to protect their product (because that’s what you are, Armstrong: a product). At this point, Armstrong should thank his lucky tattoos he isn’t eking out a living at the Shoe Tree.
And last time I checked, you can buy Green Day albums on iTunes, the brainchild of the man he wished dead. The bigger point: in the current climate of repressive tolerance, you can wish people dead—if they are the right people to wish dead and you’re the right person doing the wishing.
When Heath Ledger died, Bill Maher’s thoughtful comment was wishing that it had been Rush Limbaugh instead. He did this on his show, Real Time, and it bummed me out that no one on the panel actually said anything remotely critical of it. I’d like to think, if I had been there, I would have smacked him in his marsupial-like face. But I was told, as a child, never to fight people with marsupial-like faces. The saliva is infectious.