by Greg Gutfeld
But there was a problem: All the stuff in books and television portrayed James not as a killer at all but as a romantic outlaw. For a kid, Jesse James was cool because our culture made it so. Never mind the murders he committed; he lived outside our boring society, above the law, and did what he wanted. This was the definition of cool, not just for Bobby but for anyone enamored by the revolutionary groups erupting in the late 1960s to early ’70s—from the Weather Underground, to the Black Panthers, to the horrible cast members of Zoom (precursor to the Branch Davidians). As long as cool is defined as anything but doing “what you’re told to do by the man,” then anything is accepted as laudable behavior. Killing becomes not a crime but an act of political heroism—a strike against a suffocating, corrupt world bent on killing your soul.
So being the great dad he is, Mike Brady does his research, finds a relative of one of James’s victims, and brings him to their multilevel house, to give Bobby the unvarnished truth. (Okay, the show wasn’t noted for its realism.) The relative, an old guy played by a great character actor named Burt Mustin, grimly retells how Jesse James shot his daddy in the back. He’s sexy, in a male Angela Lansbury sorta way.
The story doesn’t seem to shake Bobby. He still prefers to embrace the lies rather than accept the ugly truth of his obsession. It’s not until Bobby has a nightmare, in which the killer murders the Bradys during a train robbery, that he changes his mind. (In the scene, actors use fingers as guns. I read somewhere that the directors believed guns would be too unsettling. Can you imagine?) This is the kind of remedy that comes from meeting a victim. It brings the horror home. I remember Bobby’s dream as if it were my own. I remember being shaken by the episode, so much so that I didn’t play cowboys and Indians for a month. I might be exaggerating. Either way, I took up hopscotch. Then, later, Scotch.
To this day, I always wonder why this isn’t the law of the land. Celebrities and activists who adore violent radicals should be forced to meet the relatives of the people killed by those adorable violent radicals. Have Robert Redford meet the relatives of the victims of the Weather Underground. Let’s see how brave the Sundance Kid really is. He certainly had no problem making a movie (The Company You Keep) based on those creeps. (I’ll get to that in a sec.) Let the idiots who think the Boston terror bombing is a “false flag operation” meet the victims of the attack. They’d shit in their camo cargo pants.
In the 1970s, the glorification of rogue violence was no longer an exclusively male pursuit. The modern “you go, girl” sentiment was evident in the Manson Family, which had a fair contingent of young, vicious females. And even today, the violent female archetype is seen as cool by Hollywood’s most vacuous minds. Director Harmony Korine put out a movie in 2012 about college women in bikinis committing crimes, called Spring Breakers. The plot is just an exercise in “hot moronism” (i.e., attractive people getting away with things that ugly people would be shot for). A drug dealer/rapper (played by the human comma James Franco) bails four female college students out of jail, which of course leads to a tawdry, repetitive crime spree. The hook to this flick was not just the plot but a gimmick: the casting of Disney stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens in sleazy, non-Disney fare. It’s like casting Barney the Dinosaur in a bestiality flick (which may happen—I hear he’s broke). Spring Breakers covers all the titillating bases (sex, nudity, profanity, drugs), with nubile Disney lasses doing the dirty work. This is their way of closing a mainstream door while opening an “edgy” window. And it’s a window to cool, which ultimately leads to nowhere. Or to Miley Cyrus and her vacuous, speckled tongue. Seriously, that’s not a tongue, it’s a European conger.
At least that movie was pure fiction—a product of a stale imagination. The worst kind of creation, however, is a fictionalized account based on true events. Translation: The director, unhappy about how the real events turned out, changed it to make it cool.
A recent example is Robert Redford’s 2012 flick, The Company You Keep, based on the exploits of the Weather Underground—a group of sordid terrorists who tried to bomb the Pentagon, NYPD stations, Fort Dix, and the US Capitol in the 1970s. Through their own ineptitude, they killed a few of their own members (trying to make a bomb in a town house), but they killed innocent victims too. How is this portrayed in Redford’s thoughtful flick? As a “thriller.” Hmmm … I wonder who he’s rooting for?
Here’s the plot, as retold in the New York Post by Michelle Malkin (who nailed it): A robbery is attempted in the late 1970s by some made-up members of the Underground, who end up killing an off-duty cop in the process. Jim Grant, one of the terrorists, assumes a fake identity and goes on the run. The flick ends up being about Grant’s struggle to free himself from his past. No doubt, it’s highly sympathetic (I’m working here from a movie summary, for I made a vow years ago not to see any movies starring Robert Redford or Susan Sarandon unless they are documentaries that culminate in them being eaten alive in a vat of European congers).
Malkin contrasts the horrid flick with the facts, which will likely go unnoticed by the moviegoing public. Facts like these: In the real-life robbery on which the movie is loosely based, three innocent men were murdered in Nyack, New York—two cops and one security guard. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, the criminals, were sent to prison. Before this, Boudin was present when three people were killed after a homemade bomb went off in her house. She was paroled in 2003, after she was able to convince a sympathetic judge that she was also a victim, paralyzed by white guilt, which caused her to lash out at a society unfair to blacks. What’s lost here: One of the men killed by the “revolutionary” was black. Malkin adds: “Waverly Brown served in the Air Force after the Korean War and had two grown daughters and a teen son when he died in the brutal shootout.” The other victims left behind full families as well. Edward O’Grady and Peter Paige were also veterans, both leaving behind a wife and three kids. Nine kids, total, without dads. Thankfully, Redford’s movie bombed. He deserves worse, really. He deserves to spend an hour stuck in an elevator with Waverly Brown’s widow. Maybe he’d lecture her on climate change.
No one’s heard from the victims again, but Kathy Boudin’s brat son Chesa has done okay for himself. His adoptive parents are Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, also Weather Underground thugs and pals to the president. Chesa attended the best schools, feted by academia, which sees him as royalty. The odious offspring still defends the thugs that are his parents. All in the name of fighting “US imperialism.” Redford’s fictionalized story adopts the same perspective: Variety called the flick, as Malkin reports, “an unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism.” (There’s an endorsement—“competent.”) It gets worse, with the paper adding, “There is something undeniably compelling, perhaps even romantic, about America’s 60s radicals and the compromises they did and didn’t make.” I’d barf, but my vomit’s too valuable to waste on this crap.
How does this poisonous, idiotic perspective still persist, when we can find the real consequences of such crimes through a basic Google search? Perhaps that’s the engine behind this enterprise: People don’t bother looking up the facts, at all. Certainly Variety writers don’t. Rather than look for the real story, people watch the flicks that whitewash the story and prevent them from knowing what really happened. That’s why Redford has no problem creating a fictionalized account. Because he knows no one will bother to research the facts, least of all the lefty media that adores him. In order to preserve the illusion that the 1960s and 1970s rebellion against societal norms was heroic, as opposed to toxic, this is what you have to do: Eliminate the truth and replace it with legend. You replace the gore with lore. And churn out vanity projects that attempt to preserve your cool as you enter your crusty seventies.
Redford’s maxim is reflexive and predictable: When any organization pits itself politically (or even violently) against the boring and mundane structures that hold society together, you simply root for those who wish to destroy it. It’s romantic, it’s cool, it mak
es you appear thoughtful. When, really, it just makes you banal. And brutal. You are just another useful idiot, a pawn for destructive forces.
Which brings me to Angela Davis: Black Panther, Communist Party leader, and loving lackey to a murderer.
Angela Davis was a lover of George Jackson, a Black Panther party member accused of murdering a Soledad prison guard in 1970. Jackson had been in jail for five armed robberies and had spent a decade in jail before killing the guard. He became famous when his prison letters were published under the name Soledad Brother. Although as David Horowitz points out in his book Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion, the letters had left out his delightful fantasies of poisoning the water system of Chicago (which is probably redundant). This was not a good guy. He was, in scientific terms, a bad guy. Pure evil.
During Jackson’s trial, on August 3, 1970, Jackson’s younger brother Jonathan invaded a Marin County courthouse armed with a pile of weapons. In the shootout that followed, two felons were killed, as well as the judge—his head blown off by a gun Davis had bought. Eventually she went on the run and became famous (and cool) as an international fugitive. She was a communist, feminist African American with an iconic Afro—all of which made her a hero of the New Left. Davis was put on trial for aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley. The trial ended in acquittal, for, as Horowitz points out, “the jury was stacked with political sympathizers for the accused.” One of them, he writes, later became a lover of Angela’s closest supporter. That’s just a coincidence, a leftist might say, and if you disagree with him/her, you’re probably just a hateful racist.
What became of Davis? You’d think her lurid offenses would deem her untouchable. Not in academia. She went to where vicious left-wing criminals are always welcome: the faculty of a major university, the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her title? It’s awesome. Professor of the History of Consciousness. I could not make that up if I was on six different types of acid. And she has been duly rewarded with commencement addresses and comfortable incomes far beyond the reach of your average prison guard or his grieving widow. How funny is it that academics decry a well-armed, law-abiding populace, yet embrace armed radicals with open arms? How funny is it that so many professors labeled Tea Partiers as terrorists, while kissing the asses of real, bona fide terrorists? It’s not funny, really. But it’s the result of a simple equation: One is cool, and the other isn’t. Own a gun and keep it by your bed in your remote farmhouse? You’re a redneck. Hang with murderous revolutionaries? Priceless. As long as you cling to cool, progressive beliefs that deem America evil, whatever you do is cool. Hell, you could nuke an orphanage and still get tenure.
But that’s not the Jesse James moment for me. That comes later, as I read a recent interview on the Daily Beast website with Jada Pinkett Smith, a misguided actress, in a Bobby Brady sort of way.
Jada is now an executive producer of Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, which the Daily Beast effusively describes as an “in-depth and surprisingly revealing documentary that outlines the story of seventies icon Angela Davis.” With that descriptor, you just know the article is going to be as balanced as a fat kid on a trampoline.
The documentary focuses on “the fascinating history of Davis’s intellectual roots” and dredges up her “rarely discussed studies at the University of Frankfurt.” Throw that garbage into the mix and she’s no longer your average criminal, she’s a deep thinker. Which excuses everything. Saying you studied at the University of Frankfurt makes your crimes so much more meaningful. I’m sure she knows how to say “shotgun” in German. After all, the best defense remains a good offense. No matter how offensive that offense may be.
Here’s how Pinkett Smith describes Davis’s relationship with the murderous thug George Jackson: “The love story gives you this entirely different view of the woman, her life, and who she was.” I bet it’s not a bad view either. Love is blind, of course, even if the lovers are the ones gouging out your eyes.
And here is her deft, intellectual summary of Davis’s life: “She never apologized for her politics or her associations and she always looked fabulous doing it.” The moral: As long as you look cool—and a “perfectly coiffed Afro” is cool—you can get away with just about anything. Being cool can turn a rampaging terrorist into a “political prisoner” faster than you can say “headless judge.”
Like an educated, older, female Bobby Brady, Pinkett Smith swallowed the whitewashed fairy tale hook, line, and stinker, espousing the power of “change and political power.” The reality just doesn’t fit into this retelling, without smearing the cool veneer with the blood of innocents. So just focus on the fantasy.
The author of the Daily Beast piece refers to Davis’s ability to be ruthless as an example of “stunning maturity.” (Which the author of this book refers to as “stunning stupidity.”) With that logic, I suppose the 9/11 bombers were the murderous equivalents of Mr. Miyagi.
But who comes out looking really cool in all this? Not only Davis, of course. Pinkett Smith as well. She could have done a documentary on an amazing scientist, or a great teacher, but how would that help her career? It’s just not cool enough. Revolutionaries make you revolutionary by proxy. I wonder if she’s optioned the script on the Boston Marathon bomber. How can you resist his bedroom eyes? Yeah, he killed a few people, but he looked great doing it!
DOING THE WRONG THING
Probably the coolest thing ever created (besides medicated wipes) is rock and roll. The first time I heard it, it was as if a virus had entered my ear, rewired my brain, and made me forget everything I enjoyed prior to infection. AC/DC riffs obliterated youthful novelty songs and caused my brain—confused but enamored by this hormone-stirring music—to disown everything that used to make me giggle. Good-bye pajamas, hello pentagrams.
First and foremost, rock and roll is black music, and the only real evolution from rock and roll—hip-hop—is also black. Yes, I’m aware I’m breaking new ground here, but I’m getting to a point, I think. Bear with me, black readers about to throw up.
This is when a hack like me throws in a quote from a movie where a black character elaborates on my point. Here, a passage from the flick Be Cool.
SIN LASALLE: Have you lost your mind? I mean, how is it that you can disrespect a man’s ethnicity when you know we’ve influenced nearly every facet of white America … from our music to our style of dress. Not to mention your basic imitation of our sense of cool; walk, talk, dress, mannerisms … we enrich your very existence, all the while contributing to the gross national product through our achievements in corporate America. It’s these conceits that comfort me when I am faced with the ignorant, cowardly, bitter, and bigoted, who have no talent, no guts. People like you who desecrate things they don’t understand when the truth is—you should say thank-you, man, and go on about your way. But apparently you are incapable of doing that! So …
[shoots his gun]
SIN LASALLE: … and don’t tell me to be cool. I am cool!
Yeah—what he said.
Now, I’m not saying cool didn’t exist before blacks invented it. They just invented it better.
Think about what was epitomized as “cool” by white kids in the 1950s. James Dean? I remember him coming across as sulky—a walking pout, an A-ha band member in a tight T-shirt. And what the hell was he so cranky about? Guy walked through his life like his underwear chafed him. Jim Backus should’ve just slapped him and told him to “shape up!” (It worked for Gilligan.) Maybe blacks didn’t become the touchstone of “cool” until a bit later. I’m not sociologically savvy enough to know, but rock and roll definitely had a part in it. Then white deejays grabbed it and delivered it to the white masses. From small clubs to stadiums, rock music changed what teenagers did with their free time and how they spent their money. Hence peace sign decals, posters by Peter Max, and lava lamps (things no World War II vet would ever buy).
But cool, since then, has changed. Behaviors that ar
e self-destructive at their core—criminality, illegitimacy, rejection of work—are not simply accepted, they are encouraged. And if these cool behaviors kill, as I believe they do, they kill nobody as much as they kill those who originally helped make cool ubiquitous: blacks.
What do I know? I’m a middle-aged white guy who listens to doom metal on a stair-climber. I’m no more an expert on black culture than Cornel West is on the Melvins. (Professor: Start with Houdini.) Ask me about Killer Mike and you might as well ask a four-year-old about German beer. (I’ve tried this—it doesn’t work.) So I have to draw on my limited history, and scholarly journals I found on the Internet, to figure out a coherent point.
Let me draw on my past first. When I was a kid I had a best friend, who I’ll call James (because his name was James). In kindergarten we got on like two peas in a pod. We weren’t aware we belonged to different teams, with different skin colors. All we knew was that we laughed a lot, perhaps only because we sat next to each other. Really, that could have been it. When you’re five years old and eat boogers for a living, you aren’t picky (well, I guess you are, actually). I spent a year being friends with James. And then our friendship disappeared.
In first grade he went to one school and I went to another. When we ran into each other some years later (maybe sixth grade), he was different. I’d like to think I was the same (I’d grown an inch, but now I had a crossword of acne on my forehead and an unnatural obsession with Lee Majors), but he treated me oddly, not like an old friend but like a faceless ghost. A disposable stranger. To him, perhaps, I was suddenly just another white kid in a white world, and he was black. I didn’t get it at first, but over time I sensed it had to do with me not being like him anymore. I accepted the new reality sadly, for no other reason than that there was no alternative.