by Greg Gutfeld
The day after the attack, blogger David Sirota wrote a piece for Salon titled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” At least he was honest.
Sirota claimed that our own racism and Islamophobia would cause us to ignore a bomber’s background if he’s white, thereby reducing our outrage and its violent consequences. But if the bomber turns out to be Muslim (which is what happened), we’d react differently.
So he really wanted those guys (or gals—we can’t be sexist here) to be white Yanks. Which makes you wonder: Did he mean white people, like the white people of Occupy Wall Street? Some are currently on trial in Cincinnati and Cleveland for terrorism, after all. Or what about the retired terrorist Bill Ayers and his horrible wife? They’re white too. They make me ashamed of my race. The human race, as the old saying goes.
Something tells me, though, that that’s not the kind of “white American” Sirota had in mind. He was speaking in code. His “white” really meant conservative. My gut says he had been praying that the bombers were those phantom Tea Party extremists we keep hearing about but never see. How grand his life would have been if he had been right! Instead, he’s been exposed as a fool. And he probably feels worse about that than anything.
Why do the likes of Sirota write such drivel in the first place? Perhaps he had trouble fitting in as a child. Or he was pressured into it by an older brother (both excuses used by the press to defend the acts of one of the bombers). But the real reason is obvious to anyone who’s had to endure the presence of academics and media hacks at social gatherings. It’s cool to have a low view of Americans—not its enemies. You get paid to express such opinions because everyone around you thinks the same way. This is the cool creed: When bad things happen to America, think badly of America. Michael Moore is the king of this. Here’s what Moore tweeted when the bombers were found to be young Chechen radical Islamists:
Breaking: “Two Americans Bomb Boston Marathon”—both Tsarnaev brothers were registered voters and US citizens. #restofworldyouaresafenow
Yippee, I guess. He will grab any straw but the one in front of him (unless it’s firmly stuck in a milk shake).
Of course the terrorists are white. But if they were white Christian conservative Tea Partiers, Michael Moore would be shouting it from the rooftop, if there was a freight elevator sturdy enough to get him there. But now that we know they are Muslim, we are told not to jump to any conclusions or point out the obvious, predictable trend. That would be wrong, and bigoted. So let’s get this straight: It’s okay to smear a right-winger if you think they did it. And once they are vindicated, it’s still okay to smear a right-winger (because you wanted to think they did it).
This reaction on the left was downright common. They hadn’t been this disappointed since it turned out bin Laden wasn’t a Mormon.
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Why is it that after every act of terrorism, there seem to be loads of angry leftists angry at people who didn’t bomb anything? Yes, I’m conservative. But why the hell are you yelling at me? Wouldn’t it be nice to see the big names who linked all of this to taxes and Tea Parties and abortion come forward to admit the real motives? Never. It’s just bad taste to talk about such indelicate matters. If only Palin had had a #crosshairs symbol linked to a map of the marathon, this could all be different. And so much simpler for Wolf Blitzer. (I guess it’s tough to be measured when your name sounds like a video game.)
So what do the cool kids do when they’re wrong about terror? When an arrest is made and we find out that the scumbags were Muslim radicals? Well, they never admit they’re actually wrong. Instead, they resort to their fanny pack of ready-made justifications. The first one is always relativism: They say Islamic terror is no different from, say, an abortion bomber. Or that Islamic extremism is no different from any other kind of religious extremism. In order to make this equation work, however, you must be really bad at math and history. Or you sat next to me in high school.
Make way for “root causes,” a cool response to evil if there ever was one. “Cool,” after all, is defined as being detached, unconcerned. And if you want to detach yourself from true evil, simply focus on the personal turmoil of the bombers, which allows you to avoid the real turmoil they cause. Somehow the minor psychological pain is easier to stomach than the assorted limbs left strewn along the avenue.
For God’s sake, how many times do I need to be told by a friend of the terrorists that they were “normal”? I suppose this vindicates abnormal people like me—but interviewing the bomber’s classmates about his habits is like interviewing kittens about yarn. What the hell is normal in college anyway? Smoking weed and running through the halls with your underwear on your head and your ass painted red is normal for most boys in college. What these interviewees really mean is that he didn’t seem like a wild-eyed Islamic fundamentalist. But you won’t get them to say that. They’ve got that house in the Hamptons to pay off.
Bottom line: I hate root causes. And I do not mean the big root cause that every cool gasbag ignores (Islamic supremacy). I mean the root cause baloney like, “Was little Billy not fitting in?” As Melissa Harris-Perry stated on MSNBC, the fact that the two bombers were Muslim wasn’t that important to the case. Really? Then what is important? Their hobbies? Their Netflix queue? Maybe it’s the jock mentality that led them to make these choices, right? Maybe if they boxed less, and hugged more, we’d all be safer!
She’s wrong, of course. The fact that they were inspired by radical Islam is relevant to the legal case. That’s why the little shitbag terrorist faces terrorism, not murder, charges. It goes back to his motive. He and his brother followed Sheik Feiz Mohammed, an Australian Muslim supremacist who posts videos advocating death and rape and loads of other good stuff. Since 2001, there have been 104 criminal cases of domestic jihadism. I’m thinking that this is a pattern even a left-wing automaton like Harris-Perry might find. But if she did, she’d probably be fired by MSNBC. She makes Katy seem like the smart Perry.
On the day following the arrests, the New York Times devoted at least five pages to the event, with maybe one sentence on the terrorists’ Muslim ties—pertaining to how the FBI had previously investigated the older brother. Oddly, they gave about the same amount of coverage to the diversity of restaurants in the Boston area. As my friend Gavin pointed out, “it felt like the writer had a gun to his head when he brought up the ties to terror.” You can feel air thick with secular prayer—the media wanted so badly for this to be anything but Muslim supremacists that now they’re suffering from a truth hangover. All this truth has given them a headache. They were little kids on Christmas morning who didn’t get the present they were dying for. Sorry MSNBC—better luck next terror bombing.
The preoccupation with psychological motives that spur a killer does nothing but benefit the killer, while energizing other losers to do the same thing to achieve attention and immortality. (It also drowns out the compassion necessary for the fiend’s victims.) Now people will wonder if it’s not the monster’s fault but ours because we didn’t help it fit in. That can only create more monsters.
The root-cause theory can be destroyed in one simple sentence: “A lot of people don’t fit in and don’t blow people up.”
We’ve all had bad things happen in our lives. Life is hard for everyone, but we all don’t wage jihad as a response. If all of us have similar problems, then a killer having them too is meaningless. The surviving scumbag kid was impressionable? Aren’t we all? In the 1970s I wore tight white flares and walked like John Travolta. Later I went punk. Then there was the lambada period. We’re all as impressionable as pizza dough.
We now spend days obsessing over the killer’s personal life—and why? What’s with the interest in evil? It’s because “cool” made it so. It’s no longer necessary to follow any structural norm to be respected or envied. As long as you do something huge, with enormous worldwide impact, you will have an audience’s attention. And the audience now seeks to know “why”—because t
he explanation has to be more than “they’re evil.” We love to dig deep into the psyche instead of accepting the simplicity and banality of evil.
The result is that we spend less time trying to stop evil and more time trying to understand it. And that enhances and encourages the “evil” personality. Even more, over time we tend to like them—glamorize them, even. We become the Clarice to their Hannibal. The Harry Morgan to Dexter Morgan. Dana Perino to her dog. Celebrities buy art made by serial killers. Rock stars move into homes where gruesome crimes unfolded. Aging actors make celluloid valentines for hippie terrorists. All of this is connected to the cool embrace of darkness. Modern pop culture has trained us to gravitate toward the guilty instead of their victims. The media has turned us all into naive defense attorneys. Johnnie Cochran wasn’t the truly cool one. The female prosecutor and her black assistant were. Quick, can you name them? Of course not.* They didn’t get the endless media accolades. And they didn’t get the conviction, either, for similar reasons. They were on the uncool side of the case.
The media’s obsession with a killer’s emotional depth (of which there usually is none) inevitably makes them more appealing. What if we had just decided to stop covering the bombers once the arrest was made? What if we made a pact not to discuss their backgrounds and stopped showing their damn pictures? What if we stopped making it advantageous to the angry and lonely to do horrible things? What if I stopped asking questions?
Here is my prediction for the future of the surviving Boston Bomber. He’ll get life in prison. He’ll get married (after choosing from a number of proposals). He’ll get fans. He’ll get a PhD. He’ll get published (poetry, my guess). He’ll get famous friends (who’ll claim he’s innocent). He’ll get laid. In short he’ll have a richer life than most people who didn’t bomb the limbs off Americans. And he’ll have famous admirers to thank for all of it.
Take Amanda Palmer, apparently a singer no one has really heard of for a while, who wrote an actual, dreadful love poem to the surviving terrorist. Instead of writing a poem for the victim, she chose the killer as her muse. Perhaps, in her head, she’ll be that one crazy lady who marries him—because she sees his good side!
Here is a sampling of her horrible nonrhyming mess, entitled “a poem for dzhokhar,” published on April 21, 2013:
You don’t know how orgasmic the act of taking in a lungful of oxygen is until they hold your head under the water.
You don’t know how precious your iPhone battery time was until you’re hiding in the bottom of the boat.
Yes, she really is empathizing with a terrorist’s need for his iPhone. She is empathizing with his fear of waterboarding. She is also empathizing with his orgasms, I guess. She is empathizing with a creep who just blew up a child. She is without question beyond pond scum. (If there were a planet full of pond scum, the pond scum who lived there would refer to her as “lower than us.”)
So what is her message here? Well, that terror really is a lifestyle choice. It’s like taking up lacrosse or joining a frat. Or becoming a cool singer with ego-driven opinions disguised as thoughtfulness. If you’d only put yourself in their shoes, you’d understand, says the cool singer. However, Palmer doesn’t put herself in the shoes of the victims, because they were blown off.
What I hate most: How the cool pretend to be so smart when they contemplate the root causes of bad men. They act like what they’re doing is somehow educational—even helpful or, most laughably, thoughtful. It’s none of that. Instead it’s pure selfishness—mental masturbation, in front of a crowd—an act of self-pleasure masquerading as analysis. In a way, they make the whole mess a lot worse because they dilute the comprehension and condemnation of horror. They turn evil into a therapy session. Instead of taking his life, now we offer the murderer a new one. Explain root causes to their families, please.
My helpful tip when someone brings up root causes: Remind them of that youthful bomber laying his deadly contraption right behind that young boy. Or the fact that the scum shot the MIT police officer Sean Collier in the back of the head.
Mindless root-causers cannot handle the contemplation of those deeds, however. They refuse to ponder the actual deeds: to look at evil in its face instead of rooting through the killer’s background for “signs” that he might have been bullied. The more they ask “why,” the more they avoid “how” and “who.”
People seem shocked that one of the bombers actually went to a party after the bombing. And to the gym! Oh, why would he do that! Oh my, the bomber was on Twitter! Why would he go there? Stop asking why, for God’s sake.
Evil people do work out and go to parties. It’s what makes them evil. They don’t care. Remember, it’s not like they did anything majestic. All they proved is that it’s very easy to leave primitive bombs among innocents and run. That’s all it takes for cowards.
But isn’t that what being cool is all about? The ability to subvert society and throw existing structures into chaos? Walking into a crowd and fucking shit up? Don’t those lowlifes who wish to leave a horrific impact really wish to be cool? The wake of destruction behind them is so awesome! This is where godless self-involvement and Muslim supremacy meet: a desire to die big, to be remembered.
That may be the ultimate consequence of cool: that a life of obscurity is viewed as somehow inferior to a life of infamy. Being a good person who lives quietly but valiantly on a pretty ruthless planet, but manages to find grace in everyday things, no longer means much. Better to scatter your hate into a thousand bloody pieces. And have idiots write a poem about it.
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*Marcia Clark and Chris Darden.
PURE IDIOCY
How has cool destroyed the pride one takes in work? Look around you. Pop culture, through music, television, and magazines, defines the “go-getter” as a clueless clone working for the man. From the first time you had to read Death of a Salesman, you were told that working nine to five was for suckers. (One wonders if it would have been so revered if it had been called Death of a Performance Artist Named Chloe or Death of a Homeless Junkie Named Gentle Ben.) I’m pretty sure that when the play was written, millions of people around the world would have died for that job and lifestyle. And did.
When I worked at Rodale, the publishing company that puts out magazines like Prevention and Men’s Health, the place seemed sincere in its mission. Which was to make lots of money while appearing not to be interested in making lots of money. Instead, it claimed to be interested in promoting “natural,” “organic,” and “pure.” (As in “pure profit.” Which I salute.)
There was also the magazine Organic Farming, which sadly had no centerfold. It later morphed into something called Organic Style, which folded after becoming an “organic ATM.” This is no surprise in an arena (publishing) where losing money is an Olympic event. Also, the name Organic Style just sounds gross. I hear it, and I think of hair gel made of pig compost. It was no surprise to me that the publisher of such dreck, Maria Rodale, published an “open letter” to President Obama on the Huffington Post proclaiming that the gassing of Syrians with chemical weapons was no different from Americans using pesticides on their produce. We’re all Hitlers, it seems. You cannot create this idiocy in a lab, folks. It can only occur naturally.
Rodale reflected the ideology that natural is cool and man-made is evil. In the offices, you couldn’t swing a cat full of hemp without hitting a person on some macrobiotic diet or a weird regimen of shrubs and herbs. One of my first friends, “Ryan” (not his real name—he might still be alive and want to offer me a cleansing), was a handsome lad in his late thirties who could have been the town playboy if his skin hadn’t been dyed completely orange because of his obsessive eating of carrots and other beta-carotene products. He was a walking Creamsicle. He ran two or three times every day, never mind the weather. I would see him jogging on Lehigh Street wearing three or four layers of clothing—in the summer. He was the first manorexic I ever met, and, being orange and covered in layers, he resembled a homeles
s sherbet.
His lifestyle was odd but wholly defensible because it was cool. You could do anything nutty, as long as the earth didn’t get hurt and what you did to yourself was somehow “natural.” These were the folks who overdosed on fiber, lecturing you on climate change while passing gas that could power three tractors. (Never jog behind an organic/fitness freak. Talk about methane combustion. Who knew you could drown from flatulence?)
I get the whole thing. The earth is cool. If you like the earth, then you’re cool.
And you make yourself feel cool by embracing this cool relationship. So go ahead, hug an earthquake. What do I care?
What was uncool to planet-pleasers? People like you and me with a “dependent” relationship on the planet, who use this precious orb for their own personal desires. People like corporate lawyers, doctors, accountants, housewives, cops. Just about anyone in a uniform or a suit and a tie was evil because they abused the planet daily. The only organic garden they cultivated was in their shower drain. If you didn’t understand how far superior it was to mountain-bike in really expensive clothes and munch on organic buckwheat flapjacks with artisanal pomegranate syrup instead of scrambled eggs, then you weren’t one of us.
And that’s the essence of organic cool, really: exclusion. The organic health movement really is about excluding you and saying, “I am better than you because I care.” And can afford to care. The cool are united by their hidden bank accounts and the rhythmic regularity of their colons.
Which is why I must make a very simple point: These people are not just uncool, they are dupes. They are wrong. Nearly all of their hobbies and amusements cost way more than what a typical Joe Schmo takes part in. Their super-cool globe-hugging lifestyle actually puts more into our capitalistic society than I ever did. They’re rabid consumers in Luddite disguise and their clothing costs more than the crap I would buy on sale at the outlets in Reading, Pennsylvania.