by Greg Gutfeld
This is all pretty new, when you think about it. Earthlings have been around for some two hundred thousand years (I don’t have exact numbers due to the vodka) and gay rights didn’t hit the planet until maybe the last forty years. Can you blame everyone for not immediately coming to grips with the biggest shift in biological reconsideration to happen since we lost our tails? Can you blame people who are being asked to suddenly disavow the beliefs that have governed not just their own actions, but their ancestors’, for taking a while to consider their position? It’s easy and cool to call them bigots and close-minded a-holes, but it wins no friends. And it’s wrong. Most of them are decent people contemplating a seismic shift in world belief. Just because you didn’t ascribe to that belief doesn’t mean you can dismiss their concerns so easily.
In my rattled head, what is really cool is being able to understand that a big change is going on and realizing that this shift takes time. If anything, if you’re gay, you should be pretty excited that you’re living in a time where you can witness this shift. I mean, acceptance of homosexuality is perhaps the biggest “gamechanger” since the civil rights movement. And before that, the dawning notion that rape was not a good thing. And before that, the wheel. And fire. And Joan Rivers’s first face-lift.
Sexual behavior, to me, is no cooler than eating. Declaring your sexual freedom—gay or straight—is akin to declaring your ability to eat forty-five hot dogs in a minute. (On a particular block in Midtown Manhattan, very akin. As in, the same.) Straight men who cannot stop talking about their conquests are no different from a gay activist’s jockstrap dance during a parade. It falls under one heading in my mind: “So what?” Choosing to be defined by who you sleep with seems about as uncool as being defined by your low-carb diet. It’s why I shut up about my bacon and mayonnaise intake (it was hurting the ratings). I dislike gays, straights, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, all people in fact, if their identity means more to them than their achievements.
But forget gays. They should be vocal about gay marriage. (Even if some really don’t want it. That’s part of marriage too—wanting it, and not wanting it, but still having the choice.) I’m more irritated by straights who go out of their way to announce their allegiance to an issue, simply as a way to distance themselves from the Neanderthals who’ve not yet evolved. I’m fairly certain that many of them made their decision based on the need to appeal to the cooler crowd. I’ve seen it myself: The self-satisfaction of a person announcing he is for gay marriage approaches the same sensation experienced when someone says, “I don’t eat veal,” or, “I would never buy anything at Walmart.” It’s an announcement masked as achievement, and it’s as boring as an Oscar acceptance speech. And about as substantial as a campaign promise.
Last week, I was sitting outside at my favorite Italian restaurant on Ninth Avenue. A chap on a date sat next to me and began telling me what he did for “a living.” I put “a living” in quotes because I don’t consider what he did an actual job. He and some other activists had rented or purchased a house across from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, with the express purpose of confronting them over their virulent antigay views. It’s a funny story, until I asked him how many members are in this crazy church. Maybe fifty, he said. We had this discussion, mind you, a week after the Boston bombing. So I asked, “Would you ever do this to a mosque?” He looked at me silently, but he knew the answer. Of course he’d never confront the homophobia of Islam, because it’s not as cool as doing it to crazy old white folks. Confronting Muslims over their bigotry could be construed as Islamophobia, and really, it’s just safer to stick to the whiteys in Topeka. They won’t chop off your head when they’re offended. I asked the guy how much press he’d received. His eyes lit up. That’s what it was about. I felt sorry for his date. I think she picked up the check.
My advice: Remaining calm and understanding in regard to different views on sexuality may not make you any cooler, but it might make you a tad more compassionate. Primarily toward those folks who, while holding no animosity toward gays, feel threatened by gay marriage.
Recently an ESPN analyst was barbecued on Twitter for speaking his mind about NBA player Jason Collins revealing that he was gay. Chris Broussard said plainly: “If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says, ‘You know them by their fruits,’ it says that that’s a sin.” And “If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality—adultery, fornication, premarital sex between heterosexuals, whatever it may be—I believe that’s walking in open rebellion to God and Jesus Christ, so I would not characterize that person as a Christian.”
Before you call him a homophobe, recognize that his view, however wrong, is steeped in religious belief. And he lumped straights into the whole sinful mess. You can belittle him all you want, but it won’t help you understand him any better. Had you wanted to. And you should.
The same applies to Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty. Fact is, his beliefs on gays do not include anything about taking action. He has views on sin, but his opinions won’t hurt you.
Last, all of this preoccupation with who’s gay and who isn’t (actually, no one cares about who isn’t gay) falls under one mistake the cool make: making sexuality important at an age when other things matter more. I get the importance of dealing with sexual confusion and the jerks who bully those who seem different. But making the assertion of one’s sexuality an achievement (one that needs to be reiterated through constant practice) goes absolutely nowhere. Civilization’s recent predicament with modern sexuality—that it is cool to celebrate it without pondering its consequences—has left us with hordes of miserable single people. It has left us with fatherless kids. It has left us with rampant STDs—some extremely distressing strains that continue to morph as we try to screw our way past them. I hope gay marriage helps tamp down these scary stats. But really, it doesn’t matter to me whether you are gay or straight. What’s uncool is assuming we care.
THE REBEL BOOTLICKER
Why would anyone not be a liberal? Think of the rewards! You’re an eternal teenager, always in sync with the cool kids, never a target of scowls, a consistent beneficiary of invites to events involving lamb sliders, crab cake tacos, and desperate come-ons from Adrian Grenier. You secretly feel superior to all those around you who have yet to evolve. You get to pronounce “Pakistan” as “pock-ist-aahn.” You become an international walking guidebook for pretentious pronunciation. But you’re as rebellious as a seat cushion.
The public acquiescence to liberal ideas has flourished for decades, unquestioned and unfettered, solely because of the cool assumption that leftism is rebellious. Given that for the left, dissent is not tolerated, this makes no sense. You can’t be a rebel and a sheep. It’s not possible. I remember Andrew Breitbart telling me a story about being at a posh party in Aspen, where he was having a friendly conversation with the wealthy host. They were getting along fine, and the host graciously offered Andrew and his wife an invitation to come stay with them over a weekend, perhaps to ski. Maybe an hour later, the host’s wife found out Breitbart’s political leanings and confronted Andrew, informing him that the invitation was rescinded. How petty, but also, how predictable. God bless Andrew’s wife, who was no firebrand like AB but had to reap the consequences his beliefs wrought. Their road was bumpier than a Klingon’s forehead.
The problem with this free intellectual ride given to the left—it allows really stupid people to pull it off. There are tons of libs who are smart, but there are far more who are stupid. Yet they realize that simply saying the “right” thing creates an illusion of intelligence. If all you have to really do is denigrate the monolithic evil that is America, or the corrupt machine that is capitalism, or the ruthless single-minded viciousness of our military, you can pretty much turn off your brain. All that stuff has been said before, to be sure, usually by someone considered a great thinker by the intelligentsia. And all of it easily translates into shorthand that helps conquer every
kind of cocktail party scenario. Just say, “A little socialism never hurt anybody” on either coast and you’re in the club. Even if you couldn’t spell “socialism” with a dictionary on hand and a crossbow to your head.
You see this a lot with pop stars who inevitably fear that they are as shallow as a tambourine. After spending their younger years consuming and consumed by ego, they suddenly realize that there is a way to rise above the lightweight reputation that comes with being young, rich, and vacuous. So they embrace liberal causes to appear deep. I call it the “Madonna syndrome,” although she wasn’t the first to discover it. But it’s since been adopted by everyone from Lady Gaga to that aging gasbag Jon Bon Jovi. Their discovery of “politics” is a breathless embrace of left-wing clichés, often expressed in cringe-producing interviews and horrendously adolescent tweets. Watching a celebrity talk politics is like watching a politician sing. There are exceptions. Like Bono, who as he ages seems to salute the machinery of capitalism that made him wealthy. In mixed company no less. But his social conscience couldn’t be better established if he were Bishop Tutu doing an anti-fracking interpretive dance. With Tina Fey. On an Indian reservation.
I’d say look at Cher as an example and her increasingly unhinged attacks on the right, but I would never suggest anyone “look at Cher.” I would say “look at the human being formally known as Cher. She is officially a cyborg.” So read her tweets instead. She’s now prone to intolerant, vicious attacks on those who think differently from her.
This was her recent take on Senator Ted Cruz:
I love crazies who crawl out from under Rocks to defend a scumbag who is beneath contempt! He makes Joe McCarthy seem like Mother Teresa!
There are more, many of them targeted at the usual suspects: gun owners, Walmart, Tea Partiers, Republicans. This is the poor crone’s road back to relevance, and who can blame her? She’s too old to do Dancing with the Stars. Twitter is where old cranks go to live and to die; and it’s exactly how they would want to die—with an audience cheering on their every last crackpot thought. (Note to my relatives: The moment I hit sixty, kill my Twitter account. I fear I may end up tweeting about my Pat Sajak fantasies—and I prefer to keep all that stuff for my memoirs.)
The bedrock of cool politics is simple: Help everyone into the warm, fuzzy arms of government. It’s not exactly a horrible thing to believe, if you close your eyes to the unintended (or perhaps intended) consequences. In order for this cool idea to survive unscathed, you have to ignore history and detach the incompetence from the price paid by taxpayers. As a kid, I had no idea where things came from. I didn’t realize we paid for the stuff we got. Dad made 25K a year, but he could have been a millionaire. When the milk arrived, I saw the milk (and the milkman, because I’m that old) but never the bill. This is the brain of the child and the liberal. There’s a wall between candy and its cost.
So the belief that government is a good thing that you work for (as opposed to the other way around, the government being awful and it works for you) puts cool kids at an advantage. Because there is no shortage of ideas when the answer is always yes. If a solution to one troubled program is another troubled program, then you can always be Santa Claus. You can keep saying yes, as long as the connection between benefit and cost is never made. You can do this till the day you die, where you’ll be eulogized by a drum circle of IRS agents.
So when a TV host asks a conservative guest, “What can the government do about health care?,” the answer “nothing but harm” may be true, but it’s also uncool and mean. If government is a board game, the right comes off like a petulant child refusing to roll the dice. Government is the game, and we’re the pissy kid who won’t play. Asking a conservative for “government solutions to a problem” is like asking a surgeon to name his favorite cancer. Asking a libertarian to nominate their favorite government program is like asking a hemophiliac to name his favorite sharp object.
Which is why the left is always portrayed as the cool cat, offering solutions that make poor people smile, while the right-winger comes off as cold and brutal, as he shakes his head dismissively, rejecting such romantic wrongheaded notions. Never mind that the solutions offered are abstract poisons, and poisons that kill you slowly. By not offering government-administered alternatives, we are uncool. Until libertarians offer their own form of “government program,” they will always be seen as aloof, heartless, and evil.
Here’s what I call the Stossel experiment.
Imagine John Stossel, a good-looking chap, taking a pill that would have him say, “We really need more programs to feed the poor and help the homeless.” That Stossel would be a movie star.
Now imagine Stossel saying, “We need government to stop helping the poor because the more they help, the more they hurt.” That Stossel would have a weekly show on Fox Business.
Life would be more glamorous for Stossel if he took the damn pill.
Where does a nation end up, under the thumb of the cool? You have a welfare state mired in debt with nothing to show for it. It’s a three-pronged attack on everything that made America the greatest country ever, a combination of incompetence, a degradation of society’s desire to create and grow, and an economy that simply cannot keep up.
It’s strange to me that the cool, by their very definition committed to being against “the Man,” would embrace an endless maze of bureaucracies that turns everyone into passive zombies, waiting for their allotment of bread and cheese. In the name of the public good, the cool happily hand over their power of individual freedom and the dynamic economy that it produces to a bloated blob of arbitrary administration. You have the media-academic complex saluting protesters demanding more government, so they can do—and think—less. They are marching in favor of dependency. They are marching for the right to suck.
The secret principle governing the cool is a belief that human beings have no imagination, no creativity, no ability to achieve. Without the centralized beast to hold us together, providing us with the most mediocre of product, we would suffer. The lie, of course, is that the cool is exempt from its own assumptions. They don’t need the government to tell them what to do, whether it be stop drinking sodas or sock away money for retirement, but it must work for everyone else. And that’s the reason the cool push this nonsense—for them the consequences are divorced from cost. As millions of Americans suffer from horrible decisions they promoted (like Obamacare), they can move merrily along, to the next cause that strikes their fancy. Without ever bothering to follow up on the results of their championed causes, they continue to push even more destructive ideas on those less fortunate. A cool cat can argue vehemently for gun control, for he lives safe and secure in a benign community. It’s the bodega owner left unarmed who has to worry. The media can trumpet the notion of universal health care. Then, when it’s in place, the media isn’t present to catalog its horrors. The media screws you, then when the baby is born, it leaves town on the first bus. With your last twenty bucks. Without a backward glance or a hint of guilt.
And that’s the scariest part of the cool’s promotion of government—it’s their chosen form of relationship, and it can only be fulfilled through dependence. Perhaps in their own lives, they found their own personal relationships wanting, and see government as an ideal replacement. I’m not sure. What I do know is that when you offer the option of government as Daddy, it robs the community of actual daddies. It robs us of the initial human response, which is to solve these problems among ourselves, first. Here’s what I know in my life: If someone offers to do something for me, I let them do it. When the government now acts as proxy for community (wasn’t it the Obama 2012 campaign that said that government is what we all had in common?), what’s the point of community? Especially when the efforts made by a community to sustain itself are so firmly blocked by a restless, carnivorous bureaucracy always looking for another way in, and larger and larger pension benefits. People telling us how much we need government—they are always the people in government!
You can laugh at religion all you want. As a troubled agnostic, I’m not the best-equipped defender. But for years religion in a community setting grounded us and helped foster a caring collectivism (as opposed to economic collectivism) that actually worked. The church made obligations obvious; the recipients felt it immediately. They saw the cost, and they felt the results. It also got you out of the house on Sunday. Not a small thing, especially during football season.
When government intrudes, community is replaced by entitlement and everyone gets in line, not just the folks who need it most. My guess is that a lot of the forty-plus million on food stamps need it, and a lot of them don’t. But it doesn’t matter; if it’s there to be taken, why not take it? And as a member of a community, what’s required of you now? Not much. Show up, get in line, take the handout. It used to be called Sovietization. Now it’s called progressive policy. And very, very few people ever voluntarily give it up.
Let’s face it, people, the more we rely on government, the less we rely on ourselves. We’ve seen the collapse of family life. Two-parent households are dwindling rapidly. No one sticks around. And the safety net did its job; it made it that much easier to stomach an economic collapse. Hooray. Is it a coincidence that cities implode as government expands? Is it any wonder that as government expands, illegitimacy soars? Is it any wonder that as government expands, the poor stay poor? Unchecked government is a vast, ever-expanding monster (and not nearly as sexy as Mothra).