Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (10 page)

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
makes 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!

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.