Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (11 page)

Into that void stepped George W. Bush. He acted as a real leader, and he brought the country back together. He was no-nonsense, and he wasn’t the cowboy the Complex had made him out to be. “When I take action,” he said on September 13, 2001, “I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.”
⁶

When he spoke on September 20, 2001, the Democratic angst
was already evident that this president had beaten their politics of personal destruction. “Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom,” Bush said. “Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” And as Bush spoke, the camera panned to Senator Hillary Clinton—a woman President Bush had greeted with a warm hug in the Oval Office just a week before, after the attacks—and Hillary was sitting there and her arms were folded tightly. It was such a telling moment, because Hillary isn’t like Bill, with his shit-eating grin, his good ol’ boy charm. She’s a bad actor. And you could tell right away that her well-funded, well-oiled, John Podesta–led machinery was of no use to her at a moment when Americans were connected like never before, when wedges were blunted and impotent.

The Democratic Party, which had put on a face of TLC moderation during the Clinton years, which had been headed up by the greatest triangulator and faux-moderate in American history, had painted itself into a corner. It was one thing for Americans to embrace the soft socialism of the Democratic Party and their hatred for the American military when we were in the context of a peace dividend, when foreign policy was considered of secondary importance. It was okay during the 1990s that the Democratic Party had an obvious disposition against a strong foreign policy, and that but for Joe Lieberman and a very few others, the people in the Democratic leadership were primarily motivated by concerns of “social justice” and economic equality—socialism in everything but name—and that they wanted to decrease funding for the military because they were naïve doves. But when 9/11 happened, the Democratic Party’s position became untenable—it granted the Republican Party a default dominant position in perpetuity if national security and terrorism were going to be the top story of our time.

So for a time, the Democrats stayed silent. In fact, just for show, they rallied around Bush. The
New York Times
reported, “Many Democrats who once dismissed Mr. Bush as too naïve and too dependent on advisers to steer the United States through an international crisis are now praising him and his advisers’ performance. Some are even privately expressing satisfaction that Mr. Gore, who tried to make his foreign affairs expertise an issue in the campaign, did not win.”
⁷

That created an obvious vacuum for the left. The Democrats were too busy pretending to like Bush and a strong America to soldier on. The vacuum was filled by the extreme left, which would include groups like
MoveOn.org
and ascendant left-wing group blog the Daily Kos. I witnessed that process beginning to take shape around September 20, at the Los Angeles Federal Building, which is just south of my house. I walked down there with my family, and I saw all of the placards that four years later became mainstream slogans, pushing the politics of personal destruction against George W. Bush. These were radical leftist movement people, people aligned with Marxist pro-Stalinist organizations like International ANSWER, whose antiwar marches were unchallenged by a pliant media. Why the pass when it was clear that if the KKK had organized an antiwar rally, there would have been major media blowback?

I remember looking at Susie and saying, “This is going to be the resurgence of the professoriate and the Baby Boomer left. This is what they’ve been waiting for. This is going to be their last stand to fulfill their self-appointed ’60s revolutionary mission.”

They had been gathering. They had maintained their existence within the protective walls of college campuses. Their gray ponytails got more gray as time went on, but they never shed their belief systems. If you walked through the hallways of UCLA and looked
at the professors’ and lecturers’ doors, you would have known they were still true believers in the 1960s world, and that they had allies in positions of power in unions all over the country and in Hollywood. These were people who had never met an antiwar storyline they didn’t love. An alliance of preexisting, seemingly marginal, left-of-center remnants of a bygone era simply walked through the front door and took over the Democratic Party. The marginal political world of the alt weeklies that I used to read had taken center stage.

And I knew the tactic they were going to use: the media. They were going to aim the pop culture at selected MTV youth, Abercrombie & Fitch youth, brandishing antiwar bumper stickers and T-shirts. They were going to imitate the means and methods of the ’60s. They were going to use their propaganda techniques, their stronghold in popular culture.

Hollywood led the way—that was a natural. They did it with a two-pronged strategy: they lampooned Bush, and they accused the right of attempting to silence them. (This while they wouldn’t shut up about their supposed lack of free speech.) Celebrities spoke first, because when 9/11 temporarily distracted us from our pop-cultural obsession, they, narcissists that they are, demanded the limelight back, and anti-Americanism and left-wing sloganeering became their de facto script for the Bush years.

Hollywood is a leftist colony. It was easy for Hollywood people to be the first “brave voices” to say “politically unpopular” things on soapboxes because their jobs were protected, because their bosses believed what they believed in. After 1972, in which Richard Nixon won and George McGovern lost (a fact Hollywood never really accepted—the late
New Yorker
columnist Pauline Kael said she couldn’t believe Nixon had won, since everyone she knew had voted for McGovern), America sent a message to the left: we’re not
interested. So Hollywood decided to send a message to the country. The natural aging process was culling out patriotic Hollywood, with John Wayne and Gary Cooper dying and Jimmy Stewart coming to the end of his career, and the paradigms of the Western and the pro-war movies were giving way to the anti-Vietnam consensus. The counterculture took a foothold in the ’60s in Hollywood, with the radical leftists inside the business taking over completely. They didn’t just take over the business—they took over the art, infusing movies and television with antiheroes instead of heroes:
Easy Rider
instead of
Casablanca
,
Midnight Cowboy
instead of
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
.

Growing up in Hollywood—going to school there, where my administrators invited Tom Hayden to come speak without the slightest concern that many in the country considered him a traitor for legitimate reasons—I knew these people. They were my friends’ parents, who voted for Hayden even though they owned million-dollar houses. These people, who hung out with the richest of the rich, gave license to their sense of entitlement and noblesse oblige by hanging out with political radicals while simultaneously wearing the outfits and haircuts of conformists. They started to sneak into traditional society pretending they were something they weren’t.
^*

They were the first to start raising the anti-Bush flag once more. This was
long before
the Iraq War. They were concerned first and foremost with tearing down this rube, this symbol of American exceptionalism and unity.

The Iraq invasion took place in March 2003. In February 2002, just months after September 11 (Bush’s approval rating was still around 80 percent at this point), TV’s fake president Martin Sheen
said, “George W. Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd, a moron, if you’ll pardon the expression.” George Clooney said in January 2003, “The [Bush administration] is run exactly like
The Sopranos
.” Dustin Hoffman injected conspiracy-theory leftism in February 2003: “I believe that the administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country, and I think that’s reprehensible.” Robert Redford said something similar in December 2002: “Coyote? The group of ’em, a pack of coyotes—tricky, cunning, making sure to take care of themselves but doing it in a wily way, making sure they never get caught.” Jessica Lange said in October 2002 while accepting a film award, “I hate Bush. I despise him and his entire administration. It makes me feel ashamed to come from the United States—it is humiliating.”
⁸
Ed Harris went after Bush with a hammer and tongs: “Being a man, I have got to say that we got this guy in the White House who thinks he is a man, who projects himself as a man because he has a certain masculinity. He’s a good old boy, he used to drink, and he knows how to shoot a gun and how to drive a pickup truck. That is not the definition of a man.”
⁹

Even as they pushed their hatred of Bush as fully legitimate and praiseworthy, the press did nothing. Actually, the press did worse than nothing—they gave them a microphone to distribute their views unchallenged. Susan Sarandon appeared on CBS’s
The Early Show
and
Face the Nation
; Madonna appeared on
Dateline NBC
; Harry Belafonte appeared on
Larry King Live
, as did Sean Penn; Mike Farrell appeared on NBC’s
Meet the Press
. As Laura Ingraham writes in her book
Shut Up and Sing
, “Whenever a top entertainer has a political bone to pick, he or she has an instant platform.”
¹⁰

Hollywood dragged out its oldest lefties and its youngest lefties. Jann Wenner, a Baby Boomer who still force-feeds the relevance of Bruce Springsteen with repetitive front-page power picks, used
this movement to promote Green Day and any other pop-cultural vessel that would create antiwar albums. MTV found selective youth, sexy youth, wearing antiwar T-shirts, and put them on TV every night. There was an urge in Hollywood from the old and the young to affirm the Baby Boomer Boss-lovers’ yearnings for the Age of Aquarius to be reborn in the Bush age.

These were the loudest people in the world. And the press was giving them free rein to say and do whatever they wanted, to incite political stunts reminiscent of the Merry Pranksters, to use media trickery to make points, to spawn a youth rebellion against the president of the United States during wartime. They were representing America abroad, and they were representing us as evil hayseeds bent on killing brown people—and the media were abetting this slander.

Next, Hollywood engaged in a ploy designed to paint the Bush administration with the tar of fascism—they accused Bush and conservatives of shutting down their free speech. The juxtaposition was astonishing—the false accusations that conservatives and Republicans were telling the left to “shut up” alongside the simple fact that every burp these bratty windbags uttered during this period was printed and reprinted ad nauseam. But by accusing conservatives of McCarthyism and raising that bugaboo, they wanted to do just what they falsely accused conservatives of doing: they wanted to shut them up.

As part of this, they crafted a “dissent is patriotic” meme, an absurd slogan to begin with, that they intentionally misattributed to patriotic Founding Fathers like Benjamin Franklin (they would later be forced to attribute it to pseudoscholar Howard Zinn). Deconstructed, “Dissent is patriotic” is a self-negating slogan because its validity clearly depends on what kind of dissent you’re talking about. If you’re a member of the neo-Nazis in America, you’re dissenting,
but nobody would call that dissent patriotic. But if you’re antiwar, dissent is automatically patriotic, according to David Geffen’s guest list (even if you’re a member of Al Qaeda, presumably, since they are antiwar, at least as far as the United States goes). The aphorism is nonsensical. But the left repeated it so many times and so often that it lost all meaning. They slapped it on every bumper sticker on every Prius at every Whole Foods. And it worked.

Next, they accused conservatives of quashing this dissent. They framed their arguments as though they were victims, even while saying things that were outrageous and arguably un-American. Susan Sarandon said, “It’s terrifying to me to feel the fear that exists now in the United States to even question anything for fear of being labeled anti-American.”
¹¹

“The early signs are this administration could go further, shutting down information, not allowing certain truths to get out,” said Robert Redford in January 2003. “And all you’ve got to do is look at history to see what that led to. The McCarthy era.”
¹²

In April 2003, Tim Robbins, Sarandon’s former quasi–common-law husband and possibly potential corecipient of her Social Security check, famously warned of a “chill wind blowing in America.” Where did he say that? At the National Press Club, of course, on national television as broadcast by C-SPAN. Why Robbins would be at the National Press Club to begin with is a question that, if you’ve made it this far in the book, I suspect you can reason out.

Robbins started off by telling the assembled media sycophants that after 9/11, he was ready for unity. What kind of unity? A unity where President Bush would use the momentum from 9/11 not to defend America, but to help people “at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read… at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirm… convert abandoned lots to baseball fields.” Robbins’s kind of unity “would send a message to terrorists
everywhere: if you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified.” Yeah, Tim, extending Head Start and giving funds to the local YMCA would have Osama bin Laden quaking in his sandals.

That unity didn’t materialize, and Robbins knew it would never materialize, because nobody would seriously think that the Bush administration would fight terror with increased welfare payments. So Robbins turned against Bush: “In the 19 months since 9-11, we have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been quickly compromised in a climate of fear.”