Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (2 page)

I can only write books when truly compelled. The last time I wrote a book (cowrote, actually—
Hollywood, Interrupted
, with Mark Ebner), I had something that needed to be written. This book marks the first time since 2004 that I’ve felt compelled to communicate a set of ideas that couldn’t be related on Twitter or Facebook, on a blog, in a chat room, with AOL Instant Messenger, via Skype, or on Blog Talk Radio.

It’s almost unbearable. The Internet jones I’ve acquired feels like what I hear heroin or cigarette addiction is like. If I wanted it
cured, I don’t think I would or could. It’s what I do. It’s now who I am. The flights between Los Angeles and New York and Washington, DC, are especially excruciating. The temporary withdrawals are something fierce. Acute boredom, something the Internet long ago cured, comes back in multiple dimensions. Episodic television, something I grew up on, now angers me. Why? Because I can’t control it. I want to go to the menu and delete the laugh track. The plots are plodding. It’s all so 1985. Reality TV comes closer to what I want. But I need to
be
Mark Burnett and Simon Cowell, not to live vicariously through them and the worlds they are creating. The best I can hope for in this Brave New Wired World is that in the future the Andrew Breitbart Center for Internet Addiction can help future generations of digital-heads.

For now, I embrace the sickness because it reaps great rewards. In the few dimensions in which I reside, my life could not be better. The war for the soul of a nation, and perhaps the world, is being fought in the New Media. And I am right in the middle of it. My “Big” Internet sites hit the ground running and are breaking the types of stories that major newspapers and networks broke in the past.

As long as I’m in confession mode, I’ll admit I am also addicted to breaking news stories—big, medium, and small. I don’t care whether you call me a journalist, a reporter, a muckraker, or a rabble-rouser, just give me the goods. Let’s get the story out there.

There is no greater high than watching cable news or listening to talk radio and seeing stories that five minutes before were in Microsoft Word format now playing themselves out, sometimes with major consequence, on the world stage.

My dual afflictions—addiction to the Internet and addiction to breaking stories—together constitute a New Media addiction. And as a New Media addict I am both junkie and supplier.

Big Hollywood contributor Patrick Courrielche, a brave Hollywood-based artist and media entrepreneur whose name and heroics will play out later in the book, broke the White House/National Endowment for the Arts scandal that led to a top NEA employee’s resignation. After things started to settle down, Patrick and I shared words about the fact that circumventing Old Media by using New Media, forcing them to cover the story and to shape, control, and even change narratives, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I felt like a New Media Sherpa. I took Patrick to the plateau and he saw what could be done. He continues to search for the next Big story. It will come. I know it. Patrick is but one in a growing stable of Big contributors to my Big group blog sites—sites that you’ll find out about later in this book—that are tapping into a renaissance of investigative journalism and participatory democracy.

The adrenaline that fuels my psyche is almost always in an optimal state. The excitement of the battle, the victories—they’re piling up. The enemy is not used to being attacked at foundational levels. With every online victory, new recruits are joining the army. Things are too good right now to worry about something so trite as whether I’m frying my cerebral cortex.

The Internet has changed and is changing everything—including the way my brain works. Am I the only one? For this radical rewiring of everything there are pros and cons. Many industries are failing—newspapers, most obviously. But Knight Ridder and McClatchy’s loss is James O’Keefe’s, Hannah Giles’s, Matt Drudge’s, Jim Robinson’s (Free Republic), Lucianne Goldberg’s, Arianna Huffington’s, and Andrew Breitbart’s gain.

If the newspapers weren’t so close to the situation, and the implosion of the Old Media didn’t involve the livelihoods of those
covering the revolution, reporters and journalists would recognize this moment as the beginning of a massive global information awakening.

These are big times. The expansion of freedom in the digital world will lead to the expansion of freedom in the real world.

The people of the United States, with its First Amendment, are leading the way in combining free speech and technology. Just as Western rock and roll helped bring down the Eastern Bloc in the latter half of the twentieth century, the Internet is going to provide a similar impetus to the people of the world to grasp the possibilities of freedom.

In the entire history of the world, these are the most exciting times to live in.

If the political left weren’t so joyless, humorless, intrusive, taxing, overtaxing, anarchistic, controlling, rudderless, chaos-prone, pedantic, unrealistic, hypocritical, clueless, politically correct, angry, cruel, sanctimonious, retributive, redistributive, intolerant—and if the political left weren’t hell-bent on expansion of said unpleasantness into all aspects of my family’s life—the truth is, I would not be in your life.

If the Democratic Party were run by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, if it had the slightest vestige of JFK and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, I wouldn’t be on the political map.

If the American media were run by biased but not evil Tim Russerts and David Brinkleys, I wouldn’t have joined the fight.

Except for about 3,213 people (friends, family, and former acquaintances), you would not know who I am.

You would not be reading this book—because I would not have written it.

If the college campus weren’t filled with tenured professors like 9/11 apologist Ward Churchill and bullshit departments like Queer Studies, and if the academic framework weren’t being planned out by domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, I wouldn’t be expanding my Internet media empire to include Big Education.

If art wasn’t almost exclusively defined by degradation of cultural norms—unless when promoting an all-knowing “HOPE”-ful leftist leader, I wouldn’t be spraying my Jackson Pollock political/cultural musings on the American New Media cultural canvas.

If America’s pop-cultural ambassadors like Alec Baldwin and Janeane Garofalo didn’t come back from their foreign trips to tell us how much they hate us, if my pay cable didn’t highlight a comedy show every week that called me a racist for embracing constitutional principles and limited government, I wouldn’t be at Tea Parties screaming my love for this great, charitable, and benevolent country.

The left made me do it! I swear!

I am a reluctant cultural warrior.

Like millions of others of my (graying) generation, I spent my adolescence as a pop-culture-infused, wannabe hipster and mindless consumer. I was the ultimate Generation X slacker, not particularly political, and, in retrospect, a default liberal. I thought that going to four movies a week, knowing the network television grid, and spending hours at Tower Records were my American birthright. As a middle-class kid growing up in upper-middle-class Brentwood, my parents went overboard to provide me the highest standard of living. And I took advantage of their overwhelming generosity.

Brentwood is a high-end subsection of Los Angeles. While Brentwood holds a mythic place in the consciousness of the American people as
the
upscale suburb filled with celebrities and the wealthy, the Brentwood I grew up in was more like the neighborhood from
E.T.
or
The Brady Bunch
. Even though it was very much a keep-up-with-the-Joneses enclave, my parents seemed oblivious to all that. When the first sushi restaurant popped up in our neighborhood in the early 1980s, we had meat loaf that night.

I knew that Gerry and Arlene Breitbart, my parents, were Republicans only because when they would come back from Mount St. Mary’s College, their local polling place, I would pry the information from them. I remember finding out that they voted for Ford in 1976, Bush in the 1980 Republican primaries against Reagan, and Reagan both times in the 1980 and 1984 national elections.

But at the same time, they never talked about their politics. They came from the Silent Generation. My mother existed as a perfect exemplar of that generation, as though she were destined to be a grandmother from birth. She spoke in aphorisms like “Children should be seen and not heard” and “Don’t talk politics or religion at the dinner table.” Whenever any form of contention arose at our dinner table, she’d awkwardly interject a non sequitur: “Your aunt Ethel makes the most perfect rhubarb pie!” I swear. Rhubarb pie.

My parents didn’t speak their politics; they acted on them. Their attitudes toward the people around them living the Hollywood liberal lifestyle were grounded in a reality and a normalcy and a decency. My father ran a restaurant in Santa Monica; my mom worked at a bank. I would often ask my father, “Which famous people come into the restaurant?” For some odd, infuriating reason, he would always say, “All of my customers are the same. I don’t care about those things.” And he meant it. I would later force my mother to tell me that the Reagans and Broderick Crawford and Shirley Jones and the Cassidy family, among many, many others, were regulars at the English-style steakhouse called the Fox and Hounds. Not only did my father
not
put these people on a pedestal, but fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, he treated all his customers and employees as individuals and as human beings.

I’ve always felt that people reveal themselves in their vacation choices, a belief probably stemming from my childhood. While
many of my friends’ parents were gallivanting off to Europe and leaving their kids at home—for some reason, my parents considered this a form of child abuse—my parents opted to buy a thirty-three-foot motor home, the Executive, and took my sister and me on a formative cross-country trip that I daydream about even now. It was my first real taste of the America that I defend to this day. My dad seemed like another human being on the road, and he engaged with every possible stranger he could—he even changed his Chicago Jewish accent and developed a twang as we entered the Wild West. It was so clear how much he liked people. When people wonder why I will talk to a lamppost, I point to my dad.

My parents granted me a brilliant middle-class life, one that didn’t overwhelm and lavish spoils on me to the point of absurdity. The house was not filled with objects or celebrities that would cause my friends to envy me, wish they could live at my house, or hang out with our social circle. My parents were also about fifteen years older than some of my friends’ parents, so while my mother was watching Lawrence Welk on television on Saturday nights, one of my friends’ dads rented a limousine so he could hit the Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry concerts in the same night. While my parents’ house had a pool and four bedrooms and a scenic canyon view of West Los Angeles, it couldn’t compete with the beachfront Malibu property that two of my friends at school occupied. And I’m ashamed to admit: those families existed in an ether that became growingly intoxicating to me.

Along with my friends’ parents’ elite addresses came original art, celebrity friends, and a very specific brand of liberal politics. Bobby Kennedy, to this crowd, did not just represent a political philosophy, but an aesthetic that started to lure me away from my parents’ simple, grounded nature. That, and those pesky palpitations in my
loins. Between the lure of a greater material life and my emerging sexual teen persona, my parents’ chaste, safe haven became less and less appealing, other than as a place to catch some Zzzzs and get three free square meals. And in a gesture of trust, my parents granted me the independence to start becoming my own person. (I still cry myself to sleep wishing that they had fought harder to keep me in that protective cocoon!)

My lifestyle began to change as I hit puberty and high school. I recall those years as spent ignoring school as best as possible while spending weekends at the best beaches and private houses, behind gates and tall bushes. I took tennis lessons with Steve Morris, the top tennis pro in Malibu, the same guy who taught Farrah Fawcett, Bruce Jenner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the entire tennis-playing Van Patten family (Joyce, Dick, Vince, Nels, and Jimmy). After one of those lessons, I vividly recall Schwarzenegger, before his ascent into megastardom, literally terrorizing me and my best friend, Larry Solov, by hitting ball after ball as hard as he could at us, to the point where we wailed in the corner and he cackled aloud. Yes, the Governator is one sadistic bastard. And, yes, I voted for him.

Another time, Farrah Fawcett asked me where Steve was. I led her on a fifteen-minute wild-goose chase looking for him just so I could hang out with her for a bit. I’ve never felt so cool, before or since.

But every time I came home from my tennis lessons or my elite private school or these exclusive beach houses, I would come home to the cold, stark reality that I was living someone else’s lifestyle, not the one that my parents could afford or would have chosen for me. The closest my family got to the prestige of that world was that we once rented out our motor home to John Ritter from
Three’s Company
. I bragged about it in school for weeks.

Then, the ultimate indignity. When I was sixteen years old, in order
to keep up with my friends, I needed to supplement what my parents were willing to give me as an allowance. I needed to get a job.

Delivering pizza for Maria’s was probably the greatest job I have ever had. During my last two years in high school, even during baseball and football season, after practice, I would make a small nightly fortune driving my dark gray Honda Prelude to some of the best real estate in America, to some of the most famous (and occasionally generous) people in the world. Listening to The Smiths while delivering a spinach calzone to Judge Reinhold in Westwood was bliss. I soon discovered that having sixty or eighty tax-free dollars in my pocket after each shift only enhanced a growing sense of freedom, of independence. I thought I was becoming an adult. It was around this time that I met Mike.