“We don’t need another hero,” sang Tina Turner in an otherwise forgettable Mad Max franchise outing. The 1985 song was a hit for reasons I’ll never fathom. Like the worst James Bond themes, it awkwardly squeezes the movie’s bombastic title into the lyrics, so the word “Thunderdome”—like “Thunderball”—feels like a stone in your shoe (in your ear).

It’s a dirge that was clearly meant to be an anthem, a collapsed musical soufflé.

Most mysteriously in terms of its appeal, though, is the sentiment expressed. If Joseph Campbell is to be believed—and the jury is hung, in academe if not in Hollywood—an aversion to heroes is downright inhuman. “Antihero” is the laziest of misnomers; hell, that type is the one we love best.

Turner’s song topped the charts around the time heroes and victims reversed polarities, a late-20th-century phenomenon I’ve written about here before.

But is our generation really so desperate for a good old-fashioned champion that we’ll glom onto the first halfway likely looking prospect who wanders into view?

The elevation of Cleveland’s Charles Ramsey to overnight secular sainthood indicates that we are.

By “we,” I don’t mean me. I woke up last Tuesday morning to learn—from every website and news channel—that a (black) neighbor had “rescued” three young (white) women who’d been held captive for years in the (Puerto Rican’s) house next door.

Like millions of others, I watched the instant-classic interview a local reporter conducted with Mr. Ramsey, the hero of the hour (and subsequent thirty-six or so).

Yes, Ramsey was energetic, earthy, and funny. Of all his quotable remarks, I most enjoyed the one that many news aggregators pretended they hadn’t heard:

I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.

African-American columnist Larry Elder noticed the same thing and got off a joke I’m jealous of:

But a check of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Cleveland Plain Dealer shows that while the papers quoted Ramsey, none saw fit to include his observation that “a pretty white girl” running up to a black man means “something is wrong here.” Looking uncomfortable, the television reporter, from local Channel 5, an ABC affiliate, promptly broke off the interview. No follow up, as in, “What, you’ve never seen a Shirley Temple movie?”

Yet unlike pretty much every website I visited—left and right—I didn’t anoint Charles Ramsey the new Lindbergh, or post his video on my blog, or his “amazing” 911 call, or any of the other “incredible” interviews he’s conducted since.

First off: The mainstream media hasn’t gotten a breaking story right since Walter Cronkite correctly reported that three shots had been fired on JFK’s motorcade. Reporters’ twisted compulsion to transform ordinary people into instant international heroes (or, in the heartbreaking case of Richard Jewell, villains) has, ironically, cost folks their lives.

Secondly: What’s so heroic about kicking down a door (which Ramsey may not have even done) after hearing screaming behind it? The Searchers this sure as hell ain’t. Hell, it’s barely Taxi Driver.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t among the white liberals who scolded their fellows for viralizing the Ramsey video and thereby supposedly perpetuating stereotypes about lower-class urban blacks as hyper, chatty clowns.

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(Interestingly, similar critiques emerged at the invaluable black conservative site BookerRising, where answers to the online debate question “Is Charles Ramsey A Buffoon?” ranged from “yes” to “maybe.”)

Instead, my BS detector went off when Ramsey contradicted himself in a different interview, apparently unable to decide whether or not he’d always thought something fishy was going on at the Castro house.

That’s when, like the infallible Adam Carolla, I thought, “I want to investigate THIS guy now,” if only to find out why he wasn’t at work on a Monday afternoon.

But Carolla and I were on our own until the SmokingGun did just that. On Wednesday, the investigative site reported that Charles Ramsey had a “domestic violence” rap sheet stretching back to 1997.

Bizarrely, the same local news station that launched Ramsey into the celebrity stratosphere felt obligated to apologize after airing details from that SmokingGun report. The reason? Viewer complaints.

Cleveland’s WEWS-TV noted that:

While the story was factually sound, the timing of it and publication of such information was not in good taste, and we regret it.…Ramsey is a hero for his actions, and we recognize that.

It’s like a version of the line repeated robotically by the brainwashed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate about the story’s trumped-up hero:

“Charles Ramsey is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

I’ll grant that this story was a novel change from the mainstream media’s usual morbid wall-to-wall coverage of missing white girls. For the first time ever, those girls were kicked out of the spotlight by the black dude down the block.

Yet the worn-out expression “the soft bigotry of low expectations” isn’t adequate to the task of explaining what we witnessed last week: a nation so nakedly neurotic about race and righteousness, so unmanned and unmoored, that it hastily embraced a shady-looking African-American guy on TV because, for once, at least he wasn’t being tackled on COPS or questioned on The First 48.

America is Blanche DuBois running into a black man’s arms and muttering something about “the kindness of strangers” on her way to the asylum.

Martha Stewart

“Seasoned blonde SWF seeks sophisticated SWM Democrat. Must love dogs, topiary, major (and minor) holidays. Turn offs: processed food, dust, dirt, disarray OF ANY KIND!!! No davenport potatoes need apply. I’m a woman of many talents, from paint stripping to pole dancing. You won’t believe what I can do with a pine cone!”

I wrote that fake Martha Stewart online dating profile before I clicked on the real one she just put up at match.com. I’d actually deleted “antiquing” as not only too predictable but too vulnerable to mockery, given her age (Martha’s a well-Photoshopped seventy-one)—but she went ahead and included the word herself.

Surely the still-bookable Martha only signed up with an online dating site because her nephew just wrote a book about…online dating. But then again, she actually admitted on national TV that she wanted to “sleep with someone.” So maybe Martha’s sincerely gasping to get her groove back, although it’s hard to believe she ever had one, what with her “don’t mess my hair” WASP ice-queen persona. (Imagine watching Alfred Hitchcock watch her show.)

Now, I own a “FREE MARTHA!” T-shirt from her Atlas Shrugs-style prosecution for “insider trading,” i.e., “following her broker’s advice,” i.e., “being smarter and richer than the rest of us.” Tall poppies must be stomped down so the opiated masses can keep up with their joneses, don’t you know. That’s why I don’t enjoy watching her doing something so…pedestrian.

Online dating still seems awfully faddish and desperate, even though almost everyone knows one couple who “met” that way. (That said, that oft-quoted “one in five” stat is merely marketing table magic.)

It’s easy for me to be dismissive, since I’m no longer single and haven’t been for some time. I (like to) forget how abysmal it can be, even to a hermetically sealed introvert like me.

Were I to find myself in the market for a matchmaking service, I doubt I’d have much success signing on with the ones whose ads seem like commercials for tampons and beer:

You’ll go horseback riding then shoot some pool and do all kinds of other pretend-fun things like take a cooking class together!

(Can you imagine that date with Martha?)

And then there’s the profile picture. Ugh.

Besides, I’d be looking not just for Mr. Right, but for Mr. Right Wing. Back in the Bush years, I could’ve joined Hannidate, run by conservative pundit Sean Hannity. The now-defunct enterprise billed itself as the place “where people of like-conservative minds can come together to meet.…It’s fun, interactive, safe and anonymous”—which sounds too much like that old liberal line about abortions to be really enticing.

Speaking of abortions, Hannidate proved unviable. Maybe its intended customer base was confused by the site’s “Men Seeking Men” option. Or perhaps fewer people than expected wanted to hook up with someone who yells, “You’re a great American!” when they orgasm. Hannidate even failed as fodder for liberal fun; blogger Jesus’ General abandoned his snotty “Hannicatch of the Week” feature after five posts.

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I’m surprised raving entrepreneur Glenn Beck didn’t snap up Hannidate, re-brand it, and add it to his growing media-apparel-survivalist gear empire.

You know who does have a radio show and a dating service?

Alex Jones.

Alex Jones is that guy you think must be an actor portraying a hysterical, paranoid, cliché-spewing talk radio host in some minor satirical movie you’ve stumbled upon, until you realize after a few minutes that he’s not acting. (Maybe.)

Jones believes “a cabal of international bankers, transnational corporations and one-world globalists are taking America down the garden path to destruction sooooo sleeepeeee zzzzzzzzz.” That’s not me being over-the-top snarky (except for that last bit). I’m quoting one of his admirers.

He shouts about this stuff and more on the radio and at his InfoWars website. In fairness, about half of what he says sounds somewhat sensible if you strip out the opera buffa “precious bodily fluids” Bilderbergers boilerplate.

When a friend sent me a link to the “Dating Freedom Lovers” forum at Jones’s online fan community, Planet InfoWars, I figured I’d sign up, do some catfishing, and then write about my no-doubt-hilarious experience.

But masquerading as someone else online, let alone making believe I was single, pricked at my conscience. (Yes, I was raised by nuns.)

Plus I’m not an entirely unknown quantity at InfoWars for some reason; under my true identity I might be exposed in short order as that “shill for the new world order” who was “working for the death of America.”

I’d also envisioned Jones’s “dating service” as boasting hundreds of members, a place where I could make mischief somewhat under the radar, not the twenty-one-member forum it turned out to be.

Finally, I couldn’t bring myself to make fun of these folks. Sure, they use the cultish catchword “awake” a lot—“My favorite movie is The Matrix and being awake and telling others is important to me”—and they duly credit Jones for busting their snooze button.

A long-haired bassist pictured holding an affronted cat writes, “I’m from FEMA Region 9 (a.k.a. Big Bear City, California.)” Not a few express a desire to relocate off the grid. A very young-looking Goth girl signs off, “Jesse Ventura 2016!”

And that’s about it.

I came, I saw, I chickened out.

Their vulnerability disarmed my sarcasm, seizing it right out of my cold, dead soul.

Even troofers need someone to luf.

Rush Limbaugh

George Carlin wasn’t funny.

His “jokes” about the Catholic Church were juvenile truisms. On other topics, his “brilliant” observations barely approach cheap birthday-card standards.

Carlin’s ingenuity had nothing to do with words and everything to do with image. His career only took off when he swapped one Catskills uniform for another, trading his necktie for tie-dye.

His “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” was a groundbreaking original routine based on an official Federal Communications Commission list of forbidden utterances. It’s a routine Carlin was prosecuted for performing, leading to a court case that changed the American cultural landscape in general, the broadcasting industry in particular, and nothing I just typed is actually true.

Carlin lifted the routine from Lenny Bruce. The FCC never kept such a list. Carlin was arrested once for performing the bit onstage, which simply burnished his counterculture cred. (See “Lenny Bruce,” above.)

In 1973, a parent sued a radio station after it aired “Seven Words…” in the middle of the day, because Lord knows not much else worth worrying about was going on in America that year. The eventual Supreme Court (!) decision in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation called Carlin’s routine “indecent but not obscene,” (?) reauthorized the FCC to “prohibit such broadcasts during hours when children were likely to be among the audience” (duh)—and, I hope, led an American taxpayer or two to wonder what this five-year-long litigious and bureaucratic pissing contest had cost them.

It didn’t cost Carlin a dime—and he reaped the publicity dividends until his death decades later.

Some sports franchises earn more revenue from merchandise than ticket sales. Likewise, Detroit car companies are now behemothic pension funds that manufacture the occasional unwanted automobile as a quaint sideline. Now consider the FCC: It’s a more efficient publicity machine than any actual talent agency. More seriously, any role it may have once played in “upholding community standards” and policing the airwaves is, like it or not, obsolete.

The Federal Communications Commission is “an independent agency of the United States government,” which sounds almost as comical as “obscene but not indecent.” Less funny is its $300-million-plus annual budget, and its mandate to—well, who knows anymore?

Established as a kind of hall monitor of radio (and now TV) broadcasting, the FCC’s “mission and strategy” as of 2006 is to ensure that “all Americans…have affordable access to robust and reliable broadband products and services” (?!) and to guarantee that the nation’s “media regulations” will “promote competition and diversity”—something that “regulations” have always been super-duper good at doing.

Oh, and once in a while, the FCC yells at someone for something. Remember when Janet Jackson’s pastie-covered nipple peeked out during her Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show with Justin Timberlake? (Sorry. Had you finally forgotten?)

The FCC fined CBS $550,000 for airing this “wardrobe malfunction.” The fine was later tossed out, but not before hack pundits mused about “censorship” for millions of (uncensored) words on end, a bunch of lawsuits were launched, settled and appealed, and other boring things happened that I’m too lazy to read about.

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Famous last name and all, Jackson never received so much press, before or since. Timberlake’s career has soared.

Which brings us to the latest “controversy”: the Red Sox player who delivered an impassioned (and nationally broadcast) pre-game speech to the hometown crowd shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings.

Specifically, David Ortiz declared, “This is our fucking city, and nobody’s going to dictate our freedom.”

Especially not the FCC. Use of that word would normally net broadcasters a $1-million fine, but in this case, the Commission hurriedly took the curse off the curse. Ortiz was simply speaking “from the heart,” the FCC chairman Tweeted reassuringly.

Known as “fleeting expletives,” such unscripted boo-boos (verbal and otherwise—see above) have become almost as ubiquitous as “leaked” sex tapes and other accidental-on-purpose amusements. The Supreme Court says “fleeting expletives” are constitutionally protected. The FCC fought that finding in case after case, but their recent “thumbs up” to Ortiz’s F-bomb may indicate that they’re just as sick of all this arbitrary, subjective, well, bullshit as so many of us.

Yet if the FCC didn’t exist, one industry might have to invent it: conservative talk radio.

According to the right-wing radio-creation myth, it was only after President Reagan abolished the FCC’s unworkable and liberally biased “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987 that Rush Limbaugh was finally free to speak his mind on the air, launching a rash of imitators and unleashing a much-needed alternative to the de facto leftist “mainstream media” that also happens to be a multi-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise.

The details may be in dispute, but conservative talk radio’s origin story, where the FCC plays the ever-looming villain who’s just about to bring back that censorious “Fairness Doctrine” any second now, has energized hotheaded hosts and united their millions of fans whenever they found themselves in the rare position of needing something to complain about.

In the Internet age of podcasts and YouTube, when America has few “communities” and fewer “standards,” the FCC’s relevance is debatable. We can mourn the coarsening of pop culture, but clearly the FCC’s existence these last seventy-eight years hasn’t done much to keep that at bay anyhow. The horse isn’t just out of the barn; the horse is dead, the barn burned down long ago, and there’s a strip club where the farm used to be.

Dear Justin Trudeau,

(Assuming that IS your legitimate surname. Since you’ve evidently inherited your mother’s looks AND brains, your real father might not be Canada’s 15th Prime Minister but rather one of your mom’s multiple boyfriends—Ted Kennedy or, God help us, Ronnie Wood. Shall we arrange a DNA test—or a driving exam—to determine paternity?)

Anyhow, belated congratulations on winning the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Of course, that’s a bit like the old quiz-show joke: First prize is one week in Philadelphia, and second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia. Except in your case, first prize is actually third prize: the leadership of the once mighty “natural governing party of Canada,” now shriveled down to a measly 35 parliamentary seats out of 308.

So you’re not even the Leader of the Official Opposition. You’re the lead singer for the band that opens for the band that opens for, well, The Rolling Stones, let’s say.

Still, this somewhat dubious “accomplishment” is the greatest achievement in your forty-one-year-old life, and like all your other “accomplishments,” it was mostly possible because you have a famous last name and nice hair. You didn’t earn your new post after years of hard, thankless work and sacrifice. You won a fixed genetic lottery.

At your age, your father, Pierre—I’ll play along—had a Canadian law degree and a Master’s from Harvard, had founded a hugely influential political journal, and then served as Minister of Justice under Lester B. Pearson.

You, on the other hand, are a drama teacher.

A substitute drama teacher.

Your resume makes Barack Obama’s look like Herbert Hoover’s.

As I’ve said many times: You live in the moral equivalent of your father’s basement.

Of course, Canada, like much of the West, is currently overrun with carefully coiffed, pleasant-enough, basement-dwelling forty-one-year-old “men” with useless degrees.

Another reason you were chosen to lead, I suspect.

The ruling Conservative Party wasted no time after your victory in pushing out a faintly amusing attack ad reminding voters of just a few of your many gaffes: your objection to the word “barbaric” to describe honor killings; your comment that Quebecers are “superior” to other Canadians. (They left out the bit where you cursed out another member of Parliament—then called on him to apologize.)

They needn’t have bothered, really. As one commentator put it, you’re your own attack ad, a kind of rhetorical suicide bomber.

Which brings us to your latest bungle.

Just a couple of hours after the attack, the state broadcaster wound up a softball interview by asking you about the Boston Marathon bombings and how you would respond if you were PM.

“People have died, many people are injured,” the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge said to you. “You’re the Canadian prime minister, what do you do?”

As I’m sure you’d prefer to forget, you replied, “[W]e have to look at the root causes.”

You added:

But there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded, completely at war with innocents, at war with a society. And our approach has to be, “OK, where do those tensions come from?”

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There is a need for security and response and being proactive and making sure that we have information, but we also need to make sure that as we go forward we don’t emphasize a culture of fear and mistrust, because that ends up marginalizing even further people who are already, you know, feeling like they are enemies of society rather than people who have hope for the future and faith that we can work together and succeed.

So here’s why I’m writing you, Justin:

I feel “completely excluded” in the multilingual, multicultural, “peacekeeping” and “Participaction” Canada your father made.

I was born into a “culture of fear and mistrust” in which (certain) ethnic groups are welcomed into the country in hundreds of thousands and are courted for votes—while their bigoted outbursts and blatant violations of the law are mostly ignored.

As a lowly white “old stock” Canadian, however—one who doesn’t have a famous last name or people throwing money at me just for leaving the house—I’m an “enemy of society.”

If I post an anti-immigrant “poem” on a website, I can face years of litigation.

Some of my opinions were still considered mainstream just a few years ago. They are now illegal. I didn’t even get to vote on that.

The police will strip-search me if my child draws a picture of a gun, but Indians can hold residential neighborhoods hostage for years with impunity.

The computer I’m writing this on doesn’t even belong to me, at least according to that Charter your father cooked up with his pals. They left out anything about “property rights” and “due process” on purpose.

Like true freedom of speech, I guess they figured such niceties were “American concepts” our powerful elites don’t have to “value.”

As you can see, I have a whole lot of “tensions.”

I’m “marginalized.”

And since it’s obvious that—despite or even because of your many irrefutable flaws—you’re going to be Prime Minister one day, I don’t have a lot of “hope for the future.”

My question to you is this, Justin:

What do I get to blow up?

Image of Canadian flag courtesy of Shutterstock

Sam Mullet

Reality has made quoting Malcolm Muggeridge impossible. That’s OK by me, because between his willfully ignorant campaign against Life of Brian and his equally problematic crush on Mother Teresa, I never liked him anyway.

But give credit where it’s due: Muggeridge originated the observation while he was the editor of Punch that modern life’s absurdities had made the satirist’s role redundant. (Surely the spectacle of one satirist later condemning others for irreverence counts as one of those absurdities.)

Hell, forget something as lofty as satire: What about plain old goofy jokes? Since September 12, 2001, I’ve enjoyed asking those who insist that “all religions are exactly the same” if they can recall the last time the Amish flew planes into skyscrapers.

The Amish’s reputation as magical Caucasians—noble, hardworking pacifists who just want to be left alone—has been burnished, ironically, by one of those “English” inventions they abhor: the movies. Thanks to heavy rotation on TV, Witness has been paying healthy goodwill dividends since 1985.

But after Devil’s Playground (2002) taught smug media hipsters the word “Rumspringa” and revealed the community’s cracks, they embraced the Old Order as their new favorite “offbeat” minority. “Amish” has become the laziest punch line since “mother-in-law.”

Reality TV came calling, but results are mixed. Amish in the City lasted only one season. Breaking Amish and Amish Mafia have been renewed despite production sins of omission and commission, respectively.

America can’t make up its mind about the Amish. That shocking 2006 Amish schoolhouse massacre prompted many to look upon them as slender beacons of supernatural sanctity in a sick world.

Yet despite evidence that the “Amish Mafia” is a work of exploitative “English” fiction, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that there’s more sinister going on in Amish country than a stubborn refusal to stick orange safety triangles on buggies.

What if Deadly Blessing was really a documentary?

Frankly, I don’t see how the Amish contribute anything to society at-large aside from the occasional pie. Like all parasitical pacifists, the Amish can only act out their utopian fantasies thanks to the forbearance of sinful outsiders. Their vaunted self-sufficiency is a pose, and their “humility” sure is showy.

But even I don’t think a bunch of them deserve up to fifteen years in prison for cutting their neighbors’ hair.

How did a long-simmering internal theological dispute about the length of their brethren’s beards get turned into a federal “hate crime” case? When did transporting scissors across state lines become a felony and cutting someone’s hair—even against their will—a “bodily injury”?

When the federal government said so, of course, waving around a 2009 “Hate Crimes Prevention Act” that “honors” the victim of a non-hate crime (but don’t point that out or you might get charged with, well, you know).

You see, these Amish-on-Amish attacks were “religiously motivated.” That makes them federal “hate crimes.” Obviously!

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The story behind the bizarre conviction of sixteen Amish men and women starts back in 1995, when Sam Mullet Sr. and his followers settled in Bergholz, OH. From the beginning, doubts arose as to whether or not these settlers were really Amish. Then Mullet excommunicated some followers, leading 300 “ordained Amish officials” to sanction him. 

An expert on the Amish testified that the community soon developed “cult-like features.”

Those features included a controlling, authoritarian figure; threats of physical punishment to coerce people into obedience; the development of distinct and unique practices or rituals; and the creation of an ideology….

(This sounds absolutely nothing like an all-powerful state adjudicating religious disputes, then shipping offenders to out-of-state prisons where their relatives can’t even visit them.)

Some of you are thinking, “Surely this crazy Mullet guy is guilty of something—incest, embezzlement—but the authorities had to get him on ‘hate crimes.’ It’s like Al Capone ordering the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre but being jailed for tax evasion.”

Which, I maintain, was one of the worst precedents in legal history.

I’m supposed to be impressed because the state-run protection-racket monopoly can only manage to convict a brazen felon on charges of, basically, not giving the state its share of the proceeds of a “crime” that was the state’s idea to begin with?

What’s the point of locking up one criminal when you’ll still have hundreds of them—armed and wearing Chicago police uniforms—on the public payroll?

(Also? Seven dead mobsters: bug or feature?)

Fast-forward to 2013. Those clever feds are at it again. Let’s see Brian De Palma squeeze a slick, hagiographic movie out of this tale:

[T]he beard trimmer, shears, and disposable camera used by Mullet’s followers…were all manufactured outside of Ohio, you see, so clearly this was a case that cried out for the Justice Department’s attention. And did I mention that the beard-cutting fanatics mailed a letter at one point and even used a highway (although they never actually left the state)? I got your federal jurisdiction right here.

A 67-year-old American citizen is about to begin a 15-year prison term—in other words, a life sentence—for being a nonconformist religious weirdo in a country founded by nonconformist religious weirdoes.

Funny, I don’t feel any safer.

Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda uttered the words, “I will go to my grave” last week and I thought: “Finally!”

Fonda recently talked to Oprah about that “one unforgiveable mistake” she made when she visited North Vietnam in 1972: allowing herself to be photographed while perched giddily on an anti-aircraft gun, looking positively post-coital when she wasn’t pulling goofy faces.

The fact that “Hanoi Jane” now insists this infamous image “belied everything that I was” displays psychopathic chutzpah; during that same era, Fonda headlined a “Fuck the Army” comedy tour and married shameless soixante-neuf opportunist Tom Hayden. Just a few years ago, the supposedly repentant Fonda showed up at Mr. Chow’s wearing a T-shirt screen-printed with her also-infamous (and much more flattering) mug shot, her then-much-younger fist raised in a revolutionary salute across her now-much-older boobs.

Fonda’s contemporary Robert Redford kept his “progressive” politics mostly to himself until old age. A wise move: We’re more prone to indulge the elderly’s cranky outbursts.

Lefties joke ad nauseam about crusty right-wingers shouting, “Get off my lawn!” (It’s one of those fanciful sentences such as “You lie, boy!” and “I can see Russia from my house!” with which liberals construct entire worldviews.)

Ironically, Redford in his dotage now embodies that liberal stereotype of the other side, swooping down in his private jet to try to halt pipeline construction and the like (on someone else’s “lawn,” but still).

Of course, you’re allowed on his “lawn”—the Sundance Film Festival, that is—as long as you can afford to go, and few ordinary folks can.

Most average Americans can, however, probably scrounge together the ticket price for Redford’s new film. Whether or not they’ll bother is another matter.

I first wrote about The Company You Keep here at Taki’s over a year ago. It’s finally set for release and is generating lots of buzz, mostly because the aging boomer narcissists who run the media (and pretty much everything else) wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Company You Keep is about “a former Weather Underground activist who goes on the run from a journalist who has discovered his identity.”

(I’m sure the curators of the highly regarded and widely influential Internet Movie Database meant to write “terrorist” instead of “activist,” but their fingers must have slipped.)

As I joked in 2012, that fictional premise is a stark contrast from the fates of all the real Weather Underground terrorists who now teach at major universities, hang out with the president, get lovingly profiled in The New York Times and elsewhere—do everything except disguise their identities and hide from the authorities.

Hell, they are the authorities.

Just a reminder: Unrepentant Weatherman bomber Bill “Kill Your Parents” Ayers is a highly respected “educator” and a longtime associate of Barack Obama; members of the Weather Underground and other Aquarian terrorists such as Ayers’s wife Bernardine Dohrn, Eleanor Raskin, and Kathleen Cleaver teach at various American law schools, even though not all of them have law degrees.

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Weatherman co-founder Jeff Jones, who—don’t you hate when this happens?—”was unexpectedly caught up in a police sweep of individuals suspected of participating in the deadly robbery of an armored truck”—now runs a coalition of labor and environmentalist groups called the Apollo Alliance “and was responsible for drafting President Obama’s 2009 Recovery Act.”

I was going to type “write your own joke,” but then I stumbled upon this:

Addressing those in attendance [at the 1969 Chicago rally], Jones claimed to be the living embodiment of Marion Delgado, a Chicano boy who, at the age of 5, had placed a slab of concrete on a railroad track and derailed a passenger train in California 22 years earlier. Though Delgado had never intended to cause such a tragedy, Jones and his fellow leftists revered the boy’s act for its symbolic value….

Just as publicity for The Company You Keep was revving up, another convicted Weather Underground felon, Kathy Boudin, was appointed an adjunct professor of social work at Columbia University. Boudin served 22 years for her role in that 1981 Brinks truck robbery that left three dead, got Jeff Jones “unexpectedly caught up”—and which inspired the backstory of Redford’s new movie.

Surely not a few impeccably degreed and rap-sheet-free young graduates are wondering right about now, “Who do you have to blow up to get a job around here?”

Or not. A la Crosby, Stills and Nash, the boomers taught the children well—their kids and those of others. (Haven’t you heard? “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents.”)

Even if not one Millennial ever watches The Company You Keep, they’re steeped in the seductive, romantic message that hippies were peaceful, noble idealists and even “patriots.”

Coinciding with the release of Redford’s movie is the rerelease of Larry Grathwohl’s 1976 book Bringing Down America. Subtitled An FBI Informer with the Weathermen, the long out-of-print memoir details the 22-year-old Grathwohl’s tenure as a Vietnam vet turned semi-reluctant and mostly unpaid terror-cell infiltrator.

The book is both a thrilling page-turner and a deeply depressing read. Between bombings, Grathwohl is stuck shuffling from one filthy safe house to another, forced to “rap” about the horrors of monogamy and imperialism for hours at a time, with a cadre of hyper-articulate, sociopathic, weirdly conformist “rebels.”

As the only individual who ever fully infiltrated the Weathermen—he was steadily promoted through the ranks—Grathwohl’s story would probably make a terrific movie or at the very least one the other half of America might actually pay to see.

And knowing how preoccupied the conservative establishment is with starting up yet another “news outlet” and touting this week’s Republican savior (while enriching themselves), I’ll go out on a limb and assume the movie rights are still available.

I have a confession to make to all my straight male friends:

I thought you were gay.

Call it a hazard of big-city living: I’ve automatically assumed every guy I’ve met over the course of the last twenty years was homosexual, then I worked my way backwards as evidence of his straightness piled up. (Say, spontaneous, repeated expressions of appreciation for Monica Bellucci, Motörhead, or both.)

Can you blame me? Consider the allegedly straight dudes you see on the subway, at the office, and at the coffee shop, sometimes with wives and even offspring in tow. Add up all the man-purses, the too-visible hair “product,” the pretentious eyewear, the borderline anorexia, the Tintin hairdos, the finicky food fetishes, and the little dogs in adorable outfits. (The Marquess of Queensbury was accidentally ahead of his time.)

We started mocking this personal style as “metrosexual” almost twenty years ago, but that word was always problematic. The “metro” prefix is utterly apt; it’s the “sexual” part that’s off. These nominal heteros are consciously or subconsciously mimicking gay twinks, and those fellows usually want to get laid. Their fragile straight counterparts, in contrast, don’t look like they could manage it, or even want to.

Back in the 1960s, hard hats complained they couldn’t tell the boys from the girls anymore. But at least hippie guys—from Spahn Ranch to the Weather Underground townhouse—were obsessed with sex. These days, a guy who expresses too much interest in getting girls into bed can end up on an SPLC “hate group” list.

In that much maligned “manosphere,” the term “beta male” is the most popular pejorative. Since it’s fresher and more accurate than “metrosexual,” I’ll be using that phrase henceforth, along with that unfairly neglected anachronism “faggotry.” It’s ideal for my purposes because it doesn’t necessarily mean “gay” so much as “gay-ish.” So I’m trying to bring that word back. Call it artisanal invective.

Now let’s review This Week in Epic Beta Male Faggotry:

• With the fruity blond Latino voted off, the remaining male contestants on American Idol are the fruity black dude and the fruity dark Latino (who really does look “laminated”). Earlier this season, a leading male contender named “JDA”—pronounced “JADE-a”—wore dresses, makeup, face veils—and five o’clock shadow. Then when one of last year’s semifinalists returned to perform, he sported a full beard and a bun in his hair, looking like the bastard son of Grizzly Adams and Frau Blücher. At one juncture, the most macho guy on the AI stage was the 2012 winner: shy, ectomorphic Phillip “You Can Tell I’m a Vegan Just by Looking at Me” Phillips.

• An advice column at the Disney-owned parenting site Babble gave new moms and dads one more thing to panic about: the “Bronie” phenomenon. Did you know “there’s an entire culture of grown men that love [the 1980s children’s cartoon] My Little Pony?” That these “men” collect the colorful equine dolls and play with them? That this culture comes “complete with conventions and tattooed ‘cutie marks’...”? The advice lady adds, “I’ll be proud if my son joins your ranks.”

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• A number of Internet forums host handwringing conversations about “masculinity,” another word the left has domesticated and castrated so that it now means the opposite of its original definition. The first such site I ever encountered was The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, but the upstart Good Men Project throws off so little testosterone, it makes the League look like the gladiator holding pen beneath the Roman Coliseum.

Behold “5 Ways Disavowing Masculinity Changed My Life,” in which one Richard Reece admits that he now “sits down to pee” and “wears women’s clothing accessories.”

• Which brings us to author Buzz Bissinger’s gut-curdling confession in GQ that he blew over a half-million of his Friday Night Lights money on clothes. And by “clothes” he means, among many other items, a pair of $5,600 leather pants and some thigh-high boots with six-inch stiletto heels.

The 58-year-old married father of three says he “began to seek sexual expression in the form of high fashion” and discovered that “Tom Ford makeup is divine.”

Yes, I know: Complaints about creeping effeminacy are as old as ancient Greece and Rome—both of which are extinct. But what brought on this latest epidemic?

For some right-wingers, the hormones excreted by birth-control-pill-taking females have replaced fluoride as the waterborne toxin endangering our “precious bodily fluids,” but the scientific jury is still out on that one. And besides, beta males only drink bottled H₂O.

Whatever the reason, the rest of us are doomed to reside in a dystopian alternate universe in which the 98-pound weakling is the beau ideal and Charles Atlas shrugged.

Del Close

Had history veered off course ever so slightly, we’d mock evangelical Christians for playing George Carlin albums backwards and listening for demonic messages in the resulting garble.

Parents would sue Saturday Night Live over their teenaged son’s suicide. Jack Chick comics would warn young people to steer clear of Second City shows instead of heavy-metal concerts.

This might have happened if all those witch-hunting (and never quite finding) fundamentalists had known that the guru of late-20th-century comedy was a self-described warlock who cast magic spells onstage.

Del Close is the founder of “long form”—the snotty gnostic cousin of populist “games”-based short-form improvisation. He is to comedy what Les Paul is to rock: the dearly beloved, slightly obscure innovator who altered his discipline dramatically while making countless other artists rich and famous.

(That said, there’s no evidence that the late luthier worshiped Lucifer.)

Few people beyond the comedy cognoscenti know Del Close’s name, but that may change if either or both of two biopics about him are ever completed.

(The Delmonic Interviews, an all-star 2002 film tribute to Close, is screened rarely, and then only to acolytes. See “gnostic” above.)

That such projects even exist demonstrates the worshipful regard in which Close is held by former students such as Bill Murray, Betty Thomas, and Mike Myers, all of whom were connected to those yellow-lit movies at one point.

From the late 1960s until his death in 1999, Close taught long form at Second City Toronto and Chicago and served as SNL’s “house metaphysician.” No wonder the names of his other devoted disciples read like a comedy hall of fame: Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, John Candy, Andy Dick, Chris Farley, Shelley Long, and Gilda Radner, to name a very few.

At the risk of sounding as Kool-Aid drunk as those evangelicals obsessed with backmasking, there’s something a bit…Faustian about that list, what with everyone on it doomed to one sort of hell (addiction) or another (one-hit-wonderhood.)

“Witchcraft in Hollywood? That explains everything,” frustrated culture warriors will joke. Except—blame my cradle Catholicism—I’m not sure how funny some of this is.

Close’s longtime collaborator Charna Halpern is helming one of the movies about his life. In a 2012 interview, Halpern describes their first meeting:

I heard he was doing a show at an art gallery with some of his students from Second City. And Del was a witch. He was Pagan. I went there one night and he had his robes on, and it was dark and it was Halloween so he made it really scary. He had his magic wand….[H]e was evoking gods of the East and demons of the West….

Halpern adds that she was into Transcendental Meditation at the time, so she and Close fought about whether or not the students were sufficiently “white lighted,” that is, protected from demonic possession, what with all these invocations in the air. Close shot back, “I protected the building!” Unimpressed, Halpern walked out but didn’t stay away for long.

In the definitive biography of Close, one student complains to a Second City producer that “Del is invoking the Devil” in class. His creepy “invocations” remain legendary in the improv community and are featured in his classic textbook. In one exercise, students “invoke a ‘god’ that they create themselves from their own group vision,” usually an object they are supposed to “worship.”

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“It’s not as frightening as it sounds,” the authors insist rather unconvincingly, describing a sample invocation:

Thou hast taken control of my good sense. When thou art with me, I am debased and dishonored.

Oh, and Close claimed his cocaine addiction was cured by a coven of Toronto witches.

Yes, for aside from his cult-leader shtick, Close was your typical morbid, manic, heavily medicated modern comic. Not surprisingly, he and student John Belushi were best buddies.

In the unwatchable movie Wired (1989), a comedy coach clearly patterned on Close screams at “Belushi” (played by Michael Chiklis), “Let the demons loose!”

The coach’s furious Freudian litany is familiar to even the casual student of humor:

Comedy is aggression.…“Knock ’em dead. Heh-heh, I murdered ’em!”...Comedy’s an assault….Kill ‘em. Make ‘em laugh ’til it hurts…’til they have a fuckin’ hemorrhage! That’s comedy.

And yet the only people who ever actually died were the ones on the stage, not in the audience.

Later in life, Close felt compelled to tell new students that “the advice I gave Belushi made him a star, it didn’t kill him”—a strange statement if you’re simply teaching mundane inhibition-reducing exercises to budding actors.

So yes, Bible-thumpers wasted a generation looking for covens in all the wrong places. Making fun of them is, well, fun. But a slender satanic thread has run through American pop culture ever since 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby (whose director lost his wife soon thereafter in a frenzied cult murder spree). Never mind that The Rolling Stones and Black Sabbath—even Sammy Davis, Jr.—flirted with the Devil back when membership in Anton LaVey’s “church” was commonplace in Hollywood.

Next time a comedian jokes about “stupid” Christian sacraments—or even the Bushes’ membership in Skull & Bones (while ignoring John Kerry’s)—you’ll be forgiven for wondering what sorts of creepy rituals that comedian has ever performed with a straight face and whether or not, somewhere, Screwtape is getting the last laugh.

Yityish Aynaw

President Obama pointedly requested Yityish Aynaw’s presence at this week’s banquet in his honor in Jerusalem.

Will his eagerness to meet the first Ethiopian-born Miss Israel retire all those nasty “Is Barack secretly gay?” rumors? Good God, I hope not. I never want Chicago blogger Kevin DuJan—the Erich von Däniken of Boystown—to stop investigating Obama’s “bathhouse days,” unpacking the “gay jokes” supposedly hidden in Drudge Report headlines, and writing photo captions such as, “There have never been two straight males in the history of the world who have sat on the couch together like this.”

Anyhow, who isn’t looking forward to pictures of the First Lady trying to look gracious around Miss Aynaw, whose regal femininity seems effortless?

Unlike Mrs. Obama, by all accounts Miss Israel has never been ashamed of her country, even though some folks think she should be.

“Did Israeli Doctors Force Contraception on Ethiopian Immigrants?” TIME asked, echoing tons of headlines from other news outlets, although most didn’t bother with the question mark.

Behold: Liberals who’ve spent the last half-century pushing Africans to use birth control are suddenly outraged by Israelis allegedly pushing Africans to use birth control.

Also? It may not be true.

That the story originated in Haaretz should’ve been the first clue. Getting your news about Israel from Haaretz is like getting your ideas about life in the tropics from Gilligan’s Island.

Earlier this year, the paper reported that Ethiopian immigrants to Israel were being told they’d only be allowed into the country if they received Depo-Provera injections, whether or not they understood why.

Cries of “racism” and “hypocrisy” and “genocide” arose from the usual quarters.

Then last week, Haaretz was obliged to run a correction. The “government official” who had “for the first time acknowledged the practice” actually hadn’t. In fact, the head of the Health Ministry had directed doctors not to give the shots to any women (not only Ethiopians) unless they understood that they were receiving birth control.

So it’s pretty much the opposite of what the original report claimed.

Haaretz‘s correction isn’t getting one squiddilion of the coverage that first story received.

Neither is this week’s revelation that a BBC stringer’s infant son had been killed, not by the IDF as he’d insisted, but by Hamas—who use children as human targets anyhow. (I reject the imprecise term “human shields.”)

Many “shocking” tales of Israeli “apartheid” are manufactured outright. Why oppressed peoples and their allies so often feel compelled to exaggerate their victimhood is a question I’ll leave to psychologists. I guess the short, realpolitik answer is: Because it works.

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Some tales of Israeli Bond-villainy are more amusing than others, such as the Day of the Dolphin-type bestiary apparently at their disposal. The overblown 2009 “organ harvesting” story was a graver concern, even though the Swedish reporter who penned it shrugged that he didn’t know if it was true.

These contracepted refugees, though…the story may not quite pass the smell test, but it surely rates a C+.

Even some of Israel’s most rabid critics might quietly applaud their bête noire for allegedly doing something they approve of: attempting to keep its population as homogeneous as possible.

So what’s really going on?

White feminists in the West fumed about Israelis supposedly treating black Third World females as if they were too stupid to understand the concept of birth control. I’m forced to side with these feminists, but for reasons of which they might not approve.

As a doctor connected to the Israeli program explained, referring to the refugees’ country of origin:

Injectable contraceptives are the most desired throughout [Ethiopia]. They are easy, culturally preferred, and offer the ability to be on birth control without a woman informing her husband, which is an issue here.

In other words, these Ethiopian women know exactly what they’re doing. Israeli doctors, anxious to keep the women’s secret, do sound suspiciously like they’re denying something—because they are.

As for Miss Israel, will she comment on this touchy subject? Sounding remarkably like any other pageant contestant the world over, Aynaw cites as her heroes Martin Luther King and Tyra Banks. So perhaps she’ll just stick to “world peace” as her cause of choice and even chat about it with the president at that banquet.

Some folks who likely won’t be at the gala?

U.S. President Barack Obama…graduated college in 1983; yet, none of the 25 or so alumni of his class who are now living in Israel remember laying eyes on him.

Weird.

Then again, I got that story from Haaretz.

Gay activists insist that “faggot” comes from the word for the kindling beneath the feet of heretical homosexuals. That’s a lie.

But while the word “faggot” doesn’t come from “a bundle of sticks,” the word “fascist” does.

Funny, that.

Behold: In the name of “truth, justice and the American way,” a renowned science-fiction writer has just been condemned to (professional) death for expressing his views on homosexuality in a tiny Mormon magazine almost twenty-five years ago.

Orson Scott Card wrote the beloved 1985 Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel Ender’s Game “about the innocence of a child winning out over war and hatred,” an “irony” which seems to be making his “homophobia” all the more heartbreaking to his lifelong (liberal) fans.

So what did Card say?

Back in 1990—and again in 2004—he objected to the legalization of sodomy and “gay marriage” by judicial fiat. If unelected judges can nullify thousands of years of civil and religious law in a trice, he asked, what else will our robed rulers force us to accept? Will ordinary people someday rise up against this tyrannical system?

That candid, decades-long (and, some would say, perfectly sound) opposition to “gay marriage” in particular and top-down social engineering in general suddenly rendered Card persona non grata when DC Comics hired him to write a Superman comic last month.

That was the stick that broke the faggots’ back, or perhaps the one they’d been waiting to beat Card with for some time.

Confronted with 12,000 petition signatures and the door-slamming departure of the project’s illustrator, DC put Card’s assignment on hold.

Card’s latter-day critics argue that Superman is the moral equivalent of Yellowstone Park: an inviolate national treasure who represents decency, fairness, defense of the underdog, and therefore, er, “gay marriage”—the very values Orson the Evil opposes.

No matter that Superman was the Klan-inspired (!) creation of two Jewish teenagers who lifted his name from Nietzsche (boo!) and his origin story from the Bible (hiss!). Far from being a piece of UNESCO-type public (intellectual) property, the Man of Steel was sold off long ago to a giant corporation (boo again!) in a deal that makes the chief of the Lenape tribe look like Donald Trump.

It’s almost touching: These progressives’ sudden affection for Superman—remember when he symbolized everything that was wrong about America?—is probably the closest they’ll ever let themselves get to a patriotism of sorts.

Of course, these born-again defenders of Superman’s honor are the same types who’ve turned Christ (another super-powered hero) into “Jesus of Narcissists,” another flattering reflection of their own scab-picking First World problems and faddish pagan beliefs.

(One of Card’s harshest critics calls himself “the last scion of Norse warriors and the forbidden elder gods.”)

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So it’s no surprise that one comment thread praising Card’s dismissal quickly devolved into a minor meditation about “fatal peanut allergies” and those dreadful right-wingers who don’t believe in such things.

Of which I am one. These “allergies” are a mostly white upper-class affectation and kill only about 30 people a year—maybe—in the United States.

But progressives always focus intently on the “rights” of a tiny, vocal minority, like the fruits and the nuts. Hence their myopic and dangerous “if it saves one life” worldview. These spindly beta males all secretly see themselves as righteous macho caped crusaders, rescuing the world whether it needs it or not. No wonder they view Card as kryptonite.

Most amusing are those who condemn Orson Scott Card for writing that if those darned gays got too uppity about their so-called rights, he would personally work to “overthrow the government.”

That’s not quite what he said—befitting a writer of speculative fiction, he merely mused that some fed-up Americans might do so in some dystopian future but stupidly didn’t use quotation marks—so what?

I thought left-wingers, straight and gay, loved revolution. How many Sex Pistols records do these people own? Hell, how many Beatles albums?

Aren’t these the same folks who’ve turned actual domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn into Establishment scions?

You know the answer:

“Oh, but that’s different.”

And never mind that the same 1990 essay held up today as evidence of Card’s “homophobia” was condemned as “pro-gay” by some of his fellow Mormons at the time. Listen as a very different writer, George Jonas, recalls the campaign to decriminalize homosexual acts in the 1970s:

Back then, the liberal position was that homosexuality wasn’t a sin but an illness, and while making a sin a crime was one thing, making an illness a crime was like recommending jail for someone with gallstones….

Some of the arguments used to push for decriminalization were as politically incorrect as the moral and religious injunctions offered for retention.

Comic books used to advertise “magic decoder rings” in their back pages. If only liberals would issue similar gadgets so we could keep up with their mercurial McCarthyite moods.

Me? I’m holding out for my very own Fortress of Solitude.

I picked the wrong year to quit drinking.

If you’ve never been to an old-school AA meeting, imagine Vince Lombardi’s locker room if he’d been coaching Pilgrims with Tourette’s: a spartan, Quaker-meeting setup, all bootstrapping, no bullshit. A newcomer dumb enough to whine about their “feelings” gets ordered to scrub out the coffee urn by a gruff “old timer.”

That’s not what I slunk into in 1992, by which time then-faddish PBS fixture John “Finding Your Inner Child” Bradshaw had accidentally turned Alcoholics Anonymous into a New Age unicorn-and-rainbows therapeutic weep-fest that would’ve disgusted Greatest Generation founders Bill W. and Dr. Bob, who probably kept their fedoras on in the gutter.

Some meetings even served decaf.

Believe me: “Low self-esteem” is not your typical boozehound’s problem. Then again, about half the people I met in “the rooms” weren’t even alcoholics, just neurotics too cheap to get real therapy.

Remember, it was the 1990s, the era of The X-Files and Oprah at her tabloid low: at every 12-Step meeting, you’d meet “survivors of ritualistic Satanic abuse” and “recovered memory victims” and alien abductees and even “starseeds,” the self-proclaimed spawn of spacemen who’ve been sent to Earth to…do something or other. (Luckily the latter two never came to blows.)

There were so many “multiple personalities” at some meetings, we were probably breaking fire codes without knowing it.

And I lived in Boystown, so lots of the real drunks were gay, bi, trannies, lesbians of convenience, and even “two-spirited” (AKA gay Indians).

Despite all this, I never drank after my first meeting (ODAAT), worked the Steps, got a new job, and ten years later, I looked around at all the people who still hadn’t and thought, “I didn’t get sober so I could spend the rest of my life with these losers.”

It took me a decade to notice that none of the 12 Steps is “Go to meetings.” So I stopped. I couldn’t take the crazies. In retrospect, I was the crazy one for thinking I was rid of them.

Aware of my impatience for the ever-metastazing and increasingly belligerent LGBTTIQQ2SA “community” and other victim-loonies, a friend directed me to a Reddit thread titled “what does all this bullshit mean anyway?” about some self-described “social justice activists.”

Now that sounds like some folks who, while misguided and none too bright, want to feed the poor and stuff.

Yeah, no.

These “social justice activists” are simply narcissistic, delusional, sex-obsessed fruitcakes.

(OK, that’s not a bad description of some famous, slightly more legitimate “social justice activists,” but stick with me.)

Turns out, crazy sex maniacs have cooked up new ways to be crazy sex maniacs.

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“Come on,” you’re thinking, “sex is sex and crazy is crazy. There’s nothing new under the Krafft-Ebing sun. I saw that CSI episode about furries and read that article about bronies that made me want to kill myself (after I killed my wife and kids to spare them the horrors of living in America another second.)”

Fine. Meet the “otherkin.” Unlike cosplayers, these dudes genuinely think they are animals trapped in human form. Literally. They’re serious.

How’s about “headmates?” We used to call these “imaginary friends,” but they’re not just for kids anymore. (Cuz that would be age-ist!)

Next? “Multiple systems”:

[A] person who describes themselves as a multiple system will likely refer to themselves as ‘they’ because they believe they are multiple people….

And, because that isn’t already batshit insane enough, some multiple systems will have headmates who are animals, otherkin people, and, of course, fictional characters….I’ve not even got to the people who believe they have galaxies, nebulae, universes, and other space shit, either in their ‘headspace’ or as an otherkin. So some people will believe they are actually galaxies.

Or “demisexuals”? They’re “only sexually attracted to people” they have “an emotional connection to.” (We used to call them “normal” and “women.”)

Now meet the “transethnic” and “transabled”: paralyzed black women trapped inside functional white-male bodies.

Naturally, “the favorite pastime for SJAs is to pretend they’re oppressed, and they are all professional victims. You may very well see otherkin telling people to “check their human privilege” while they talk about how oppressed they are because no one believes they’re really a cat…”

All very weird indeed, but so what?

Well, within living memory, gay “marriage” was unthinkable, transsexuals stuck to the stage, and a “bathroom bill” letting “transgendered” boys use the girls’ washrooms in elementary schools would be one of John Irving‘s forgotten subplots, not something that is about to become law.

Brace yourself for “otherkin-phobia” and the fines and firings that will come with it.

“There’s a fair dollop of therapeutic chatter,” one notes, in last week’s ruling by Canada’s Supreme Court declaring that mass homosexual “self-fulfillment” trumps one crazy Christian’s freedom of speech, even when he’s just quoting the Bible. (Especially then.)

Who’s to say some “cripple” is cheating the insurance company just because you saw him shooting baskets in Bermuda? He’s really transabled, you bigot.

If you don’t want your life ruined by the powers that be, you’ll cultivate the cowardice to know the difference and keep your mouth shut.

Christiane Amanpour

In the otherwise forgettable movie Betsy’s Wedding, the chichi event planner swoons over a cake sample: “It’s so subtle you can’t even taste it!”

That line sprang to mind this week after CNN’s Christiane Amanpour wished Robert Mugabe a happy birthday on Twitter.

Amanpour’s response to the inevitable outbreak of confusion and outrage? She informed her detractors with an almost audible sigh that they had an “irony deficit” that rendered them unable to appreciate her brilliantly witty and supposedly obvious “scorn” for the African dictator.

And indeed, how could we have missed it? Her exact words—“Happy Birthday, President Mugabe”—are fairly dripping with double, nay, triple entendre, no? Remember that time Marilyn Monroe sang to JFK because, as anyone could clearly see, she totally hated his guts?

It’s no secret that cable news is broken. Along with all its other problems, it has a severe problem with humor. Consider MSNBC’s recent round table discussion of “race jokes.”

This segment pissed off everyone, left and right, for all the wrong reasons:

“Can you imagine if Fox News had aired this?” “Race is no laughing matter!” “The host clearly hates white people!” “The host’s mother is white, dude!”

And the one I hate most:

“Those jokes weren’t even funny.”

It’s not that the jokes weren’t funny. It’s that they weren’t actually jokes.

OK, there was one. Even with a professional comedian on the panel, only the host, Melissa Harris-Perry, told a joke—a Jewish mother-in-law gag, no less.

The other panelists–well, the crew of the Pueblo looked more relaxed and certainly made their points more effectively. These MSNBC guests served up meandering word sequences without punch lines, all of which limply mocked—you’ll never guess—white men.

So much for those brave, iconoclastic, ever-so-clever progressives, who insist ad nauseam that on top of everything else, they’re funnier than conservatives, too.

A scant ten years ago, here’s what a televised “race joke” panel looked like. Note that the funniest, most outspoken participants are non-liberal white males. (PS: The show was quickly canceled.)

How we have fallen. Politically correct “comedy controversies” now occur with menstrual regularity. (Last week it was Lisa Lampanelli Tweeting the word “nigga”.)

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A depressing “dialogue” inevitably begins about whether or not the offending joke was funny. I’m troubled by such arguments because, well, I’m a weirdo. (I put up pictures of Gene Wilder in my locker and sent Johnny Carson a birthday card when I was eight.) But it’s also because I live in a country where the government can team up with two drunken lesbians to ruin a comic’s life. The fact that some people even debated whether or not this action was right or wrong was distressing enough.

That the debate often centered on whether or not the comic in question, Guy Earle, was funny—and therefore deserved support—was worse. More self-described comedians than you’d think strenuously insisted that he didn’t, that Earle was that second-worst of creatures, a “hack.” (In the stand-up lexicon, the only worse insult is “joke thief.”)

In Soviet Canuckistan, court jesters side with court!

More of those fearless, speak-truth-to-power “artists,” I guess.

We can’t rely on some immeasurable standard of “funniness” to determine whom or what to censure. Humor is arguably more subjective than beauty, although that hasn’t prevented the likes of Freud from putting comedy (and his readers) to sleep for some exploratory surgery.

(The funniest thing about The Joke and Its Relationship to the Unconscious is the title; if it hadn’t existed, Woody Allen would’ve felt obliged to invent it.)

Even comedians can’t resist: Put two comics together, and after five minutes scoffing at blowhardisms such as “Comedy is tragedy plus time,” they’ll spend the next hour expounding on their own Grand (or Not So Grand) Unified Theories of Humor.

Here’s what’s weird:

As I’ve complained about here before, bike-helmeted, nut-allergic, low-IQ Americans increasingly demand that stand-up comedians be responsible and sensitive, “fair and balanced,” as if they were journalists instead of jokers.

But because a comedian acting as a journalist has become a respectable one-man institution, now we have journalists trying to be comedians.

They’re awful at it, but when smacked down, they employ the same “I was only kidding/You’re too stupid to ‘get’ it/Bite me” excuses they castigate comedians for employing.

None of this should surprise anyone. Contrary to what they tell you (and tell you and tell you), progressives don’t have principles. Rather, they have faddish opinions that are highly unstable and often contradictory.

When confronted with evidence of said shallow hypocrisy (Al Gore, pick up the white courtesy phone…), they respond with less entertaining variations on Ring Lardner’s “Shut up, he explained.” (That line was taken from a short story they’d no doubt condemn as offensive if they bothered to read it.)

Or else they say nothing at all. MSNBC didn’t issue an apology to white people for making them the butt of jokes last week.

Are you kidding?

Leftists feel obliged to rebrand themselves every generation or so. They’ve tried out “liberal” and “progressive” already. While it’s unwieldy, might I suggest calling them the “It’s-Different-When-We-Do-Its”?

At least that has the advantage of pinpoint accuracy.

I didn’t go to college, let alone law school. So when I started joking a few years back—in response to my own legal troubles—that “libel is what we got when we abolished dueling,” I had no idea that’s exactly what happened.

“The offence originated in England at the time of the Court of Star Chamber with the intention of preventing dueling,” explains one of Canada’s top lawyers in his recent call for the abolition of our criminal libel laws.

Yes, “criminal.” While criminal libel cases are rare compared to the amusingly named “civil” kind—which I’m up against—you face actual jail time if found guilty of the former.

Wow, who are these sinister menaces to Canadian society, you’re wondering, these heedless breachers of the Queen’s peace who need to be tossed behind bars?

Well, there’s the restaurant owner sentenced to 90 days in jail for “publishing false material concerning an online restaurant reviewer;” the protester who blogged mean things about two cops; another guy who wrote mean things about some cops and a judge; and, er, the dude who texted nude photos of his ex-girlfriend.

Bob Kane at the height of his creative powers would have a hell of a time turning these folks into credible Batman villains.

In terms of sheer stupidity, though, Canada’s civil defamation laws fall between England’s—(where Liberace won, Julie Burchill lost, and libel tourism is one of that country’s last flourishing industries)—to America’s First Amendment “Can’t they both lose?” free-for-all.

So for instance, this fellow waited until his “libeler” moved to the Great White North before serving him, and you can’t buy a major Scientology tell-all north of the 49th parallel.

To our credit, Canada—like every other nation except the United States—is at least a “user pays” jurisdiction, so we’re not burdened by what I call “lottery law”: all those “I spilled hot coffee on my lap!” (non-defamation) suits that have contributed so greatly to America’s economic and moral decline.

When someone does sue for libel in the US, it provides cheap entertainment for anyone not directly involved. How do you serve “Bubba the Love Sponge” without laughing? Then there’s the non-Nobel Prize winner who sued Dr. Tim Ball for joking, “Michael Mann at Penn State should be in the State Pen, not Penn State.”

Tort reform is desperately needed throughout the English-speaking world, and once in a while, our robed betters deign to nibble away at the law around the edges.

We all know that true, lasting tort reform will never happen, because lawyers are too politically powerful.

That doesn’t matter, though. Defamation will eventually atrophy into extinction as social mores change, as have previous subspecies of libel (the “blasphemous” and “seditious” kinds).

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For better or for worse, the notion that God and country could be fatally injured by insult has withered away. Defamatory libel is the next concept facing the scrap heap because today, a good reputation is less valuable than a bad one.

This phenomenon is nothing new but has reached epidemic proportions due mostly to technological advances. The difference between Kim Kardashian and Roxie Hart is the Internet, ninety years, and a net worth of $40 million.

That same technology has led to the other reason libel will fade away: the Streisand Effect.

If you sue someone now, the allegedly damaging, unspeakable, humiliating libel is repeated in news stories and blog posts around the world. As a reputation-management strategy, suing is the moral equivalent of picking a scab. Contra that tone-deaf New Yorker cartoonist: On the Internet, everyone knows you’re a dog.

Back in the ’70s, the famously litigious church [of Scientology] had time to fight publicly with the novelist William S. Burroughs, himself a Scientology defector—or, in the ’90s, with Time magazine. Today, going after every Cruise-bashing blog post would be impossible.

Annie Oakley actually did that. Back when one’s reputation still more or less mattered, the famous female sharpshooter took fifty-five different newspapers to court for claiming, among other things, that she’d been jailed for “stealing the trousers of a negro in order to get money with which to buy cocaine.”

Oakley won almost every suit, but not after she’d been forced to travel across the country for six years. The crusade cost her more money than she ever won in damages.

She’d have been better off challenging her libelers to a duel.

As an alternative to libel suits, there is no downside to dueling. Knowing their very lives are at stake, fewer powerful blowhards will try to bully their ideological enemies into silence.
(In Canada, the plaintiff’s damaged reputation and/or loss of income are assumed—he doesn’t even have to itemize it in court. To the contrary, as in England, libel defendants are presumed guilty until proven innocent. Even if one emerges triumphant, the long, costly, and emotionally draining process is the punishment.)

Under the dueling system, courts will be freed up.

The firearms and funeral businesses will boom.

And at the end of the day, the world will be down a few idiots.

This isn’t some “modest proposal,” either. I’m deadly serious. And if you don’t believe me, it’s pistols at dawn.

The Japanese: nuked too much, or not enough?

Exhibit A: Their epidemic affection for a century-old B-list children’s book set in Canada’s teeniest province and starring the original “red-headed stepchild,” a decidedly un-Japanese heroine named Anne Shirley—better known as Anne of Green Gables.

In an Anne-inspired bout of brattiness, I’ve neglected to type in the “^TM.” It’s true, and vaguely tacky: Author L. M. Montgomery’s estate and Prince Edward Island itself have trademarked the book’s very title.

The Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority also controls, and collects royalties on, “the commercial use of images, likenesses, objects and events” depicted in Montgomery’s series about the bold, big-hearted orphan who makes good. This includes the eponymous musical—one of the world’s longest-running—which countless Japanese tourists have pilgrimaged to Charlottetown to see and hear since 1965.

Ironically, the only thing Lucy Maud’s heirs can’t control is publication of the book itself, which lapsed into the public domain in 1993. Anyone can print Anne of Green Gables and stick any old cover they want on it, too.

So somebody did just that. It’s enough to make one wish the Japs hadn’t traded kamikaze for kawaii.

Last week, with a predictable dollop of Yankee-bashing, Canada’s largest newspaper reported:

Anne of Green Gables goes blond on new U.S. cover

See, somebody uploaded the book’s text to Amazon’s online self-publishing arm, CreateSpace, and started selling it, as many other folks have done before. (Who can blame them? Anne of Green Gables has sold tens of millions of copies ever since no less than Mark Twain pronounced the titular heroine “the dearest and most loveable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.”)

The trouble is, whoever did it this time chose an unbelievably inappropriate stock photo to grace the cover: one depicting an impeccably made-up, catalog-model blonde teen who’d look more at home casting her come-hither gaze from the front of Lolita.

Or a mug shot. My first reaction was that someone had cruelly swapped out the image of Canada’s best-loved heroine for one of its most hated women: the “Barbie & Ken” serial killer, Karla Homolka.

Such knowing “ironic” degeneracy wouldn’t have surprised me. Look at the “Sexy Costumes” craze that prompts women to become consequence-free “whores for a day” every October 31. But what started as a run on “Sexy Witch” and “Sexy Mountie” slut-o-ween getups inevitably devolved to hipster pseudo-parodies such as “Sexy Anne Frank.”

(At this rate of decay, expect to witness “Sexy Sharon Tate’s Murdered Baby” either this year or next.)

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You can tell this anonymous Green Gables poacher wasn’t even trying to be amusing in a twisted, postmodern kind of way. That’s because the cover model is a blonde, and the whole point of Anne Shirley is her red hair, an instant signifier of her untamed personality and outsider status. She character calls her ginger locks her “life long sorrow;” Anne’s chief tormentor (and future husband) Gilbert nicknames her “carrots,” not “bananas”—just before she smashes a writing slate over his head.

If you were going to go for a “Sexy Anne of Green Gables” look, as either a cynical “commentary” on something-or-other or just to hopefully move more units, you’d obviously keep her red plaits and maybe even her straw hat. You’d just shorten the dumpy dress to hit right below the butt and add a pair of those stay-up white stockings with the little bows on top.

You might even ask a harajuku girl to help you out. The kinderwhore look has been popular in Japan for generations, with human females striving to look as much like Hello Kitty dolls or anime characters as possible, often through the use of scary contact lenses and even plastic surgery.

(We really need more research on the long-term effects of radiation, m’kay?)

Believe it or not, though, Japan’s “Lolita” problem isn’t the real fount of Anne’s popularity there.

Montgomery’s book was introduced into the country’s school curriculum in 1952 after a departing missionary left her beloved copy with a well-known Japanese author and translator. Anne embodied a blend of the familiar (an orphan who loves her island home’s idyllic natural beauty) with the exotic (her red hair, short temper, and lack of social graces). This winning combination assured Anne of Green Gables over fifty years of popularity in the Land of the Rising Sun. A 2010 Japanese film about the book’s “philosophy” was a big hit, especially with “women in their 30s and 40s…who take to the film’s message of handing down the story of Anne from one generation to another.”

When the Green Gables House in Charlottetown caught fire in 1997, Japanese fans raised millions of yen to restore it. PEI residents returned the favor by donating to relief efforts after the tsunami.

Anyway, I suppose this whole over thing could be worse. As Margaret Atwood complains of the original illustrations for Anne of Green Gables:

[E]veryone in them has a very small head…leading us to wonder about the degree of inbreeding that was going on around Avonlea.

Robert De Niro

What’s the female equivalent of “I’ll never get an erection again”?

That happened to me when I found out actor Alan Rickman—upon whose lap I’d often fantasized sitting while he read aloud from the Manhattan telephone directory—was directing a hagiographic play about “activist” dingbat Rachel Corrie (AKA “St. Pancake.”)

No doubt millions of other women had that same unwelcome physical reaction right after some blousy star-bonker announced this week that Robert De Niro kept on his socks during sex.

While he was never on my “f***-it list”—that Bananarama song left me profoundly unmoved—any residual feelings other females had for De Niro during his pre-funny grandpa era were likely erased by that hideous “Bobby socks” image.

If you’re me, though, the ultimate De Niro deal-breaker is the news that he’s producing a TV series about Boston neo-Nazis.

What’s next? A Ken Burns doc about Elvis’s pet Sasquatch? American Experience Presents…Martians of the 82nd Airborne?

Memo to Robert De Niro: American History X was not a documentary, just an ABC Afterschool Special with swear words.

There are more “Nazis” on your average Hogan’s Heroes rerun than currently reside in all of North America. (And even they were played by Jews.)

I know, because the ever-looming yet never quite materializing “neo-Nazi” takeover of Canada was supposedly the reason we needed our since-abolished (I helped!) “hate speech” law, Section 13.

One often hears that “if Such-and-Such didn’t exist, So-and-So would have to invent them.” Seemingly unaware that this expression is a wry observation about universal human stupidity, not a suggestion, our “Official Jews” reportedly invented “the Canadian Nazi Party” in the 1960s just so they’d have someone to “fight.”

(Now that’s a cool movie idea, Mr. De Niro!)

Look, I know Boston went through the whole “busing” thing—about which the “bad” i.e., “conservative” white guys were, as usual, absolutely right.

And yeah, I realize that Boston Herald American photo of the white guy spearing the black guy with an American flag has been reprinted in millions of textbooks.

But I also know the less-famous “punch line” to that Pulitzer Prize-winning image of Beantown at its supposed worst:

...the man who was being attacked was named Ted Landsmark….He is presently the president and CEO of the Boston Architectural Center….The man in the photo wielding the flag was Joseph Rakes, who when last heard from was a laborer on the Big Dig in Boston. Ted Landsmark is writing opinion pieces for the Globe about the nature of the art and landscaping that will go on top of the tunnel.

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What a horrible country, eh?

P.S.: Even Landsmark’s against busing now, too.

(Now that’s a cool movie idea!)

I didn’t think “Boston neo-Nazis” were some festering problem that warranted a pricey, prestige television series with an Oscar-winning show-runner.

So I Googled the phrase “Boston neo-Nazis” and got back a grand total of four results, two of them a call to action posted at anarchist websites to counter-protest an August 24, 2002 National Alliance march on Washington, DC.

Illustrative “recent examples of fascist violence” listed in this old call to action “include a plot by Boston neo-nazis [sic] to bomb bridges and monuments named after Black and Jewish citizens.”

So I Googled various combinations of the words in that sentence. The best result I got was a January 11, 2012 post at Sam Francis’s blog, and by “best” I mean “funniest”:

New media hoax: Left-wing media turns liberal Jewish alleged bomb makers into “Neo-Nazis.”

(Now that’s a cool movie idea!)

Still figuring I had to be missing something, I sprang for a $9.95 pass to the Boston Globe‘s archives, granting me access stretching back to 1980.

Again, I typed in “neo-Nazis.” Of the 300+ results, most of them were datelined “Germany” or elsewhere in Europe.

Very few stories had any Boston connection. One tantalizing, far-too-short “Metro/Region” squib dated August 7, 2002 reassured locals that after “a summer break and reprieve from neo-Nazis who kept showing up at their meetings earlier this year, members of the Human Relations Commission are reconvening tomorrow night at the Memorial Building” in Framingham.

Wait: August, 2002 again? Were these the same saboteurs plotting to bomb the “Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner Memorial Overpass and Rest Stop” that all those anarchists had been fretting about earlier?

That’s still unclear to me, but I finally did learn something about that particular foiled fascist bombing spree, in a December 16, 2006 Globe story. The female half of—get this—“Aryan Unit One,” we’re informed, “got a job after finishing her sentence last year, took college courses on architecture, developed a romance with a Jamaican man, and gave birth to a biracial daughter….”

(Now, that’s…)

Oh, skip it. No point giving Robert De Niro all these free, based-on-a-true-story movie ideas when he’s dead set on cinematizing his predictable liberal fever dreams. He’d just get cold feet.