The Joy of Hate (15 page)

If you think Garofalo is the worst culprit, you’re wrong (to her dismay, I’m sure—she’s very competitive). Witness D. L. Hughley,
the black comedian and failed host of a short-lived CNN show. In a series of woefully unfunny tweets, he smeared Cain by saying that his face belongs “on a pancake box.” For those of you under thirty, he was referring to Aunt Jemima. Yep, Cain was just an Uncle Tom, because he was a successful black man who didn’t blindly follow the liberal assumptions that all black people are supposed to follow. And how should Cain respond to that? By saying D.L.’s face belongs under a hat that says
GODFATHER
’
S PIZZA
on it? You could just as easily use Garofalo’s line about Cain on Hughley—that the attention he’s received during his career is based on toeing the white liberal line.

Imagine if Nick DiPaolo, a conservative comedian, had tweeted that Obama’s face belonged on a pancake box. He’d be on a boat to Cambodia faster than Michael Richards. But when Hughley tweeted that nonsense, the only people that noticed were a handful of conservative blogs. That’s it. No one else raised an eyebrow. I relayed the tweet to Herman Cain, and he laughed. He expressed no sense of outrage or anger. It was beneath him. He just expected this kind of stuff, and thought it silly—and noted how mainstream liberals cannot accept a conservative black leader, for it destroys their comfy worldview. For if a black man rejects liberalism, he rejects all the do-good nonsense liberals believe in. They are no longer political sheep, and they see the consequences of white liberal guilt, which harms blacks more than a thousand unfunny comedians and DJs ever could.

On the topic of bad CNN shows, did anyone find it weird that Eliot Spitzer got a show, after what he had done with hookers? And with a face like something from Easter Island? It was perfectly acceptable, because his heart, if not his groin, was in the right place (where Spitzer’s groin actually belongs, however, is something I’m not going to contemplate). Which is why he found
another job, at Current TV. Repressive tolerance allows a pig to be a pig, and if it’s at Current TV, at least the pig found adequate slop.

But in this day and age, you’d better know your place. And you better know it fast. Which leads me to Brett Ratner. There’s no way around using that name without including the phrase “untalented schlub.” Or if there is a way, it’s a very long way around.

He committed the latest act of intolerance. He made a joke that was perceived to be “homophobic,” even though his intention had nothing to do with attacking gays.

Back in the fall of 2011, this notorious nitwit was participating in a Q and A session after a screening of his flick
Tower Heist
, a piece of poop he had idiotically linked to the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in an earlier interview. The plot—a heist caper—had a lot in sync with how people were feeling down at the protest sites, or something like that. Someone asked how the preparations for the upcoming Oscars (he was producing) were going, and he said, “Rehearsal is for fags.”

Neither funny nor original, nonetheless it’s a huge sin because it was deemed homophobic. Even though the dimmest of the dim could see it was just a knuckleheaded remark meant to convey “We’re such badasses we don’t need to rehearse.” Or put another way, “The Oscars always suck, so why change now?”

After the predictable outcry from the supersensitive, Ratner announced he was stepping down as producer of the awards show. He did it in record time, actually, without bothering to put up the kind of fight you’d expect from the creative genius behind
Rush Hour
and
Rush Hour 2
. Apparently he had seen where these brouhahas usually end up, and—not as dumb as he looks—he could see he was on the losing end.

If it had only ended there with a simple, “I’m outta here.” But
Ratner, a quick learner, realized that in order to clear himself, and save his name and career, he had to do the full penance, jumping on every sword he could find. So he didn’t just say “I resign,” he offered a long, pathetic letter of resignation to the academy. In the pantheon of shameless groveling, this would have won the Oscar … for shameless groveling.

Here’s what he wrote, in part:

What a performance.

Ratner continued:

Note: Whenever you see the word
dialogue
in a political context, you are in the presence of pure, unadulterated bullshit of the liberal variety. This is a scientific axiom, which I just made up.

Now, I have no proof to back this up, but I don’t believe Ratner wrote that letter. Also, the letter sucked. The suckiest part? Groveling to GLAAD. For saying “fags,” a hurtful word if words do “hurt.” Me, I would prefer a well-hurled epithet over a rock, crowbar, or empty wine bottle cracked over my head. But I realize that is not a fair comparison, and I apologize in advance. I will text you from Cambodia.

I said Ratner probably didn’t write the letter, and I may be wrong. But all the catchphrases are in there, and I can’t believe Ratner had that amazingly complex lexicon at the ready. Nope, he sat down with an expert in this malarkey and was told what to cut and paste. Either that, or Ratner went through the world’s fastest brainwashing session ever. Or perhaps he secretly worked for GLAAD all along and had planned the whole thing. If so, I take back everything I said: the man’s a genius.

Apparently, Ratner learned something in the last four or five years, other than how easy it is to sleep with B-list actresses. He knew the thing you gotta do, no matter what, is take the medicine, do the penance—even if the penance far outweighs whatever infraction you committed against the almighty tolerati.

For repressive tolerance, when violated, is the worst possible sin on the planet, and the penance must reflect that.

Two words must have echoed in Brett Ratner’s cavernous but empty skull: Isaiah Washington. You remember him, no? He was the actor who once starred in that hit show lonely women and their cats watch, called
Grey’s Anatomy
. He played the dreamy—I mean cocky—doctor Preston Burke.

Until he made a remark deemed outrageous by the Offense Police.

In October 2006, details emerged that Washington had called
his costar T. R. Knight a faggot, or something like that. Washington apologized for the words, especially since Knight had only recently come out of the closet. But the apology wasn’t enough, because when you appear intolerant, you must
suffer
. You must lose something valuable, like your job. And yeah, Washington is black, which you’d think would offer him a little immunity, but in this day and age, gay trumps skin color, and he was going to suffer just like everyone else. Welcome to the tolerance sweepstakes, Mr. Washington. One wrong word and out you go.

Being interviewed on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, Washington joked that he wanted to be gay. “Please let me be gay,” he implored, probably beginning to understand his place in this new universe. He then denied he ever called Knight a “faggot.” But then Knight, in an appearance on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
, said everyone heard him say it. So Washington apologized again, longer this time. Despite undergoing something called “executive counseling” (was it done at an airport Sheraton, with a free continental breakfast?), ABC announced the actor was dropped from the show.

So fast-forward five years and here I am at the gym, a few weeks or so after the Ratner controversy, and I look up at the TV in front of my stair-climber, and whom do I see? Mr. Washington, looking dapper with a beard and stylish glasses and a colorful shirt, appearing subdued yet relaxed, about to be interviewed by the delightful Fredricka Whitfield.

According to the CNN anchor:

I guess Cambodia was too crowded with celebrities seeking “spiritual renewal.”

And there you have it. The penance for an argument in which the word
faggot
was used was a pilgrimage to Africa—that lasted four years. Yep, four years. For one word, that’s almost seven months per letter.

I’m sure what the actor did was ennobling—in the interview he talks about how he’s already “saved lives.” He said, “In fact, I have five hundred students in my school. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years. And to get excited about saving real lives, that is the biggest adrenaline rush that I could have for someone like me.”

And of course, none of this could have happened if it hadn’t been for him getting canned from
Grey’s Anatomy
, right, Fredricka?

No. What we got was a “B” and an “S.”

And, there you go. From the utterance of one bad word, to self-imposed exile, to returning a changed man with a new book. Thank you repressive tolerance and cultivated outrage. Do you
see the equation? The man says an offensive word and five hundred lives are saved. Hell, maybe
that’s
a good thing.

These are phenomena so powerful they forced Washington to get in touch with his own victimhood—how he felt “Unattractive, all of it. Broad nose, full lips, the whole thing,” from being a black man. And this guy’s a handsome guy, for chrissake. If this guy had misgivings about his looks—Jesus Christ—then what hope do I have in this world? On a scale of one to ten, he’s a thirteen! I must be hideous.

Anyway, this journey wasn’t just about his own homophobia but also his own insecurity, his own pain (conveniently focused on racial characteristics, which was Washington hopefully floating a little victimhood of his own past the tolerati). And maybe now that story will erase the story that forced him to create this story. And he get can back to acting!

And so what Washington has just gone through is the path that awaits Ratner, and Ratner knows it.

Does it help? Who knows. It probably doesn’t matter. Because the great thing about the whole cycle of Tolerance, Violation, and Penance is that there’s always a new culprit, a new flub that surfaces and threatens to swallow a career because it has hurt the wrong feelings. Why? Because another special interest group emerges every couple of years. It used to be, legitimately, blacks. Currently, it’s clearly gays. In a year or two, who knows? You’ll recognize it the first time you hear a celebrity telling an interviewer how he or she was made to feel “inferior” growing up but has now “come to peace with who I am.” “Comfortable in my own skin” is the modern go-to cliché. It could be dwarves (sorry, I mean little people). Or maybe very tall people (who now have support groups), or even Belgians. But it’ll arrive, rest assured. And as
soon as some gay celebrity says the word
midget
and then appears crying on
The View
before boarding a plane to Cambodia or Sierra Leone, you’ll know we’re onto a new cycle. (Note: As I edit this, Rosie O’Donnell is just getting stick for the very thing—ragging on little people. She apologized.)

But you don’t even really have to hurt anyone’s feelings—the perception that a comment might is all that it takes. Consider CNN’s Roland Martin (wasn’t he on
Laugh-In
?), whose tweets were deemed offensive to gays.

Martin was suspended by CNN after GLAAD complained about his tweets during the 2012 Super Bowl. In response to an underwear ad featuring six-pack meat bucket David Beckham, Martin tweeted:

He followed that with this charming missive:

As a middle-aged white guy, I don’t know what “ish” is—I assume it’s some sort of high-carb dip. At any rate, GLAAD tweeted to Martin that

GLAAD smelled blood, and then issued a statement demanding Roland’s removal from his network, citing the fact that he once
referred to homosexuality as “sinful behavior.” Martin claims he was only cracking on soccer—and by looking at the tacky tweets (and not being able to read his mind), we should probably take him at his word. It didn’t matter. CNN threw Roland to the wolves, writing:

So how did Roland react? Did he jump up and fight back, condemning both his network and GLAAD for a witch hunt based on innocent, albeit stupid and unfunny tweets? Nope, his job was more important than his spine. And so he quickly announced he would be meeting with GLAAD, even adding that he would look forward to “having a productive dialogue.” There it is again—dialogue! Gutfeld’s first scientific axiom.