Let's say that you and your friends get accused of being racist. And let's say there's nothing in your heart that fits that accusation. You know you're a celebrator of freedom, a passionate American who wishes all people could enjoy the best that this country has to offer.
You're white, incidentally.
Still, you're accused, and your reputation is tarnished, so you elect to fight back. How to go about it? If you're the late Andrew Breitbart, champion of the Tea Party's virtue against the likes of Janeane Garofalo, the answer is clear: Point out as often as you can that, no, it's actually black people who are the racists.
You don't put it in those words, of course. No. You yell at the media—”You bullshit artists; you hateful bastards!” You say, “You're going to call us racist? You're going to call us potential Timothy McVeighs? Well, fuck you.” And you do what you're best at—you dig up video of black people behaving in ways that any good person would quail at. Government officials, community organizers, the people who you've said are out to hurt this country, who collude with the media to destroy lives and stop Americans like you from telling the truth.
To get that footage, of course, you have to fudge some. Maybe you send dickweed James O'Keefe out there to playact that he's a pimp, soliciting free tax advice from those ACORN people who claim they're helping poor Americans find housing. (You're not rich, and you found housing!) And then, when those ACORN bastards fail to say shameful pro-pimping stuff on camera, you can always edit, make that video reflect what you know they're really thinking. They'll help criminals, with taxpayer money. There's got to be a couple of seconds in there in which those ACORN women—black, of course—seem as though they might kind of, sort of not be disgusted with O'Keefe, that skinny piece-of-shit talking about importing underage whores from El Salvador while dressed like Superfly.
And—wait, really? O'Keefe didn't actually wear that pimp costume in the ACORN offices? Well, what's it matter? There's footage of him jaunting around D.C. in it, and that's good enough. Splice that in, and you've got proof: Proof that Garofalo and those virgins over at MSNBC were wrong to call the Tea Party racist or nationalist or whatever, because goddamn it, right here, on video, it's absolutely clear that black people are the real problem.
Not that you would ever say that, of course. But you do say things like this: Multiculturalism represents an attempt to “pit us against each other.” Congressman John Lewis, the civil-rights leader, is a “liar” because nobody could find video evidence that any Tea Party people ever called him “nigger.” That's what you believe: Without video, there's no proof, so how dare Joan Walsh at Salon call your friends racist?
Tommy Christopher, that little shit from Mediaite, says, “To act like we're never going to report something unless there's video? That's idiotic.” If he were here, you'd grab his tape recorder and scream, “Fuck you!” into it, just as you did to David Weigel's at the Tea Party convention. Nick Gillespie, one of those Reason guys, calls you “the al-Qaeda of media,” and you know that's a compliment because this is war—war against those racists who dared to call you racist.
Maybe you keep doing this. “You try to destroy people!” you shout at a reporter, and to show everyone how bad guys like him are, you release some more videos, destroy some people yourself. Such as that Shirley Sherrod woman at the USDA, fired just hours after you showed footage of her bragging to the NAACP that she once considered not helping a white farmer. And they call you racist? You tell the press—who never give a voice to people like you—that the NAACP crowd applauded her for “sticking it to the white man.”
You destroy Anthony Weiner, but that one's cake. Didn't even have to fudge anything!
And then maybe you die. Lots of people are sad, and lots of others are sad they won't have you to hate. Fuck them. You did good. You did your best. You never proved you and your friends aren't racist, but you did pull off something much more grand: You gave everybody something to yell about.
Maybe someday someone makes a shapeless, uncritical documentary about how much fun you had doing all this. You'd be charming in it because you always had as much charisma in you as you had rage.
Maybe they bleep your swearing because it's a PG-13 flick. You know, for the kids.
And maybe you'll be filmed puttering around a hotel room, singing “I'm So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters to yourself. And maybe that song won't be listed in the closing credits because maybe your producers didn't bother with licensing. And maybe some prick reviewer at some rag someplace will put that fact into some review, knowing the copyright holders of pop songs search the Internet all day, every day, for any indication that someone someplace might owe them some royalties.
That's what the media does. They try to fuck the good ones.
