This article appears in the new March issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
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I AM GOING TO SEE a friend of mine, an underground American comic
named Neil Hamburger, open for Tenacious D tonight. He’s played at
sold out venues across England, from Birmingham to Manchester, and
has been booed by tens of thousands of people along the way.
Hamburger sucks. But he sucks so bad that he rules. Less a comic
and more a prankish performance artist — he’s the master of the
non-joke — designed to confuse an audience that expects nothing
more than “Bush is stupid” inanities. I would unleash a sample of
his best material here, but I want to keep my job.
I am now in the crowd of about 5,000 pimply faced teens and
their fat dads (both wearing similar black T-shirts and poorly
managed facial hair) when Neil makes his way onto the stage, decked
out in rented tuxedo and oversized glasses. The crowd eyes him
suspiciously as he launches into a litany of hilariously obtuse
jokes, and within 20 minutes the angry mass starts throwing coins
— mostly 2 pence shrapnel, which is all they can afford after
spending their meager wages on overpriced tickets.
I’ve seen Neil play a bunch of times — in the U.S. and in
London — but this is the first time I’ve seen him play in a large
venue, in front of thousands of people. And it’s the first time
I’ve ever seen people throw coins. I watch as men-ranging from
gawky 16-year-olds to flabby baldies-charge toward the stage and
hurl a coin, and then slink back into darkness, patting each other
on the back along the way.
I needed an explanation for all this.
“You throw copper coins at coppers at football matches, and at
anyone you don’t like,” my British pal, Kevin, tells me. “It’s
something we did as a kid at football stadiums as the mounted
police attempted to bring order. But it’s handy for gigs too.”
The good thing about coins is that they can’t be seen in the
air, so the victim doesn’t see it coming. “They also hurt! Football
matches are rife with it and the police prosecute heavily if they
catch you doing it,” says Kevin, who seems to know more about this
than I expected.
I guess everyone likes the safety of being at arm’s length,
which explains the popularity of coins, petrol bombs, grenades,
Scud missiles, and the web. No one really wants to be up close and
personal punching, stabbing, and charging. There’s too much risk,
and unless you’re a celebrity, that kind of intimacy means
accountability.
AS THE SHOWER OF COINS intensifies, I stand with my writer pal Dave
and Neil’s lovely wife, Simone, who’s watching these cowards
torment her husband on stage with increasing anger. Dave and I
sense something interesting is about to happen.
When Neil leaves the stage to a chorus of taunts, I turn to
Simone, who is eyeing a young man a few feet away, sporting a
poorly maintained goatee. He is gloating among his friends over
drilling her husband, Neil, with a coin right in the nose. “Don’t
you ever want to hit someone?” I ask. She points toward the goatee.
Without hesitation, we walk over to him, and in a short burst of
movement, Simone punches him in the forehead. His temple reddens,
and his friends burst out in nervous laughter. “That’s for hitting
my husband,” Simone says, before hitting him one more time. The
second punch is hard enough to make the 30 or so witnesses wince.
The creep looks horrified.
The amazing thing about getting hit by a woman: it turns men
into boys. “He has the look of a lad whose mum has caught him
wanking,” says my friend Dave, who should know. Moments later, the
injured coin thrower and his friends come over to apologize to
Simone. They were from Milton Keynes, they explained, and are now
wondering why — when they always come to London — they get hit in
the face. “Why did you single me out?” asked the goatee. “Why not,”
Simone answered.
Backstage, Neil emptied his pockets of about 20 pounds in change
he’d picked up on stage, adding up to roughly 40 dollars. He’d use
it to buy his wife a new sweater — a reward for her matrimonial
act of bravery.
I only write about this now, because lately I’ve been getting
hit with coins — figuratively anyway — whenever I write something
on the web. After a few years of blogging, I’ve hit on one
essential truth: there are millions of cowards willing to say
things about you online that they’d never say to you in a bar.
That’s the baseline definition of snark: catty words spewed on a
screen but never uttered to a face. Blogging has created a chorus
line of cowards — coin-throwers who would never take the stage or
put themselves in the line of fire. The World Wide Web has
revealed, sadly, that as a country we’re losing the will to fight
real wars, preferring instead to be nonproductive wusses, incapable
of delivering anything more than a snide aside to the outside
world, via the “send” button.
THAT’S WHY AT HAMMERSMITH APOLLO, Simone was my hero. It was the
first time that these pimply faced boys — either online or in real
life — had experienced accountability for their anonymous crimes.
When faced with an angry woman who literally struck back, they
learned something about the real world — that actions have
consequences, even those of a coward.
We all have potential to be cowards. But most of us never take
that route. We’re decent people, or try to be, anyway. Take Sunday
night, for example. Lying in bed, alone, thinking about stuff I
think about when I’m lying alone in bed, my phone rings. It’s my
wife, walking home after a night out with friends. “I’m being
followed,” she whispered, terrified.
“Where are you?”
“Mortimer Street.” I heard another voice from her receiver,
someone barking nonsense. I ran out of the apartment and raced down
Wells Street, then onto Mortimer barefoot in the rain, until I came
to my wife, walking along the sidewalk, with a hooded man behind
her, closing in, adorned in the casual uniform of druggy bagginess.
Whatever he wanted, it wasn’t directions to the London School of
Economics. As I approached, waving my arms, he backed away, with
his hands fumbling in his oversized pockets. As I got closer, he
retreated into shadows.
Calming down, my wife gave me the look. “What are you
wearing?”
We walked home in the middle of a rainy London street at
midnight, me wearing nothing but tattered boxers. We hadn’t done
laundry, and I wasn’t wearing my best underwear. It had holes in
all the wrong places.
I looked ferociously stupid. And then and there, I realized that
the hood had run off not because he was scared, but because I
looked crazier than he did.
Back at the apartment, my wife was still shaking. “I felt bad
for calling,” she said. “When I told him to leave me alone, he just
got closer and kept yelling.”
She explained that she had two competing voices in her head, one
saying, “This is nothing. He’s just a drug addict.” And another
saying, “Call Greg and scream — it’s better to be stupid than be
dead.”
SINCE 9/11, these two lines of thinking should compete for
attention in your brain each time you’re faced with a potential
crisis. Should you do nothing and be cool? Or take action, and look
stupid? If you don’t wrestle with those two thoughts when you’re on
a bus, subway, or plane, then you are a liar. Or a coward.
They were present when Simone saw that man hurl a coin at her
husband, and they were also present on that USAir flight last
November, when the imams made passengers and airline staff
uncomfortable with their prayers, their animated conversation, and
their odd requests. At some point before take off, each passenger
on that plane must have had those dueling banjos of thought in
their heads:
“It’s 99.9 percent certain that these people are harmless
idiots. Just relax. Don’t be a fool.”
“It only takes that .1 percent to blow a plane up. I don’t care
if I look foolish, I must say something. My family is on this
flight.”
“But I’ll look like an ass.”
“But I don’t want to die.”
These two lines of thinking reveal the key differences between
the left and everyone else on earth. Normal folks are willing to
take the risk and appear stupid. The left cannot fathom why anyone
would do such a thing.
Why? Because it’s uncool. And that’s the only thing that matters
to the left. They claim to be concerned about tolerance, but really
they are concerned about how cool they appear to others. They need
to be admired. The left will never stand up for anything, because
doing so undermines the protection necessary for their fragile
egos. And it also requires balls, which they sorely lack.
And that makes them all cowards. Because, in order to prevent
evil, you have to take a risk-not of death, but of
embarrassment.
The bravest response for all of us? To have the balls to appear
stupid — at any and all times. We need to stand up and demand to
see what’s in a fidgety man’s back pack, even if it turns out its
nothing more than back issues of the Utne Reader and a
“neck massager.”
We need to be willing to face the mobs in the street and the
mobs online. We need to punch a coward in the face when it’s called
for, and do so in front of his friends. We need to be the scary
ones, for once.
Myself? I’m ready to play the fool. I’ve had lots of practice
over the years — just ask my friends. The U.S., in fact, as a
nation, needs to start acting like fools. We need to be ridiculous.
We need to be scary. We need to keep our enemies up at night and
make them squirm for a change. When we hear those two competing
voices in our heads, we need to listen to the one that dares us to
look stupid. Because it’s better than looking dead.
