This article appears in the April 2007 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
edition, click here.
HERE I AM, now in New York City, having moved from London to launch
a TV show for Fox News — and the welcome gift I receive is
mycoplasma pneumoniae. I hate New York for this very
reason: whenever I’m here, I get bronchitis and my air passages
cease to function. My chest cavity stuffed with detritus and muck,
every cough flings pieces of Marlboro-stained lung from my mouth —
usually in the unfortunate direction of my poor wife.
I hate coughing. It’s not like sneezing — which I love. I have
always found sneezing to be a purely selfish pleasure — an
expulsion of itchiness followed by a rush of relief. Coughing,
however, offers no such joy. Coughing is like Sneezing’s loser
ex-boyfriend — causing nothing but trouble while affecting
everyone around him. I am coughing a lot — so much in fact that I
actually cough while I am coughing — the equivalent of having a
snack in the middle of dinner. I should go to the doctor.
But, sadly, going to a doctor in Manhattan often means more than
just getting to read Harper’s in a plastic sheath. No, it
also involves a lecture about smoking. I get that every time. Here
in the land where everyone but you knows what’s good for you, if
you smoke you’re not just a Nazi but a Holocaust denier as well,
which pretty much cancels everything out anyway — making you
Swedish.
Because he asked — I told the doctor my reason for returning to
New York, and he appeared aghast at the thought of treating a
patient who worked at Fox News. It was as though I had told him I
was making beer out of babies. He made a crack about “fair and
balanced,” and then he was off to the races. While I coughed,
shivered, and dripped, the doctor instructed me on the evils of
George Bush, breaking it down into three familiar refrains:
— He falsified reasons to go to Iraq.
— Now everyone in the world hates us.
— Did I mention he’s stupid?
I stared at his family pictures and realized I might have to hit
him with them. But instead, as a response, I weakly said something
like, “Surely Bush is not as evil as those who are spending every
minute of their day trying to kill us.” He dismissed that, saying
“extremists are very few in the world,” which is kind of an obvious
point — since that’s why they’re called “extremists” in the first
place. I began to stare at the prescription pad — trying to will
the doctor to shut up and start writing. After ten minutes, it
worked — and he wrote a few for codeine, steroids, and some crap I
was supposed to shoot up my nose. He also gave me a pile of free
samples of a new antibiotic — something those evil drug companies
come up with every year or so that radically improves the lives of
everyone. God I hate those heartless bastards.
Yet, it bothers me that no one ever makes a movie about them. In
fact, no one makes movies about stuff people do that actually helps
people in real life. Take Stephen Frears. Please. He’s British, so
that makes him smart. And he was nominated for an Oscar for The
Queen, which is not about Elton John or George Michael, but
should be. Frears says he’s now doing a movie related to the London
bombings of July 7, 2005. But true to his nature, he won’t be doing
a movie really about the bombings at all — but the real tragedy
that occurred days later, when British agents mistakenly gunned
down 27-year-old Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes, who
ran from the cops in the subway — probably a dumb thing to do just
after a subway bombing. Doing something dumb doesn’t mean you
should die, but it doesn’t need a movie to explain that point to us
either.
Yet, somehow, Frears thinks this is a more important story —
the death of one man — as opposed to, say, the wholesale slaughter
of 50 plus Brits only days earlier — and I think I know why: He’s
really into that moral ambiguity thing. And it’s just too easy to
say who the bad guy was on July 7 (well, for those of us not in
academia). But with the shooting — the bad guy could be YOU or ME!
That’s right — our own paranoia, intolerance, and barely concealed
racism is really the villain in this mess. And when de Menezes got
shot, we all pulled that trigger.
In movies, the bad guy can never be the little guy. That’s the
problem with doing movies about the war on terror. Because, in the
minds of Hollywood and London, we’re not David — the terrorists
are. And that makes us Goliath. And you can’t make Goliath a good
guy. (Unless you animate him, and let Robin Williams do the
voice.)
YEEHAW!!!! the codeine is kicking in!!!! I am levitating around the
apartment — a light-headed zombie floating in space. I know it’s
only 2007, but I am declaring myself president of my apartment. I
swear this is how Al Gore must feel. My theory on Gore: Losing the
presidency meant that he had to be president of something else —
something you can’t vote on and something boring and intangible and
where every media hack’s assumptions are the same. Gore is
officially the President of Global Warming, an office that was
there for the taking, since its critics simply don’t have the time
or the energy to refute its preening disciples. He should make a
movie about it.
Oh wait, he did. It was nominated for an Oscar — which must
have thrown many Academy members into a tizzy since it was up
against a number of other flicks that also underline America’s
horrible place in this world. So which one would the Academy vote
for? The one that says, we’re all at fault for killing the planet?
Or the one that says, we’re all at fault for starting a war that’s
caused the suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent
people?
They went for the planet, for obvious reasons: Now the Hollywood
glitterati could congratulate themselves on showing up to the event
in Priuses — although if they really cared about the environment,
they would have car-pooled. Wouldn’t that have been grand: to see
Warren, Jack, Leo, and Ellen ride-sharing in a hybrid! That will be
my next campaign.
I wish I were in the Academy — then I’d probably vote for the
1978 film, The Swarm. It involves two things I love:
character actor Cameron Mitchell and killer bees.
I love killer bees. I remember that almost every month in the
1970s, we were always being reminded that the bees were only “200
miles off the coast” of Florida. They were always expected to
arrive “late next year,” and when they did — the elderly, infants,
and slow-moving pedestrians would suffer the worst. I grew up
basically thinking that the killer bees were as inevitable as acne
— and we better start stocking up on light clothed zippered suits
and canned foods.
I probably wrote a handful of book reports on it. I might have
even wondered aloud, if the bees were truly at fault. Maybe they
weren’t “killers” to begin with. Maybe it was you and I who had
turned them into these desperate revolutionaries in need not of
elimination, but of understanding. Perhaps it was our collective
“bee-gotry” that caused the problem.
Was America to blame, once again?
Of course, the killer bees never came. And for that I am
grateful. But what still bothers me was the lack of accountability
on the part of news organizations that allowed this hysteria to
prosper. What happened to all those journalists, reporters, and TV
hacks who continually scared the beans out of us about the oncoming
killer bee massacre? Did they lose their jobs for their shoddy
lies? Did they print retractions? Did they move to Jamaica and open
a jam hut?
I BELIEVE FOR EVERY SCARE a journalist falsely reports, he should
be punished in a manner similar to the type of hell he was
predicting in his stories. So, if you wrote that the entire state
of Rhode Island would be buried under a sea of angry bees, then you
should be placed in a tiny room smelling of violet, and stung
relentlessly by millions of yellow jackets as the state song “Rhode
Island, It’s for Me” is sung by the Providence Choral Group.
Likewise, if you wrote scathing reports on silicone breast implants
— scaring many exotic dancers into having their illustrious orbs
removed — then you should be forced to pay. And by pay, I mean
getting a shoddy implant inserted into your body. But not on your
chest. On your face, so each day everyone can see what a boob you
are.
Okay, time for a nap. Now remember to check out my new show on
Fox. It’s on at 2 a.m. Eastern Time — every night. Wave to me, and
I promise I will wave back.
