I am
going to start with three beloved movies of my childhood, and end with a
suggestion of why liberals will probably never be able to come to grips
with what they winningly call “inequality.” The three movies I have in
mind—”National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “Caddyshack,” and
“Ghostbusters”–were all written or directed, in whole or in part, by the
great Harold Ramis, who died last week, and whose work was
That seems about right, doesn’t it? Each of
the films I mentioned features some prudish or strait-laced patriarch
who is spectacularly humiliated by a band of slobs or misfits or smart
alecks. With their dick jokes and cruel insults, these movies
represented, collectively, the righteous rising-up of a generation
determined to get justice for the little guy. That’s why a group of
prominent Democrats showed up at Ramis’ funeral. It’s why
So,
the political equation is obvious, right? We of the left own the
imagery of subversion and outsiderness. It’s ours. Every time a stupid
old white guy gets humiliated in a TV commercial for choosing Brand X,
we know it’s because the people at Brand Y secretly support universal
health insurance and a nice little pop in the minimum wage. Right?
Well,
no. And with that acknowledgement, let me advance to my bold
hypothesis: The dick joke is not always what it seems to be. The dick
joke is not always your friend.
Start
with the first really great movie Ramis had a hand in writing,
“National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Watching it again today, I didn’t
think so much of righteous defiance, or underdogs and outsiders; I
thought of Wall Street. This particular iteration of Ramis’ martinet vs.
slob theme pits—as everyone knows—a prissy, militaristic college
fraternity against a fraternity where the boys like pleasure, which is
to say, where they drink beer and throw parties and actually enjoy
getting laid. If this basic formula doesn’t strike you as particularly
rebellious or even remarkable, that’s because it isn’t: in its simple
anarchic assertion of appetite, it’s the philosophy of the people who
rule us. Everyone is a fraud in this world; learning is a joke; sex
objects are easily conned; Kennedy-style idealism is strictly for
suckers; and in one telling moment, fratboy 1 remarks to fratboy 2, who
is crying over the trashing of his borrowed automobile by fratboy 1 and
company, “You fucked up. You trusted us.” What popped into my mind when I
heard that line was that other great triumph of the boomer generation:
the time-bomb investments of 2008; Goldman Sachs peddling its “shitty
deals” to the naive and the credulous.
Drink, take and lie:
translate it into Latin and it could be the motto of the One Percent. It
is no coincidence that P. J. O’Rourke, who was editor of National
Lampoon when “Animal House” was made and is currently a wisecracking
critic of liberalism at the Cato Institute, recently declared that the
release of the movie in 1978 marked the moment when his generation “took
over” and started to make the world “better.” (That O’Rourke chose to
write this for the
American Association of Retired Persons
is a particularly poignant detail.) It is also no coincidence that the
fraternity at Dartmouth which served as one of the models for “Animal
House” has of late become
a kind of pipeline into the
investment-banking industry, nor should it surprise anyone that Wall
Street is home to a secret Animal House-style fraternity of its own, a
place where the anarchic captains of finance come together to slurp
likker and
howl their admiration for their beau ideal: the self-maximizing asshole . . . who got bad grades in college.
The
second of the Ramis comedies eulogized by Obama was the 1980 cult
classic “Caddyshack,” which took on the great movie theme of the
Seventies—class antagonism—over a game of golf. The martinet this time
is a country-club grandee, depicted by veteran blowhard Ted Knight; the
slob confronting him is a real-estate developer of hilariously garish
taste played by Rodney Dangerfield; between them stands the American
worker in all his nobility—meaning, specifically, a teenaged caddy at
the country club who must decide whether to be true to his blue-collar
self or to kiss the grandee’s ass in order to go to college. The movie
unfolds as a series of set pieces in which WASP prigs blow gasket after
gasket upon beholding some infringement of their Prussian
sensibilities—absorbing one of Dangerfield’s jokes, or seeing caddies
frolicking in the pool, or hearing someone using the word “sucks,” or
finding a car parked on the lawn, or picking up the saucy strains of a
Journey song as it wafts across the greensward. Boom: Apoplexy! Watch
the patriarchs go berserk!
And that makes for a pretty liberal
film, right? I mean, who else makes fun of country club grandees except
for us lefty authority-questioners?
Well, free-market
conservatives do. Google the phrase “Country club Republican” and what
you will find, by and large, are right-wing types using it as a synonym
for “RINO”: fake Republicans who are in it for the snobbery—not out of
faith in the relentless, disruptive forces of capitalism.
These
same conservatives are also the most likely to understand class conflict
in the way “Caddyshack” does: as a rivalry between WASP old money and
differently pedigreed new money. In fact, this is one of the themes of
George Gilder’s 1981 book “Wealth and Poverty,” the manifesto of the
“supply-side” revolution, and of countless wealth-celebrating books that
followed. That’s why “Caddyshack” seems in retrospect like a piece of
crypto-Reaganite social commentary. Rodney Dangerfield’s character, for
example, is a clear symbol of the crude power of markets—proudly showing
off one of his tasteless billboards and announcing that he only cares
about the “snobatorium” country club because he wants to build condos
there. The choice before the white, working-class caddy boils down to
the Harvard-proud WASP snob and the earthy, joke-cracking businessman;
the side he eventually chooses is the same one that millions of
real-life blue-collar workers were also choosing in those confused days.
There is nothing “crypto” about Ramis’s 1984 hit, “Ghostbusters”: Its Reaganism is fully developed, as
numerous critics have pointed out.
Here the martinet is none other than a troublemaking EPA bureaucrat;
the righteous, rule-breaking slobs are small businessmen—ghost-hunting
businessmen, that is, who have launched themselves deliriously into the
world of entrepreneurship. Eventually, after the buffoon from the EPA
gets needlessly into the businessmen’s mix and blunders the world into
catastrophe, the forces of order find they must outsource public safety
itself to the hired ghost-guns because government can’t do the job on
its own.
Both Reagan and his closest advisers were transfixed by the film,
Sidney Blumenthal tells us;
“Ghostbusters” fit nicely into their idea of an America guided by
“fantasy and myth.” And while the film itself piled up its stupendous
box-office returns in that summer of ‘84, Jack Abramoff and his College
Republican pals got together a troupe of “Fritzbusters” to warm up the
crowds at Republican events, mocking Democratic presidential candidate
“Fritz” Mondale with an offensive take-off on the catchy “Ghostbusters”
theme song. And why not? What Mondale was promising—yes,
promising—was to raise taxes, balance the budget, get responsible, and close down the party. What a Niedermeyer.
Harold
Ramis was a sort of poet of the rude gesture, of the symbolic
humiliation. Our reaction to his work, both now and when it was fresh,
is almost mechanical: We see the square on the screen get shamed, and
our mind shouts liberation. It is almost Pavlovian. Our culture-masters
have been gleefully triggering this kind of reaction for nearly fifty
years now—since the rude gesture first became a national pastime during
the 1960s—and in that time the affluent, middle-class society that
produced the Boomer generation has pretty much gone the way of the
family farmer.
These two developments are not unconnected. One small reason for the big
economic change, I think, is the confusion engendered by the
cultural
change. The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out
to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded
out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with
equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple,
unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone believes
that they’re standing up against unjust authority of some imaginary kind
or another—even those whose ultimate aim is obviously to establish an
unjust authority of their own. Their terms for it are slightly different
than the ones in “Animal House”—they talk about the liberal elite, the
statists, the social engineers, the “ruling class.” But they’re all
acting out the same old script. The Tea Party movement believes it’s
resisting the arrogant liberal know-it-alls. So did Andrew Breitbart, in
his brief career as a dealer in pranks and contumely. So do the people
who proposed that abominable gay marriage discrimination law in Arizona.
Hell, so do the pitiful billionaires of Wall Street—even
they think they’re standing bravely for Ayn Rand’s downtrodden job creators.
Maybe
the day will come when we finally wake up and understand that insults
don’t always set us free. But until that happens, my liberal friends,
don’t ask for whom the bird flips:
the bird flips for thee.
Drink, take and lie: translate it into Latin and it becomes the motto of the One Percent.
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