The Last Blog

Adam Carolla, who you may remember as the Flava Flav to Dr. Drew’s Chuck D, is a pretty big wheel in the podcasting business.  The biggest, as a matter of fact, having the most downloaded podcast in the world, because people enjoy boredom, apparently. Well, recently he used said podcast to launch into a searing diatribe about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and has subsequently become a folk hero to angry early-middle-age conservatives everywhere.  He apparently has managed to articulate the thoughts of people who are super-pissed at all those dirty tent-lovin’ hippies in a way that they themselves have so far been unable to.  He’s like the Elizabeth Warren of bitter white jerks!  Well, I listened to his “epic rant” and found some flaws in his logic.

First, he cites a statistic he heard somewhere that the top one percent pay fifty percent of the taxes in California.  I’m not sure about the accuracy of this specific claim, but statistics about the top however much percent providing a huge share of the tax revenue in this country are common, so let’s take it as correct.  Here’s the thing, this phenomenon is a result of the very situation the economic justice movement is protesting.  Of course the top one percent pay a disproportionate amount of the taxes in this country, because they control such a fucking mind-blowingly disproportionate amount of the wealth.  I personally would love to see a day when they’re not paying that big a portion of the revenue pie, because they don’t gobble up so goddamn much of the income.

Still, Adam angrily demands “How much is enough?” As if these poor one percenters are being robbed blind and left with barely enough money to get their monocles polished. Well, how about this?  It’ll start to be close to “enough” when corporations like Citigroup, which made billions and billions in profits last year, pay a bit more than the zero dollars in taxes that they did.  And when the investment bankers that nearly destroyed the entire world economy with their stupidity, criminality, and greed have to pay more than the 15% they do on their “capital gains,” which makes up a substantial if not majority portion of their incomes.

Carolla goes on to cite “envy” as the root cause of the growing Occupy movement.  He should be proud to find out that this puts him in the intellectual company of Herman “Which one was Libya?” Cain.  Yes, all the people who have spent months living in tents and staring down militarized police forces are doing so because they’re jealous of all the Patrick Bateman wannabes and their shiny baubles.  It couldn’t possibly be because they themselves have been victimized by predatory financial institutions, or are sickened by what’s become of a country that’s been bought wholesale by amoral greed monsters, or fear for their children’s future.

But the problem goes deeper than this, according to Carolla.  It’s rooted, of course, in our having given out too many “Most Improved” ribbons these last few decades, leaving a generation that feels entitled, doesn’t understand the value of a hard day’s work, lacks gumption, sitck-to-it-iveness, and elbow grease, and won’t stay the fuck off Adam Carolla’s lawn.

It’s here that Carolla veers into the (unintentionally) funniest and most revealing portion of his rant, when he busts out some good old fashion, Reagenesque, morning-in-America style fetishism, lamenting an imagined golden past wherein Carolla conjures the image of a man and his son who walk down Main Street and see a rich man drive by in his Rolls Royce.  In these long lost halcyon days of American greatness, the father says to his son: “That’s Mr. Jenkins. He’s a great man. Work hard and you can be like him.”

So I guess the lesson hear is that if, say, you’re a recently laid off factory worker and repugnant, remorseless, shit-bag criminal great man Lloyd Blankfein were to ever step into whatever luxury sedan he owns and for some reason drive through your devastated, dilapidated main street (he won’t) you shouldn’t shake your fist at him for eviscerating your 401k and leaving you destitute, but rather should tell your son he’s the model of what a man should strive to be.

But I think what’s most salient about Carolla’s hissy fit is not his specious logic, his ignorance of history, his knee-jerk reverence for power and disdain for dissent, or his stupid metaphors, but rather his anger.  You can hear a palpable rage in his voice as he inveighs against these (in the parlance of Rick Santelli, Carolla’s intellectual brother) “losers.”  There’s an inchoate, free-floating anger driving the modern, right-wing, white male.  And years of main-lining the movement conservative Kool-Aid means that directing that anger at the institutions that deserve it is off the table, so the only option left is to unleash all ire upon those victimized and marginalized people who finally dare to stand up, assert their strength in numbers and challenge the powers that be.  And that’s exactly what Carolla has done here.  And his avalanche of rage-filled brain diarrhea has unsurprisingly found many fans among other scared, not-so-bright right-wingers who will never see the irony in the fact that they’re siding with the motherfuckers who work day and night to screw them out of every last dime over the people who are on their side.

I read an interview recently where Adam Carolla said something about wanting to be a “blue-collar comedian” but a “smart” one.  Well, Adam, mission accomplished, I guess, because you are still smarter than Larry the Cable Guy.  Congratulations?