Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (5 page)

While working at this Roger Corman–esque production company, I was getting quite serious with my now wife, Susie. Not only was I working in Hollywood, I was dating the daughter of Orson Bean, an actor, comedian, and raconteur. Spending time at his house on the Venice canals (which to this day I still call Dennis Kucinich Bumper Sticker Country—where Clinton, Kerry, and Obama aren’t left enough), I perused his bookshelves. Not only was I attracted to Susie, I was attracted to Orson’s wit and depth of knowledge of
everything
. This guy had appeared on the
Tonight Show
couch seventhmost of any guest. His opinion mattered to me.

One day I asked him why he had Rush Limbaugh’s book
The Way Things Ought to Be
on his shelf. I asked him, “Why would you have a book by this guy?”

And Orson said, “Have you ever listened to him?”

I said yes, of course, even though I never had. I was convinced to the core of my being that Rush Limbaugh was a Nazi, anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti–all things decent. Without berating me for disagreeing with him, Orson simply suggested that I listen to him again.

While I was listening to Jim Rome and Howard Stern, the intensity of the 1992 election cycle warranted that I switch the frequency over to hearing about the horse race.

This is where my rendezvous with destiny begins.

I turned on KFI 640 AM to listen to evil personified from 9 a.m. to noon. Indeed, my goal was to derive pleasure from the degree of evil I found in Rush Limbaugh. I was looking forward to a jovial discussion with Orson to confirm how right I was. One hour turned into three. One listening session into a week’s worth. And next thing I knew, I was starting to doubt my preprogrammed self. I was still a Democrat. I was still a liberal.

But after listening for months while putting thousands of miles
on my car, I couldn’t believe that I once thought this man was a Nazi or anything close. While I couldn’t yet accept the premise that he was speaking my language, I marveled at how he could take a breaking news story and offer an entertaining and clear analysis that was like nothing I had ever seen on television, especially the Sunday morning shows, which had been my previous one-stop shop for my political opinions.

Most important, though, Limbaugh, like the professor I always wanted but never had the privilege to study under, created a vivid mental picture of the architecture of a world that I resided in but couldn’t see completely: the Democrat-Media Complex. Embedded in Limbaugh’s analysis of politics was always a tandem discussion on the media. Each segment relentlessly pointed to collusion between the media and the Democratic Party. If the Clarence Thomas hearings showed me that something was wrong, the ensuing years of listening to Limbaugh and Dennis Prager—who at the time was also undergoing a political transformation from the Democratic to the Republican Party—explained to me with eerie precision what exactly was wrong. I swallowed hard and conceded to Orson that he was right.

And so it began.

The default labels of liberal and Democrat—labels that were necessary cultural accessories in my Hollywood and Venice worlds—were becoming ill-fitting.

I still had a natural disdain for the religious right, which had been the ultimate 1980s-era bogeyman, so I was looking for some neutral ground while I tried to figure things out. If you met me in 1992, for some odd reason, I would have told you I was a libertar
ian, and I voted for Ross Perot. The only awkward memory that haunts me more is my roller-disco period.

While Professor Limbaugh provided me an understanding of the architecture of how politics and media relate, Professor Prager provided me articulation of the ethical framework my parents had lived out. I saw that my parents were fundamentally right and that those ecstatically exuberant and audaciously fun New Orleans years came at a great cost. I knew that I was estranged from my parents’ belief system and that a permanently libertine lifestyle was no substitute for a clean conscience, work that felt satisfying, and a decent night’s rest.

These revelations rendered certain aspects of my life uncomfortable. I was beginning to recognize that my ethical framework did not jibe in any way, shape, or form with the Hollywood world into which I had sought entry. I knew now why I had no desire to be promoted. I even remember trying to visualize where I would be in twenty years. I remember thinking,
I don’t want an Oscar. I don’t want an Emmy. And I don’t want a Grammy. If you don’t want to be the best at something, what’s the point?

I was also discovering through my boss’s relationship with the Democratic Party that Hollywood, much like the media, was part of the same architecture that Rush Limbaugh described. This boss, who shall remain nameless, was not an inherently moral individual. Everything that he did—
everything
—was about business. His devotion to wining and dining top elected Democratic officials was no exception.

Meanwhile, for the first time, through my autodidactic cycle of talk radio and books, I began to feel like an engaged adult. The homework that I abhorred in college—the dreary books, the nihilistic musings of dead critical theorists that had me embracing an
anti-intellectual lifestyle—was being replaced by a new world of books and authors of whom I’d never heard.

My AM professors taught me to ask questions, to use the Socratic method. And I started to ask everyone around me some basic questions, but they didn’t want to engage or couldn’t engage in basic civil debate. The person that made this new pursuit of intellectual engagement invigorating and sexy was Camille Paglia. Her book,
Sexual Personae
, made me realize how little I really had learned in college. Her articles and assorted writings began to open my mind up to the fraud that is higher education in America. The origins of the problems in the media and in Hollywood begin in the sacrosanct, stultifyingly politically correct world of academia. It seemed to me that while Professor Limbaugh was focusing on the corrupt relationship between politics and the media and Professor Paglia was focusing on the corrupt relationship between politics and academia, I was beginning to hyperfocus, as we ADD types are apt to do, on the corrupt relationship between Hollywood and politics, and how academia, the media, and the political class conspicuously either ignore or denigrate all the ideas, authors, and voices that were now my lifeblood.

I was taking ownership of my own education. Words cannot describe the emancipation I felt to discard those confusing works and philosophers that my gut instinct had told me to reject. Nihilism, after all, is never a comforting companion. I had known it was garbage, but I felt that I couldn’t tell a Harvard Ph.D. that I thought it was garbage. Surely my professors had known something I didn’t. Now I was realizing that just wasn’t true.

I guess it was inevitable that my relationship with my friend/high-IQ political guru, Mike, was bound for the rocks. Mike was someone else I had long believed must have known something I didn’t. Around this time, Susie and I ran into him at Aron’s
Records in Hollywood one night. He was disoriented, confused, and incomprehensible. I followed him around the store trying to get his story before finally discovering that he was on mushrooms. This was when I recognized the distance that now separated us. What the hell is a grown man doing on a weeknight all by himself taking hallucinogenic drugs? I guess you can do that when you don’t have a job.

Not long thereafter, when I would see Mike, I began to challenge him. I began to ask him questions. And I began to see that my Yoda was a bullshit artist, had been all along. That he wasn’t
borrowing
my CDs to tape them; he was taking them to the record store to sell to buy drugs. His philosophy, his poses, his trite, utopian, disapproving pronouncements—they were just boring. I stopped calling him, actually avoided him. And one day I got a phone call from a mutual friend who said Mike had been found murdered.

To this day, I hold great guilt that I did not cry when I heard the news. I didn’t step through the normal Kübler-Ross stages of grief. But in Mike’s life and in his death, I have ascribed to him an importance—he is my reminder, my personal cautionary tale. Mike’s arrogant, elitist approach toward conservatism was laziness covered in pseudo-intellectualism. If I hadn’t gotten out of New Orleans, I would have been Mike. He was the bullet I dodged, in every sense.

The world that I was now inhabiting demanded thinking, because it demanded results. My paycheck was a result. Susie’s happiness was a result. Sleeping eight hours when it was actually dark out was a result. Paying my bills was a result. And buying the shoes that I worked in was a symbol that I had come so far in such a short period of time. I was becoming what my father, through his actions, taught me to become. I was becoming self-reliant and—gulp!—I was starting to come to the difficult revelation that I was
a conservative… with the concurrent revelation that I wanted out of Hollywood. I was no longer going to four movies a week. I was no longer laughing the laugh track.

One day, without giving notice, I just walked out the door of my job and never went back.

Not long after, I was driving eastbound on Wilshire Boulevard at around Centinela one evening. I was overcome with the frustration that came from three excruciating years of postcollegiate learning—of trial and error, of a political and philosophical transformation in which something remained missing. I was twenty-five years old, had walked out on my only career prospect, and I had no friggin’ idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

I’m not the most religious guy. In fact, at the time, I considered myself an atheist. But that pent-up frustration caused me to say aloud, in my car, “Please, God, give me something to do that I’m passionate about. Please give me a mission.”

I first heard of the Internet from a close high-school friend, Seth Jacobsen.

Over the years in prep school and college, my greatest coping mechanism was aligning myself with straitlaced, smart guys. Before a test I hadn’t prepped for, they could always be relied upon to give up a quick view of their notes, which would push me into the C category. At the time, that was enough. Now here I was, after college, looking for the crib notes for life.

Seth was an Astrophysics major at Harvard (yes, he’s that smart), and when I visited him for a brief weekend in 1989, I found out that some people actually studied at college. So when Seth came to my apartment in 1992 to tell me of a pending technological revolution, I was uniquely, perhaps pathetically, positioned to listen.

Seth said eight words to me that changed my life: “I’ve seen your future and it’s the Internet.”

I answered as any normal person would have in 1992. “What’s the Internet?”

He started to explain to me what the Internet was, what HTML was, and why it was all a perfect fit for my ADHD. He made the World Wide Web sound like the Wild West in outer space, a romantic new frontier. I was fascinated. It was like I had just been shown the road map to my life. The only problem was that I had no idea how to read the map.

At that point, I had AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve. I was instinctively drawn toward these new services, even though I didn’t know their endgame. But I knew I could get sports scores and make my own travel arrangements—basically, it just felt edgy and cool to be part of a medium where you could interact on a computer.

Around 1993, another friend, Dave White, lent me a copy of
Wired
magazine, which had just come onto the market. He had learned from
Wired
how to hook his computer up to the Internet, and he had started messing around with online groups like the Well. These were online communities, the precursors to chat groups. I was living below Dave in an apartment complex and working with my primitive technology, and I would visit Dave and watch his forays into the Internet’s earliest incarnations and think to myself,
That’s it. That’s what Seth was talking about. And I’m eventually going to go there.

In those days, it was complicated to get onto the Internet. The technology was so raw, the interface required programming knowledge to interact. It was the days when you had to type in “RUN” and operate the computer through MS-DOS. Compared to now, it was like using an abacus to do your tax forms.

But it was cool and exciting just the same. Seth had planted the seed, and I knew that for me, this was it. I’m only grateful now that I somehow realized it.

It wasn’t until I was living in Austin, Texas, in 1994 (don’t ask) that I finally sought out an Internet service provider (ISP) called
Illuminati Online. Illuminati was somewhat famous at the time for a civil liberties case that it had fought and won. I tried to hook up to it, but had no luck—it was crazily complicated to try to get my computer to relate to my modem in order to connect to the Internet. The whole concept was just not idiotproof enough for me yet.

Then, one night, I decided that I was going to do it once and for all. I went to Central Market, a proto–Whole Foods on steroids—the Eighth Wonder of the World, an affirmation of capitalism deceptively marketed to guilty liberals—and bought a rotisserie chicken and a six-pack of Pilsner Urquell. And I sat down at my glorious Mac and said to myself,
I’m not going to leave this room until I’m on the Internet.

I huffed and puffed through hours of trial and error, over and over, with no hint as to whether I was even making any progress. It was like trying to reach the finish line of a marathon in a thick fog. But then, surrounded by gnawed chicken bones and empty beer bottles, I heard the vital crackle of the modem connecting. And instead of it breaking off, the connection stuck.

I was reborn.

The Internet in those days was a free-for-all libertarian haven. I saw, even at the very beginning, that this was a new medium born of unwieldy individualism, of people who so desperately wanted to communicate with the world outside of the Democrat-Media Complex (whether they were aware of that construct or not), that they sought each other out in this technological wilderness. I recognized that for the Internet to exist, and for people to have such a massive desire to get on it, there had to be a driving force—and that driving force was the suffocating ubiquity of the Complex. Here was a place where freedom of speech truly existed, where you
could say anything, think anything, be anything. It was no wonder that the first adopters of the Internet were the outcasts of the Complex: libertarians and conservatives.