Meet the New Lefty Dreamboat
Can Van Jones Take on the Tea Party?
By ANDREW GOLDMAN
Published: March 30, 2012
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In your new book, “Rebuild the Dream,” you discuss your 2009 resignation as President Obama’s special adviser for green jobs after your signature was incorrectly reported to be on a 9/11 Truther petition.
I don’t mind bearing the cross for controversial ideas I had when I was younger, but I can’t stand bearing the cross for wacky ideas I never had. I’m a black guy who used to sue police departments for brutality. You don’t have to make up stuff to scare people.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/can-van-jones-take-on-the-tea-party.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
Van Jones has a very bright future ahead of him. He is a dream date --a handsome, intelligent young man who talks all the right talk. He's probably well hung. And I suspect at one time he had integrity.
Van Jones is a bright guy. He knows what a 7-series compressor is. He knows that it precludes Flight 175's presence at the scene of the crime. End of discussion.
He's so bright that he also knows that speaking the truth in an age of idiocy is wacky. He's playing to his audience. He's mentally charting his career path and he sees that lazily pointing out the obvious to people who wish to remain in Dreamland is a career non-starter. (See? He's a dream date for the inhabitants of Dreamland.)
He's also bright enough to know that he is now actively perpetuating myths that will lead to the construction of a political system in which his own children run in terror from that Frankenstein's Monster in Washington.
Van Jones is now a willing cog in that corrupt machine. He has sold his soul. Van Jones is, by his own choice, the very definition of a sell-out, a corporate creation. He's the Vanilla Ice of Dreamland.
And he also has a very successful, lucrative career ahead of him.
At no time did I ever labor under the illusion that I would wind up on TV or in a movie. You will recall that when I first got my start in Orlando (before I was old and ugly) some producer from Disney Studios came to see one of my shows. Before the lights went down, he came over and introduced himself. He said, "I've heard a lot of buzz about you. I think we may be able to put something together."
I never heard from him again. And it didn't matter to me, as I had my show. My show is my intellectual property. I could take it on the road, and rent rooms, and put up posters, and inveigle people to enter my theater and buy their tickets.
And in the wondrous new space age of the internet, I can even do a virtual show on a blog. The only thing missing here is the performance aspect of it, where the audience gets to hear my tone of voice and see my facial expressions.
It is still nonetheless a show, the professional undertaking of a critically acclaimed, ticket selling comedian. And it is not free.
But to hear my audience members tell it, it's free because it is easily stolen. It is easy to sneak into my theater undetected and sit in the back and partake of my intellectual property without compensating me.
I have plainly posted at the top of my show for years that this show is not free. Yet why my probation officer, and why my various Secret Service staff members, and why my witch doctor all refuse to buy their tickets, I've no idea. I guess everyone's pretending that they're not here and that they're not thieves. This is not a goddamned facebook fuckin' page that you can surveille.
Are my tickets overpriced? No; I could charge a nickel and still no one would buy their ticket.
The unfortunate reality is that I had unwisely chosen to play to losers, those who think themselves a pretty top-shelf crowd. I have now pissed away every last nickel I had and a promising career in stand-up by speaking to unwashed street urchins in the erroneous belief that they would understand that I will never earn a living inside the system and that I need to sell tickets in order to hire camera guys and writers.
Buy your tickets, losers.
