Like (I suspect) most viewers, I wasn’t too troubled by self-recrimination at the end of Quentin Tarantino’s must-see exercise in “Jewish revenge porn,” Inglourious Basterds. (The description comes from the Jewish Daily Forward, not from me.) I wasn’t worried about Q’s preposterous deviations from history, nor was I concerned that some Jewish folks might not appreciate – indeed, might be appalled by – their forebears’ cinematic transformation from victims to vigilantes. Screw the strictures of morality, the heavy burden of humanity! The way I figure it, most people leave the theater thinking just one thing: Man, if only the Jews had been able to open up a can of whoop-ass on those damn Nat-zees – that woulda been sweet.

My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” Liberty and Tyranny (which leaves some question as to where his sympathies lie), Glenn Beck’s Common Sense (the first of two oxymorons in this column), Dick Morris’ Catastrophe and Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption. The latter two tomes, which see fit to pass final judgment on the new administration, were released in June and July, respectively – which, even accounting for the sped-up timeline for publishing political books, means they were written no later than March or April … before the stimulus bill had even been signed into law.

I decided to seek some sanity in the WWII section, hoping I might find some facts half as audacious as Tarantino’s fiction. Instead I stumbled into American History – where I learned (however belatedly) that conservatives are no longer content to create alternate realities in the present; they’ve gone after the past as well! The genius behind this endeavor is Larry Schweikart, whose publicity bio places his legacy as “a former rock drummer who opened for ‘Steppenwolf’” (drummers once played opening sets by themselves?) ahead of his current gig in the history department at the University of Dayton (go Flyers!). Following up his 2007 Patriot’s History of the United States (We’re always right! Historians are liberal-elite pussies! Those Injuns had it coming!), Schweikart’s most recent treatise purports to debunk 48 Liberal Lies About American History – perhaps because if he had bothered to dream up 50 such straw men and delusions, he might have been forced to acknowledge that Obama’s birthplace is an actual state.

If you’re a frequent reader of my ravings you won’t be surprised to learn that, at some point in that bookstore, I snapped from all the lunacy around me – and proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon plotting inglourious revenge fantasies of my own. Sarah Palin, facing down a firing squad for her crimes against truth, justice and David Letterman, and being asked if she now understands what a “death panel” is. Dick Cheney, fresh from his 188th round of waterboarding, at the bottom of a naked-guy pyramid with panties on his head. Sean Hannity, disemboweled by a bald eagle tired of being exploited as the symbol of his bullshit. Teabaggers and town-hall crazies, desperate for meds that will turn down the voices in their heads, being turned away from one of those massive Remote Area Medical clinics. Chappaquiddick fetishists, forced to sit through the audiobook of Ted Kennedy’s forthcoming memoir — twice (heaven forbid they read). A bound and gagged Ann Coulter … oh, Ann … watching a gaggle of 9/11 widows advance on her, ready to pluck out her eyeballs with her own stiletto heels, as a classroom full of immigrant children recites the Pledge of Allegiance without uttering the words “under God”…

Eventually, though, I came to my senses and recoiled in horror at my misbegotten reveries. Of course I did; it’s what Democrats always do.

We just don’t seem to have that instinct for the jugular – to scream bloody murder when we’re down, or to stomp the other side when we’re up. We don’t “win” an election by one vote (in the Supreme Court) and then start acting like the other side doesn’t exist; we win the presidency in a landslide and obtain a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, then start begging the other side to negotiate bipartisan compromises. When we lose an election, we don’t immediately start talking about impeachment, secession, or “watering the tree of liberty”; instead we form a tidy, circular firing squad. And when a president of the other side comes to our town, we certainly don’t turn up toting assault weapons just to show how angry and intimidating (and unbalanced) we are.

It has been exceedingly difficult, as a Democrat who worked so hard to help the most recent election turn out the way it did, to watch mainstream Republicans (there’s that other oxymoron) get away with behaving like petulant toddlers and schoolyard bullies in the aftermath. They often leave me thinking, as a friend said while watching a U2-hungry crowd boo the opening-act Waterboys back in 1984, “If this crowd gets any more violent, I’m gonna have to hit somebody!”

In the wake of Inglourious Basterds and that menagerie of madness in the bookstore, I was left to wonder: Is our reticence as Democrats to play dirty, to seethe with pure partisan malice, or to openly plot political vengeance a noble thing – or a character flaw? The film’s Jewish critics are of little help in the matter. Some are just fine with its vision of Semitic ultraviolence; others have worried that “to seek revenge by murder [is] to lower yourself to the level of the murderers,” in the words of Brandeis University Holocaust studies professor Antony Polonsky, or that the film’s image of WWII-era Jews as vigilantes will feed perceptions of contemporary Israel as aggressive and/or oppressive.

Tarantino himself isn’t playing along with such diffidence, as he made clear in a recent interview with the Atlantic:

“I hate that hand-wringing shit,” he said [of most Holocaust movies]. He had a revelation in his early 20s, he recalled, when he saw Red Dawn (1984), a Cold War revenge fantasy in which a group of American high-school students, the “Wolverines,” battle Soviet and Central American soldiers who invade Colorado. “The Wolverines capture a soldier, and there’s a little bit of back-and-forth — should we kill him or not — and C. Thomas Howell just blows him away with his shotgun,” Tarantino recalled. “Those are the kind of things you say, ‘That’s exactly what I would do.’ It’s what I want to see, and when I don’t see it, I become frustrated, and then it feels like a movie as opposed to real life.”

So much for Quentin and “real life” (he’d have been great at My Lai, apparently). But before we go any further (as if I haven’t gone far enough already), cool your jets, conservatives – nobody’s calling anybody a Nazi here. Not today, anyway. In fact, considering the obnoxious Nazi comparisons Beck and others have been trotting out lately, and the extent to which right-wingers seem to be perpetually teetering on the brink of violence, I thought long and hard about titling this column “Inglourious Republicans.” But then I realized they might actually like that, so … no dice. Besides, this column is about my revenge fantasies – and the fact that they’d never, in a million years, be carried out. Not by any self-loathing respecting Democrat, anyway.

No, today’s Republicans don’t bear much resemblance to the Nazis. They do, however, remind me a lot of my 12-year-old – when he was two. Blissfully free of common sense; unable to admit they’ve made a huge mess, and unwilling to participate in cleaning it up; prone to extended tantrums and the occasional violent outburst. They don’t require a Basterds-style scalping so much as a good, stern Time Out.

What say we give them one? Senate Democrats, let’s leave Grassley in the weeds and forget about that futile attempt at bipartisanship in the Finance Committee. Forge the best bill you can with the Blue Dogs – compromising just enough to keep them from joining a filibuster, even if they refuse to vote for the end result – and let health care pass with just a vote or two to spare. Drag Biden in to break a tie, even. Hell, use reconciliation to implement the public option, if you have to! Let Glenn and Michelle and Hannity and Rush and the rest of them throw their tantrums in their Fox bedroom, with the door locked from the outside. The majority of the electorate that will benefit from health reform (and that still supports a public option) will be immensely grateful that you pulled your thumbs out of your asses and got something done for the good of the country. And they’ll remember the ever-shrinking party that tried so hard, and with so little civility, to stand in the way.

Yeah, I know – even tough-love parenting is probably too much to expect from the Democrats in Washington at this point. But I’m going to have to indulge my lame fantasies about imposing party discipline, because it’s no use dreaming of a Kenyan voodoo prince (do such men exist?) shrinking Bill O’Reilly’s head to the size of a pin. I mustn’t think such thoughts. I can’t. I’m a Democrat.

P.S. I asked my wife to look this over and see if she thought I’d gone completely around the bend. She said, “No, it’s good. It’s a little long, a little too violent, and a little scattered maybe. But it comes together well in the end. Kinda like the movie.” So there you go.

Tags: Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Charles Grassley, Dick Cheney, Dick Morris, Glenn Beck, health care reform, holocaust, inglourious basterds, Jon Cummings, Michelle Malkin, Nazi comparisons, Political Culture, quentin tarantino, revenge fantasies, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity

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