David Cole
REPUBLICAN PARTY ANIMAL
2014, Feral House
When your life is ruined by a lie, you’ve lost all of your friends and everything you’ve worked for collapses overnight, it seems like you have a few options left to consider. You could eat a bullet for lunch. You could become a strident, droning victim and bore everyone until we not only lose interest in your trial, but we start to think that you deserved it. Or you could joke mercilessly about the whole affair, preferably in a book that reads like a thousand dirty secrets told in confidence between two bar stools—and that’s the path that David Cole takes, thank God.
Now, let’s get one thing straight here: Infamous Jewish “Holocaust denier” David Cole is, uh, not a Holocaust denier. This is not a fact that I got from fake news (whatever that is) or some blowhard on social media. I got it from Cole’s own words in this very volume. David Cole says that the Holocaust happened. David Cole agrees with the mainstream that European Jews during the Third Reich were rounded up, forced into camps and killed in large numbers. There’s nothing wrong with my copy of the book. No pages were ripped out. Everything is spelled right. The ink didn’t come off on my hands. I wasn’t on drugs. My old Kindergarten teacher once told me that I read very well.
David Cole acknowledges the Holocaust (let’s say it again). It’s here in professionally typeset plain English. So can anyone who’s EVER hated him for that FINALLY shut up? If you question Cole’s authority on the Holocaust, how about we at least buy that he’s an authority on what’s in his own head? Sounds reasonable to me.
The (very) brief summary of what makes Cole such a hot lump of coal deemed unfit for sensitive hands: He questions that Auschwitz was an extermination camp.
While Cole believes that other camps, such as Treblinka, were true blue death destinations, he posits that Auschwitz was more likely a labor camp for a warring country who really needed it. Its famous gas chambers, mere legend. He doesn’t say that Auschwitz was a country club, but he thinks the facts have become distorted over the years and that it’s his job as a researcher to set the record straight.
Is Cole correct? I don’t know. He’s read more Holocaust literature, interviewed more people on the matter and done more personal inspections of the original site than I’ll ever do. I say we leave it for the historians to argue. If you’re not an active participant in Holocaust research, neck-deep in the reading and well-weathered on the traveling, I don’t care what you have to say. When non-historians get in on this, they tend to bring in their politics. Pundits win and history loses.
Pursuing this matter in the face of violent resistance (and I do mean real violence, with punches thrown and death threats from high places) is only Cole’s FIRST self-destructive act. He’d have a few more, including one literal faking of his death and a changing of his professional name and a path that lead to working with the most image-conscious human beings on Earth outside of high school kids: politicians. Los Angeles resident Cole was a real up-and-coming mover and shaker of the little-acknowledged, well-moneyed, but marginalized Hollywood right wing. He hobnobbed with everybody in the scene, worked the room from front to back and threw legendary parties. Powerful people loved David Cole. They admired his work ethic. They wanted to team up with him. The kid had a future.
Then these people found out about Cole’s controversial Holocaust past (through machinations best revealed in the book) and they pretended to never know him.
Such is life in the big leagues. Anyone who has anything to lose will always distance themselves from the pariah. All sides of the political spectrum are fat with lies and hungry for more. They play to people who don’t read far past the headlines. They know how truth distorts the very moment that more than one mouth is talking about it and they take advantage of that (except when it’s working against them). Cole, a quick-thinking achiever who admits that he’s comfortable being a manipulative weasel, felt comfortable among other weasels. And then they chewed him up.
This is his story. Sounds like a good book to me.
As with any memoir from a disgraced person, this one invites suspicion of its accuracy. What do Cole’s relentlessly bashed ex-friends and ex-girlfriends here have to say? I don’t know (none of them seem to be writers), but what makes Cole believable is that he’s funny. This book is not a screed or a plea for mercy. It’s a laugh-out-loud take on a screwball-worthy situation. Cole seems like the kind of guy who could find out that he’s got a terminal disease and then start joking about it five minutes later. I always believe truly funny people because they’re not afraid to make themselves look pathetic. There’s too much humor in the sad truth to reach for some boring lie.
David Cole’s fall is the worst thing that ever happened to him—and he sees both its tragedy and its comedy. Any real seeker of truth ought to be able to do that.
5 – TEENAGE MOTHER (Alamo Drafthouse, September 2016)
I’ve seen 50,000 horror movies and at this point I can eat a meatball sandwich and watch heads roll all night. So, seeing a movie that REALLY did freak me out, rob my spirit of all optimism and make the very air in the room feel carcinogenic was a weirdly exciting sensation. Originally released in 1981, POSSESSION put me in my place. It’s about the worst marriage in film history. He (Sam Neill) twitches like a raw nerve, she (Isabelle Adjani) screams more than the singer in a black metal band. He’s jealous, she’s insane. He beats the hell out of her, she cheats on him with a mysterious slime beast in an apartment that looks like the inside of a dumpster. Director/co-writer Andrzej Zulawski builds a real nightmare here, icy in approach and nerve-rattling. At times, he dares the audience to walk out. In a theater, the infamous “miscarriage” scene—three solid minutes of Adjani howling and writhing and throwing herself around a lonely subway tunnel—is an assault that makes your ears ring afterward. It’s one of the best horror films ever made. The sparsely attended late Thursday night show, a Club Silencio-like collection of scattered strays, only added to the effect.
This documentary about the world’s one-time leading peddler of online tickle fetish videos is funny stuff at first and then becomes harrowing as the onion layers peel off to reveal one of the creepiest and most mysterious antagonists in recent movies, a world class “cyber-bully” before the term was invented and a Dr. Mabuse-like string-puller under cover of digital shadow. The two New Zealand filmmakers here travel the US interviewing the very few who will come forward on the subject, doing stakeouts, following people, sneaking cameras anywhere they can and having doors slammed in their faces. The audience is there with them the whole time, the third person in the investigation, keeping the edges of our seats good and warm on this trip into a real underworld. My favorite NEW movie that I saw in a theater this year.
I hate movie remakes and I hate them even more now that I’ve finally seen it done right. Here’s what it takes: A bunch of 11-year-olds pick out their favorite movie and then re-shoot it, painstakingly, shot-for-shot with a VHS camcorder and no money. If it takes them seven years to finish (as it did these kids during summer vacations off from school from 1982 to 1989), that’s even better. This is a movie that you can’t believe really exists until you’ve seen it. If you’re deeply familiar with the original 