Hella Nation - Evan Wright [166]
While in New York, Dollard also appears on Hannity & Colmes. Introduced by Colmes as a former talent agent who left “Tinseltown behind to see what the Iraqis themselves think of the liberal antiwar movement,” Dollard plays a clip of an Iraqi translator who calls Michael Moore a “little bitch” and crushes a DVD purported to be Fahrenheit 9/11 (but appears to be I, Robot). Dollard rambles about “an incredibly strong [anti-Republican] bias in Hollywood that denies people work.” Hannity adds, “The truth isn’t being told, is it? The left is undermining [the soldiers’] effort and stabbing them in the back.”
After viewing her ex-husband on the show, Megan Dollard tells me, “It’s really scary that a person who is completely crazy can go on TV and have that influence.” Having seen him come unglued so many times in front of me, I hadn’t anticipated how effective he would be on TV. Isn’t somebody going to notice he’s insane? I had wondered while watching him trade sound bites with Hannity. But of course he would fit in. In the pro-wrestling world of opinion TV, Dollard is a natural.
In my conversations with Breitbart, he, like other conservatives, harps on the “nihilism of the left.” He brings up anti-Vietnam War protesters, like yippies, who attacked the Establishment “by spitting on people. They debased people and institutions and values with anger and disrespect.”
Despite his outrage, Breitbart advocates a right-wing version of the Merry Pranksters led by people like Coulter and Dollard. Perhaps America has experienced a circular movement in its social history. The freaks are now on the right. Dollard takes this even further. With his drug-fueled excursions into combat zones, his lust for booze and hookers and porn, and, above all, his madness for life, he is an authentic antiestablishment figure and is certainly in the running to be the first true gonzo journalist to emerge from this war. And yet he supports the Republican Party platform, George Bush and the Pledge of Allegiance.
Four days after Dollard’s Hannity & Colmes appearance, I receive a call from a security guard at the W Times Square hotel, where Dollard is staying. The guard tells me NYPD officers are on their way to possibly arrest Dollard. Throughout the call, I hear a drunk slurring in the background. It’s Dollard. The guard tells me that earlier that morning a woman from room service had brought him cigarettes and found the room trashed, covered in what she thought was blood. (Dollard would later claim it was coffee.) Dollard allegedly told the woman from room service, “I killed someone.” Welsh, who accompanied Dollard to New York, tells me that after his appearance on Hannity & Colmes a magazine editor “trying to kiss Pat’s ass and believing all his Hunter S. Thompson bullshit” gave him “a bunch of coke, and Pat got all retarded as usual.” Welsh left him a few days ago.
When the cops show up at the W, instead of arresting him, they have an ambulance take him to St. Vincent’s hospital for observation. He is released hours later and flies back home.
Welsh informs me that he and an ex-Marine buddy plan to tie Dollard up and use a Taser gun if he acts out. Dollard sobers up for a few weeks. But in early September, Welsh moves out after an incident in which Dollard shoots a hole through the ceiling of his bedroom while playing with a .45. “The motherfucker’s out of his mind,” Welsh tells me. “I’m just fucking tired of being a twenty-three-year-old babysitting a forty-two-year-old.”
Two weeks after Welsh’s departure, Dollard contacts me. He has finished cutting his second version of Young