Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World

by Andrew Breitbart

My parents granted me a brilliant middle-class life, one that didn’t overwhelm and lavish spoils on me to the point of absurdity. The house was not filled with objects or celebrities that would cause my friends to envy me, wish they could live at my house, or hang out with our social circle. My parents were also about fifteen years older than some of my friends’ parents, so while my mother was watching Lawrence Welk on television on Saturday nights, one of my friends’ dads rented a limousine so he could hit the Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry concerts in the same night. While my parents’ house had a pool and four bedrooms and a scenic canyon view of West Los Angeles, it couldn’t compete with the beachfront Malibu property that two of my friends at school occupied. And I’m ashamed to admit: those families existed in an ether that became growingly intoxicating to me. Along with my friends’ parents’ elite addresses came original art, celebrity friends, and a very specific brand of liberal politics. Bobby Kennedy, to this crowd, did not just represent a political philosophy, but an aesthetic that started to lure me away from my parents’ simple, grounded nature. That, and those pesky palpitations in my loins. Between the lure of a greater material life and my emerging sexual teen persona, my parents’ chaste, safe haven became less and less appealing, other than as a place to catch some Zzzzs and get three free square meals. And in a gesture of trust, my parents granted me the indep...