After graduating from New York University School of Law, David Gottfried practiced Law. He litigated a broad array of suits, everything from large commercial disputes and matters of international import (The slaughters of Serbs and Jews by Croatian Fascists) to the rights of the mentally ill. His experiences served to burnish and amplify his belief that what people really do is often diametrically opposed to what they claim to do. He found that lawyers, while purporting to champion justice, often magnify injustice, that doctors often seem very skilled at exacerbating disease and that the liberal welfare state, far from giving succor and support to the aggrieved and the afflicted, is often a racket which augments the power of the powerful.
David Gottfried’s observations prompted him to craft theories which explained why so much of life was obscenely false and why J.D. Salinger hit the nail on the head when Holden Caulfield, the main character of his novel “A Catcher in the Rye,” plaintively sighs that people are a bunch of “phonies.” Gottfried finds it very phony when an academic or thinker promulgates an idea which only rehashes what has already been said ad nauseam. Gottfried believes that he has many wholly original ideas to share. (He will also concede that such a claim may sound unbearably pretentious.)
Gottfried has dwelled in diverse and diametrically opposed milieus as he was steeped in a Brooklyn Jewish milieu, but was at one time immersed in a world of fundamentalist Christians, partied hearty with rock n rollers (he once was in a band of sorts) but also savored the rarefied delights of fine art, and dealt with tiresome career politicians who saw issues only as ploys to get votes but was also invigorated by activists who put their lives on the line, including ACT UP activists who raged at Reagan’s AIDS-ridden 1980’s. His variegated life makes him less predictable, freer of the ideological straight jackets that constrain so much thought and hopefully more insightful.
He hopes his commentaries will incite debate and enliven a brain-dead political discourse in which both the Left and the Right repeat platitudinous pabulum which seems capable of giving everyone narcolepsy. Why knock down trees to print books that say what has already been said or cram our computers with regurgitations of the cowardly conventional wisdom. David has new things to say. As he said in the closing lines of one of his poems:
So come survey this paper trail
Of poems, polemics that pierce the veil
Let your mind set out and sail
And you’ll be capsized in a gale
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