5 Pesky and Provocative Essays Guaranteed to Annoy Devotees of Political Pussyfooting
By
David Gottfried
I am too tired and too ill to write something new for you today. Accordingly, I will give you some of my oldies but goodies. In 2017, I wrote a 522-page compilation of essays on a diverse range of topics, from politics to art to the natural sciences.
Today, I will give you a few pieces from the 2017 compilation:
My essay, “Jane Jacobs meets ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ – Why we leftists hate you liberals,” describes a schism in Left of Center thought and sentiment which might make the poor erupt in riots against rich liberals.
“My Elton John Epiphany” notes how, when I was 14 and heard the song “Levon,” my view of the world was substantially changed.
“Homosexuality and misdirected Testosterone” offers a completely novel hypothesis regarding the development of certain types of homosexual orientations.
Supposedly mankind came out of the nether world of Mid-Eastern barbarism and despotism when Abraham smashed the idols of yore. My essay, “The residue of Carthaginian Infanticide Among Christians and Jews,” documents the reappearance of those idols.
In “Charity and Benevolence Does Not Constitute a Foreign Policy,” I note that Great Britain and the United States were very generous to Germany and Japan before World War Two, and I deplore the plebian belief that peace can be had simply be being nice to other nations.
Jane Jacobs meets “Like a Rolling Stone” -- how we leftists hate you liberals
In “The life and Death of Great American Cities,” Jane Jacobs said that cities were great because of the possibility for something in the nature of intermediate relationships or relationships with people who you were only slightly intimate with. Whereas in small towns, people knew you not at all or knew everything about you, Jacobs held that cities were wonderful because of the abundance of semi friends and associates.
These were the people you knew on a superficial basis: The shopkeeper, the old fart talking on the stoop, the guy playing chess, etc. You exchanged a few pleasantries with them, laughed with them on occasion, but you might not even know their names. This mix of people, she said, helped make city life interesting, a heady brew of varied personalities brightening and enlivening your day.
Jacobs went on to say that it was sort of understood that it would be poor etiquette if one got to know these people more closely. One kept them at arm’s length. One already had one’s friends. One is not looking for more friends, certainly not with the motley and sometimes miserable characters one exchanged meaningless pleasantries with.
But Bob Dylan -- G-d bless that man who skewered West Side liberal self- satisfaction -- gave us the view from the characters that Jacobs got her kicks from. In “Like a Rolling Stone,” he sang that the “jugglers and clowns” who amused Jacobs were not amused. Maybe you had your friends, but they had no friends and were not interested in your stupid jokes because you would not be interested if they died tomorrow. You, the rich Wall Street lawyer, will pride yourself on our wonderfully diverse City because you will exchange pleasantries with the black clerk at Duane Reade’s. You think of her sort of fondly, as if she were an urban version of Mamie from “Gone with the Wind.” Because you exchange pleasantries, you think all is well and that she really does not want to come into your home and eat your dainties and drink your champagne and lie in your silk sheets. And you will pride yourself that you are living in a wonderfully liberal and brilliant City.
And Jane Jacobs wrote her book only a few years before Dylan wrote Like a Rolling Stone. (Her book came out in the early sixties; Dylan’s song came out in the mid-sixties)
And they were both writing about life in the same place: New York City.
And they both had wholly antithetical views of friendship in the Greenwich Village of the day. Jacobs espoused the view of the affluent, pushy, educated Jewish lady who has never really had to worry about anything. She adores the arts, and she laughs and throws pennies at someone on the street playing the guitar. She loves the homosexuals; indeed, her hairstylist is a homo. She considers herself such a lovely and vibrant person because she has such a mélange of peculiar non-friends to spice up her days like pieces of toasted garlic in a bagel. But Dylan knew that these people hated her.
And you liberals don’t understand that this patina of civility only exists because of the Irish or Italian Cop who you despise as poor white bigoted trash from the burbs who hasn’t divined the virtues of the metro sexual lifestyle. You don’t understand that the black clerk in Duane Reade’s hates you, and the jugglers and the clowns in Bob Dylan’s sainted song hated you, and that I hate you. You are only alive and well because some policemen are dumb enough to ensure your physical safety.
The most radical and rebellious things occur when they are least expected. In 1968, no one thought that France would be the scene of leftist outrage and rebellion; after all the French Government, at that time, almost behaved like an apologist for Moscow and Ho Chi Minh. But then France exploded in the May Movement and uprisings quickly spread from the universities of Paris to the entire country.
And you may think that New York, that shining city of unmitigated monied gall and neo liberal lies, is immune from civil disturbance. But, G-d willing, New York will see guns as portentous as the Guns of August. G-d Willing your towers will all come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.
—
MY ELTON JOHN EPIPHANY
1971 epiphany: I am 14 and hear Elton John’s “Levon,” and I am awed by this lyric: “He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas Day when the New York Times said God is dead.”
This lyric murdered atheistic liberalism in its official robes.
With this lyric I knew that we needed something spiritual, something to adore and to love and that my crass, materialistic, Marxian world-view would not sustain me.
—
HOMOSEXUALITY AND MISDIRECTED TESTOSTERONE
Could homosexuality be caused by misdirected Testosterone. I have known more than one extremely hung drag queen. One of the drag queens had the most masculine physical features – not an ounce of sub cutaneous fat, veiny without working out, square jaw and a ten-inch dick.
Could it be that all of their testosterone was directed toward the masculinizing of the body and that there was nothing left over for the masculinization of the mind.
Similarly, I have known men who were extremely hairy, one of them was truly ape- like, and they have often had small penises. Could it be that an excess of testosterone went toward the development of body hair and not enough testosterone was left over for phallic development.
THE RESIDUE OF CARTHAGINIAN INFANTICIDE AMONG CHRISTIANS AND JEWS.
In ancient Carthage, they periodically killed some of their little children. They believed that they were offering their children up to their various gods and that this would ensure a good fate. The Jews transcended this barbarism, but only by a hair:
In the Old Testament, G-d tells Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Abraham was ready to kill Isaac. At the last minute, G-d stopped him, and said that he was only testing Abraham’s obedience, but the Bible would have been infinitely more morally useful and salubrious if G-d had said, “You must always love your children, and resist that tyrant who wants to kill your child, and you shall resist that tyrant even if he emanates all the regal power and arrogance of all the Emperors of the World, and you shall resist that tyrant even if that tyrant is G-d.”
A few aspects of Judaism reveal the vestigial remains of the idea that killing someone or something that is pure is a passport to appeasing G-d. On Yom Kippur, some Jews kill a chicken and throw it in a body of water. They are supposedly transferring their sins onto the chicken.
The Christian Faith Makes matters worse:
G-d colludes in the murder of Jesus, and the rationale for his murder is absurd. Supposedly, he died to save Mankind. But Jesus and his Daddy in heaven should not have allowed Jesus to be killed, on the grounds that that will allegedly save the world, because the death of an innocent should never purify the guilty. The death of innocent Jesus, far from quashing evil, commends and exalts evil. The Jesus story says: You shall be saved because this innocent man died for your sins. This can inculcate a belief that salvation is to be had by killing innocent people. A healthier New Testament would have said that one can attain salvation by helping others.
And just as innocent Jesus was killed, the Jews of Europe were innocent, and the gentiles of Europe decided to cleanse their sins by killing innocent Jews. Christianity, at one time, could have become a wonderful thing, but the Church became a handmaiden and apologist for tyrants for two thousand years, ever since Rome converted to Catholicism. Christianity was too fine a thing for the Christians of Europe who proceeded to debase and destroy the love of Mother Mary and replace it with the icy gleam of the thousands of Jewels and Daggers and Swords of all the Courts of Europe.
Also, the New Testament arguably justifies fascism: Supposedly, Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar than which is Caesar’s.” So if the Fuhrer says, “Go and invade Russia and murder as many Jews and Russians as possible,” you go and do it like a good little Christian fool of a Hun and kill and die for your evil King. It is nothing but a rationale for being the ultimate blond beast of the Hitler Youth, for having a mute, mummified brain and a body that kills with all the mindless poison of Cleopatra’s asp.
The Jews, too, finally rendered unto Ceaser that which was Caesar’s. They did it on Yom Kippur, our holiest day, in 1942 in the ghetto of Lodz. The Nazis decreed that the Jewish ghetto should surrender to the Nazis all children under a certain age; I don’t remember what the cut-off year was -- It may have been all children under 11, or under 8, or under the frightened and frail of age of 7. And the Jews surrendered their children on the holiest day of our calendar.
And the Germans, of course, knew what they were doing. I am sure the anti-intellectual Nazis who never read a word of Freud had more psychological insight than all the pseudo intellectuals who bowed before the altar of psychoanalysis.
After the mothers and Fathers of Lodz surrendered their children, the mothers and Fathers hated themselves (And they deserved to hate themselves) and they felt as if they nothing to live for and they were more willing to slave and die for the Reich.
We regressed from killing chickens to killing our children and went all the way back to ancient Carthage.
CHARITY AND BENEVOLENCE DO NOT CONSTITUTE A FOREIGN POLICY
On many issues I am a stalwart leftist. However, I think far too many leftists have the sort of dreamy, lovely but loosing generosity of spirt that makes for ideas that are at their best just too cute and at their worst deadly. Some liberals seem to think that to have peace we just need to be nice.
In opposition to the liberal argument that by being nice to countries we may have peace:
Some of our biggest enemies have been the recipients of our most bounteous kindness.
We were very nice to Japan before World War Two.
Theodore Roosevelt, in the course of adjudicating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, decided that Japan would be given dominion over Korea – and the Japanese were ruthless occupiers of Korea. And some morons wonder why North Koreans hate us.
At Versailles, the British determined that Germany’s colonies in China would be given to Japan. And from their foothold in China, the Japanese slaughtered countless Chinese. And some American morons wonder why the Chinese Communists hate the West.
The British Military helped train and modernize the Japanese Army.
And Japan attacked both Britain and the United States.
We were very nice to Germany before World War Two.
It is often argued that Versailles was extremely punitive toward the Germans, but not long after it was signed, and until the eve of World War Two, the West was extremely solicitous of the Germans because it sought to join Germany in combatting Russia and communism.
In the Locarno agreement, which was entered into in the early 1920’s, Western powers agreed that Germany was free to change her Eastern boundaries and to seize territories controlled by Slavic nations in the East. (And you wonder why Russia is so suspicious of us.)
In the Dawes plan, Germany’s bout with hyper-inflation was resolved on terms very favorable to Germany.
Because the existent Deutschmark was worthless, a new Mark was established.
The Deutschmark had been severely undermined because Germany printed Marks, with extreme abandon, to make reparations payments to Britain and France.
To enable Germany to pay its reparations payments to England and France, America gave Germany the money to make those payments.
And then of course a series of concessions were made to Germany after Hitler ascended to power, but I am sure you are familiar with this. I discuss this in accompanying essays. But Germany still went to war with the West.
I am not counseling that we harass, malign and be warlike toward other nations. I am saying that we must have a foreign policy that incorporates some gray matter. Princes and other aristocrats played chess for centuries to instill the sort of artifice, subterfuge and gracefulness which makes for a winning foreign policy. We need to start playing chess in geo-politics.
`