Bari Weiss’s Drivel about Covid and the Pathology Behind Her Comments
By
David Gottfried
(At around 5:50 to 6:50 Russel discusses the strict sense of puritan piety that suffused his childhood)
First, I will discuss Bari Weiss’s recent and reprehensible remarks about Covid. Then, I will explain how Weiss’s execrable rant was a manifestation of a larger moral problem: The tendency of the comfortable and the rich to care even less about the poor than they did in the past, and the resulting forfeiture of their right to dominate and rule.
BARI WEISS’S NARCISSISTIC AND NONSENSICAL OUTBURST ABOUT COVID
Today I heard the “comedian” Bari Weiss say that she was “done with Covid.” She was tired of taking precautions to prevent infection. Weiss is a whining weakling. She holds that since the masks and vaccines offer only partial protection against Covid, advocates for masks and vaccines are guilty of a “catastrophic moral crime.” Essentially, she is saying that if our efforts to combat a foe are failing, we should surrender and succumb to the foe. If Great Britain had followed her counsel in World War Two, it would have deposed Winston Churchill, and surrendered to Adolf Hitler, when France Fell to the Nazis.
Also, she is dead wrong about who is committing the catastrophic moral crime. The guilty party is the healthy person, like herself, who reasons as follows: Since I am healthy, I will probably not get ill from covid, so I will not wear a mask even though my exhalations could spray covid viruses on older and infirm people I come in contact with. Since she is young and healthy, she may very well have covid viruses in her nose and throat and not gotten sick from them because her immune system is robust. So she does not give a damn if she blows covid viruses on a waitress, whose immune system might be compromised, who serves her pretentious, expensive food reserved for chi chi shitheads,
Bari Weiss, maybe you are “done with covid,” but we are not done with you and your sneering, supercilious kind.
THE LARGER MORAL PROBLEM
In 1993, Daniel Patick Moynihan, the quintessence of the phony liberalism that besets much of the Democratic Party, wrote “Defining Deviancy Down,” an urbane and erudite version of the rants of Archie Bunker. In this essay, he laments society’s willingness to accept more and more raucous, irresponsible, and criminal behavior. His prissy fastidiousness sees the hand of Hades in graffiti, in squeegee men who offer to clean your windshields for a buck, and in black guys walking down the street with boom boxes. (In those days, people often sported boom boxes)
Perhaps poor people no longer behave like obedient church mice and have adopted the habits of rattling rats. However, why doesn’t anyone notice the concomitant decline in the moral standards of the rich and the retirement of that once near universal belief that people who are doing well should have kindness and time for those who are aggrieved.
WHY THE RICH FORFEITED THEIR RIGHT TO RESPECT
At the beginning of the 20th century, fierce Marxists and anarchists sought to pummel and pound the monied class into submission. However, many poor people found revolutionary politics repulsive. In large measure, I think that is because the rich and ruling class commanded enormous respect.
Yes, the chasm between the rich and the poor was astounding. Yes, people in the East End of London were markedly shorter than people in other parts of London because the poor simply starved. The workhouses gave the poor a diet of cheap starches and water, or essentially the bread and water supposedly only reserved for convicts. Yes, in 1776, the same year that Adam Smith sang the praises of capitalism in the “Wealth of Nations,” a doctor noted a rash of cases of scrotal cancer, in London, in young boys, who contracted the ailment because in their work as chimney sweeps they crawled through chimneys and the constant exposure to huge amounts of soot gave these little boys cancer of the balls. Yes, in 1911, well over one hundred teenage girls were incinerated, or jumped from the inferno to the street, because their boss, the Triangle Shirtwaist company, locked them in their factory, and prevented them from leaving, for fear that a girl might steal some fabric.
Nevertheless, for some reason the rich had a deep reservoir of respect.
I first got an inkling of the origins of this respect when I heard Bertrand Russel discuss his youth. Russel was born in 1872. His Grandfather knew Napolean and was the Prime Minister of Great Britain in the 1830’s when England passed its “reform laws,” which like almost everything in politics were an obfuscating misnomer; they made life better for industrialists and cursed the peons who worked for the new tycoons. In any event, on YouTube you can hear interviews the BBC conducted with Russel in the 1940’s and 1950’s and be transported to the 18th and 19th centuries.
Russel said that his grandmother would not sit in a chair, which had armrests, before the evening had arrived because such a comfort would be too sinful and downright decadent. Although Russel’s grandparents were exceedingly rich, the food they ate was spartan and austere and the only seasonings they savored were salt and pepper. The rich often did not enjoy their wealth. Their stern sense of Protestant propriety made the English and American ruling classes lead lives circumscribed by inhibition, self-denial and guilt.
In World War One, British soldiers from the upper class were much more likely to die than soldiers from poorer classes, presumably because their sense of obligation and duty was more pronounced. In the “Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam relates that Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles (John was secretary of state under Eisenhower; Allen was Director of the CIA) went to prep schools where the boys were awakened at 6 AM, rushed into the courtyard without any breakfast, and made to perform mental arithmetic in front of their fellow students. When the Titanic went down, top-hatted rich men sang Protestant hymns as they drowned. When the curve ball was introduced in baseball, in the second half of the 19th Century, the Dean of Harvard was aghast. The curve ball was fraught with sneakiness and deception; such a snaking, serpent of a pitch recalled the infamy of the Garden of Eden, and the good men of Harvard sought to banish it from their verdant playing fields.
Some of this continued into the middle of the Twentieth Century. In the early 1960’s, about twenty percent of the graduating class of Harvard College went not to graduate school, not to Sheister Street (sorry, I meant to say Wall Street) but straight into the United States Military. For those readers who doubt the ethics of enlisting in the United States’ armed forces, I would remind my readers that many young people joined the Peace Corp or the Civil Rights Movement.
Of course, today, the elites never volunteer for any burdens. Join the military. Fuggedaboutit. Rich Americans have adopted the ethics of Don Corleone and Donald Trump. Christians who once believed in Jesus believe in plush, deluxe vacations on Christmas. (Recall the film “Ordinary People” and Mary Tyler Moore’s character telling her spouse that their upcoming Christmas should be a luxury vacation in London sans their son.)
The rich do not serve in the military (As Il Duce Trump noted, defending one’s nation is for lowly losers) They don’t give a rat’s ass about poverty, hunger, yada yada yada.
Today, the rich are free of morals. Although we have no communist government which has condemned religion, we do have exceptional wealth and that is conducive to the violation of all moral standards. Marxists have often noted the correlation between wealth and the sort of preening pride that casts off moral restraint, but Religion has noted the very same thing that Marxists deplored. I refer you to the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament. In this story, people were building a Tower that would reach Heaven. G-d found their aspiration arrogant. G-d stymied their construction project by creating the many different languages of the world. Suddenly, workers who had once understood everybody else, found speech incomprehensible.
I suppose some educated but obtuse fellows will say that there is no evidence of the Tower of Babel. No shit sherlock. These dunces miss the point entirely: These Bible “stories” illustrate conflicts and dynamics that people experienced, i.e., they understood that great accomplishment is conducive to a measure of arrogance and that arrogance can morph into wickedness. I suppose someone is going to attack me for using the word wickedness just as they attacked George Bush for using the word evil. George Bush had many faults, but the puny notion that using the word wicked was one of them is a manifestation of a sort of lily-livered liberalism that instead of focusing on ideas retreats into semantics and directs its fiercest attacks on people who use blunt, direct or politically incorrect terms.
In any event, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average soars ever higher, it is a sort of modern analog to the Biblical Tower of Babel -- and periodically it is driven down into the dust whence it came.
However, our stock market crashes never seem to pack the punch that 1929 had. Nowadays, the market, over the long haul, has only gone in one direction and a class of investors have become as stinking and as fetid as only a massive carcinoma on the conscience of this country might be. Their wealth has grown to such majestic and malevolent proportions that its stinks more than all the industrial toxic dumps of the Northeast and the Rust belt taken to the tenth power of moral degradation.
And when the rich and comfortable live in places like Long Island, New York, a sea of suburbs so vulgar and vice-ridden that it named one of its towns Babylon, as if it wants to recreate all the pagan perversities of the ancient Levant, they have devolved into spoiled shits like Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuco, a crazed couple responsible for killing Joey’s wife so they could ride off into the scabrous sunset of their filthy dreams.