George Santos: Image is Everything in An Intellectually Bankrupt World
George Santos v. Brian Epstein and the measure of a man
By
David Gottfried
Have you had your fill of George Santos ? He is the recently elected Republican Congressman, from New York, who has been found-out as a fraud. He said he graduated from Baruch college; Baruch has no record of him. The suave and slick financial institutions, where he claimed to have worked, do not know him. He pays himself 700 K a year from a company he controls, and that supposedly lucrative company has no website, no linked in page, and where its money comes from is anyone’s guess.
We do know this about him: While is Mother was caring for an aged and sick man, he stole that man’s checkbook.
But man, he did have the perfect image.
First, he came off as a manly homosexual. That automatically gets a candidate three psychosexual cheering sections: Gay Men, Neurotic Women who are madly in love with gay men, and a certain type of straight man who has great respect for manly homosexuals. (It’s a little bit of the Pete Buttagieg effect, but that might be unfair to Pete who was, after all, one of the brightest men American politics has seen in eons.)
Second, he supposedly worked for various “financial firms.” Whenever someone plays around in money, we say they are working in finance. They may be involved in short selling, or making money by making other people lose their shirt; they may involved in arbitrage, or buying low in one exchange and selling high in another exchange; and they may be riding a wave of crypto currency megalomania like a crack head on a fast track to Bellevue, but we embellish and prettify their sordid work by calling it finance. In any event, nowadays finance and its entire fraud infested realm is held in high esteem. Santos, by claiming that he worked in finance, gave himself the seal of sarcastic, supercilious yuppie, guppie and puppy approval.
He also had a real winner of a family tragedy going for him. People love real holocaust tear jerkers, and Santos, by claiming that his family had endured the holocaust, knew how to win over scads of sentimental old ladies, old Jews and young anti semites who rationalize their excoriation of the “Zionist entity” by regularly and publicly shedding crocodile tears for the Holocaust, knowing that they can rationalize their endangerment of the lives of living Jews by crying for Jewish lives that have long since ended.
Of course there are other people in this world who are homosexual, good with money and Jewish, and one of them was Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles and many other British rock sensations of the sixties. Of course, artistic and sensitive Brian Epstein was nothing like bitchy and vindictive George Santos, and this tells you how little we know about someone when we are told that they are gay, Jewish or good with money.
The terms and categories that consume our debased public discourse count for very little in making the measure of a man. Whether one is Jewish or Catholic or Protestant is not what matters. What matters is if one is kind and good or a son of a bitch. And so while the bean counters count the number of Jews and blacks and homosexuals in a government office, that sort of data is useless drivel and a diversion from that which is important and makes our life meaningful.
What a doozy of a character, a hustler who made sure to check all the boxes in his ascent to the top. Does he fall now ? Are there avenues of recall in NYS short of public lynching ? He'd be fine on TV, wouldn't he ? Maybe he could read the evening news with that charming glint in his eye, just to let people know it's all a gag. Nice piece. What happens next in the Empire State ?