How Leftist Activists Alienate the Young: They Sound like Discipline-Minded School Marms
To be a good activist, one first requires a healthy measure of happiness.
By David Gottfried
J. D. Salinger’s sweet and lonesome Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of “A Catcher in the Rye,” says that when he reads a really good book, he wants to personally get to know the author, have a beer with him, and maybe even dare to be his friend. (Such a comment, in today’s polymorphously perverse but stunningly sterile world, would be considered an uncouth, vulgar display of adolescent and inane affection)
Of course, no one has endeavored to be my friend for anything I have written, but I expect it’s because I have a persistent predilection for writing like a son of a bitch. I suppose that sometimes I get off on the notion that I am fighting a jihad against the entire world. But hell, all the greatest borderline personalities (See Kornberg, 1940, for a psychoanalytic exegesis on the borderline personality) are the greatest prophets, and I am one with the moon and the west wind and with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Leon Trotsky and Diego River and DH Lawrence, and we all had an extra helping of diva definition to belt someone in the Jaw and Win one not for the Gipper but rather the winsome zipper.
What a load of horseshit. I must confess. I smoked some groovy refer and thoughts are cascading through my head like delicious, cognitive French Petit Fours. I am eating the succulence of cherries sugared with brandy honey wine, I am reading newspaper taxis and riding rocking horse people and glittering with the diamonds of Lucy in the Skies.
But this piece isn’t meant to be a stream of consciousness, let’s glory in the marijuana marigolds of whatever pops into my head, regurgitation of ancient fantasies.
Coming Down from the High:
Allow me to reassert clarity and all the linear loveliness of London’s crystal palace (A 19th century exhibition meant to celebrate science, industry and organized, reasoned thought)
I will recap the beginning of this essay -- in case the intervening hallucinogenic segment confused you -- and then move on:
As I said, in Salinger’s golden universe, when a reader likes a writer, he wants to get to know that writer and become his friend. I said that my readers are not interesting in knowing me. They don’t want to know me because I am quite a monumental son of a bitch.
And I write this essay to advise people on how not to become a son of a bitch. Most of the time, the answer is simple: One becomes a son of a bitch be being hurt. And this essay will try to tell people how to minimize getting fucked over and hurt. And to minimize getting fucked over one should disregard most of the bullshit one hears at commencement ceremonies. So, graduating seniors, hear something that the boring, whoring, galling mass of commencement speakers won’t say:
If you don’t love and cherish yourself, you will get fucked, become bitter and never be able to follow the counsel of commencement speakers who tell you to cherish humanity.
Old farts love to give blistering speeches which badger young people to care about the third world, the blacks, gay people, women, yada yada yada. These farty farts try to pose as hip and cool, and they think they can get away with this by reminding young people that the free-wheeling sixties were characterized by activism. However, these foggy-headed farts reek of a smug pretension to moral superiority that has the same bigoted flavor as that of mendacious moralists who have maligned mankind for millennia.
I am all for activism, but first one must set one’s own house in order and this entails getting one’s daily recommended dose of Vitamins A, B, C, etc., or awe, beauty and good cheer. And being able to help the world requires that one also be a potent person, and to have any measure of potency in a world in which everything has a price tag, requires that one have money.
And so the commencement speakers trying to whip students into slavish social justice warriors have it all wrong. To be a good and helping person, one must first have happiness and money. If one is unhappy and poor, one will resent anyone who has any measure of satisfaction, and one will be a misanthropic ogre.
The Left did not Wane, at the end of the Sixties, because people suddenly got more selfish. The issues changed.
Also, some “leftists” sound especially inane when they complain about the waning of the left after 1968. Like spoiled, egocentric children, they wonder why leftist strength declined and complain that they were deprived of the fun of raucous, riotous rallies. Too stupid to ascertain the reason for leftist decline, they rail at today’s young people, claiming that they are too selfish or capitalistic to adequately pay homage to the Leftist verities.
In fact, very specific facts made the left die-out. The Vietnam War, easily the most perverse, unjust and inane foreign policy misadventure in all of American history, made the left grow, and the end of that war made the once towering New Left fade away. But the left should not be ashamed of its decline. The left, in large measure, brought about an end to United States military involvement in Indochina. The left served its purpose.
Also, some of the issues that came to the fore after 1968 were antagonistic to the strongest supporters of the left. Some “leftists” championed unremitting race-consciousness and would deny highly qualified whites positions because blacks were always thought to be most deserving, and some leftists saw, in the replacement of class consciousness with race consciousness, a regression to the backward and reactionary days of Europe before Marx, when racial and religious consciousness dominated politics and demagogues preached bloodbaths against disfavored minorities.
College Professors teach as if we are all living in a Merchant and Ivory film.
Many of the characters in late 19 th century and early 20th century novels lived on easy street. And nowadays they are celebrated in Merchant and Ivory films which are festooned with flowers and ladies with glorious gowns and shimmering silverware at feasts overflowing with caviar and crumpets and whatever shit rich people ate in those days.
College Professors seem to be smoking so much weed that they have imagined that all their students are rich too. It’s really quite amazing. Colleges teach a plethora of courses as peculiar as the most daft Dadaist canvas of the Post World War One era. Like Marcel Duchamp’s piece of art which carries the instruction, “to be looked at, for one hour, with one eye closed,” the course work seems dedicated to the creation of warped and precious children.
I think that colleges ought to spend more time teaching students how to bargain so they don’ t get ripped off by the hordes of ill-cultured, greedy brats that are the mainstay of American life, how to fix their car, roast a chicken and grout a shower so they can save of few bucks, how to get an apartment, buy a house etc. As it stands now, a ridiculously high proportion of students are deep in debt when they graduate and soon sink deeper in debt and are as financially competent as neonates. (Actually, newborns are better off because they don’t know how to sign their names to rip off contracts)
Beware of Activists Incorporated
I am all for activism, but keep in mind that many venues and platforms that profess to love the world and to be fighting sainted struggles for the true and the good are really gimmicks to put some people in luxury condos where they bide their time laughing at the soulful fools fighting for “the cause.”
Certainly not all activism is infested with lies and fraud. ACT Up was completely for real. It had to be as most of its members had AIDS, at the time AIDS was a death sentence, and ACT UP members did not have the luxury of working for just another impotent, irrelevant waste of time.
However, ACT UP is the exception. Almost all left of center organizations fighting for change, whether they are dedicated to militant political protest, legislative change or social services purporting to help the aggrieved, are in business so some pompous son of a bitch can preen and scream as the President of the club, are suffused with a condescending, contemptuous liberalism that considers the poor wayward ignoramuses, and are shot through with a malady that I talk about in another post, the reaction formation theory of the professions. (Footnote 1)
My distrust of the ostensible Left was articulated by one of the foremost leftist Artists of 20th Century America, the playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman. In an article appearing in the New York Times Book Review about 15 years ago, Hellman was said to have given advice on how to live one’s life and thrive. Hellman allegedly said that a) one should believe in a great ideal, b) one should rave and rant about the importance of one’s great ideal and c) while everyone is staring at the ideal, one should grab the money.
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Footnote 1: https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/why-you-may-hate-your-doctor-and