How Trump Supporters Remind Me of Myself When I was 22
By
David Gottfried
Many Anti-Vaxers and Trumpers remind me of myself when I was 22.
At that vainglorious stage of my life, certain rituals gave me ravishing, redolent freedom.
I used to floor the accelerator, speed to ninety miles an hour, fancy my car a tank and advance deep into enemy territory to the accompaniment of the Rolling Stones, screaming on my tape deck, “Street Fightin’ Man” or “Sympathy for the Devil.” With all my windows open, the wind made my red hair swirl like the hellacious fires of Hades or a strawberry ice cream cone, depending upon whether I was in a gallant, valiant, savior-like mood or the demon king of all the deviates.
Of course, things sometimes go bump in the night, and my automotive aggression sometimes made for some very big bumps. From 1977 to 1980, I totaled a car about once a year, smashing one car in a parking lot because instead of watching the road I was reading the lyric sheet of what was, in retrospect, a very stupid song; totaling another car because I was in a marijuana haze and could not be bothered with picayune distractions such as stop signs and traffic lights; and vaulting to the apex of the automotive contingent of the rock n roll hall of fame by rear- ending a car while going 60 miles an hour on New York’s Belt Parkway. That last incident of automotive sodomy resulted in the destruction of my victim’s gas tank, torrents of gasoline spewing all over the highway, and the brief closure of that major transportation artery. I couldn’t help it; my tape deck was blasting “Going Mobile” by the Who.
Of course, if I were the only potential victim of my daredevil driving, that wouldn’t necessarily have been so terrible. Of course, I might die, but then I would be able to hang out with my heroes in Heaven, playing touch football with Jack and Bobby Kennedy, noshing on Kasha Varnishkas, kugel and kishka with Emma Goldman and Karl Marx, and crafting poetic couplets with Lord Byron himself.
However, I was not the only potential victim of my rowdy, ribald behavior. My actions could land many third persons in the hospital or the cemetery.
And this is the essential problem that Trumpers do not understand.
They proclaim the majesty of absolute freedom (While acting very unfree; witness a Trump rally, where they all chant the same slogans, such as “Lock her up,” in Stalinoid uniformity), but they don’t understand that American liberty never held that freedom should or could be absolute and unlimited.
If I lived on my own mountain, and I, on the summit of that mountain, wanted to decorate the mountain peaks with my own feces, throw balloons filled with my urine at imaginary enemies and have a fine old time behaving like a GOP Congressman in a padded cell, that would be fine and dandy. However, I live in a congested city with 8 million people.
For Christ’s sake, haven’t these loony people heard of the old adage that one man’s fist ends where another man’s nose begins. Or, if you consider yourself too good for old adages, haven’t you ever heard of the social contract, or the very basic notion that when a mass of people live together, in a society or a nation or any human aggregation, they all must make some sacrifices or concessions for one another. We all must wash ourselves lest we become a stinking, festering mess of lice. We all must part with some of our coins to treat the poor person with tuberculosis lest his tuberculosis eventually infect us. We all must aid the isolated, impoverished orphan lest his misery one day fuel his malevolence which will lead to our murder.
And we must all wear a mask because it is not simply a matter of you and your freedom since your exhalations, if they are covid-infested, may harm or murder your neighbor. And you must fucking roll up your goddamn sleeve and take a shot because every time covid multiplies there is a risk of yet another mutation, which leads to ever more virulent strains of the virus, until the viremic genome may be the veritable Golgotha of our civilization. Of course, my reference to Golgotha does not mean that I prophesize that we will all die. I mean that that which was good in our way of life will die as we will give up more and more freedoms, and endure more and more lockdowns, and scorching fevers, all because some people fancied being jabbed with a needle the height of tyranny.