2024's Man of the Year, Mangione, Slayer of Insurance CEO Thompson

“The Civil War, and the Foreign One, have Murdered Bourgeois Liberalism in its Official Robes” -- Andrew Kopkind, “The New York Review of Books,” August 1967

By

David Gottfried

What a difference a few weeks makes.

A few weeks ago, the left was feeling puny and ready to perish as Donald Trump, the most grotesque presidential contender in American history, won the election. But just a few weeks later, so many Americans have rediscovered their leftist sensibilities as throngs of us cheer and laud our new Robinhood, our Ravachol, our Robespierre, our true-blue revolutionary, as red as a Ruby, as radical as Christ at the Sermon on the Mount, slicing through the news of the day like a bloody, brilliant sword.

Luigi Mangione, as hot and bothered and as undeniable as Sacco and Vanzetti, is a hot Latin lord who is the perfect antidote to our smug times. And by these smug times I am talking about a mood and an era in which dire conflict and urgent needs are laughed at with some ironic witticism that bourgeois boys in New York skyscrapers giggle about. (Camille Paglia, a radical feminist whose iconoclasm is so blunt she makes other radical feminists run away in fear, recently deplored our era for its la di da irony in which no one has the balls to take a stand.)

The Fiercest and Finest Rebels have sometimes sprung from the Ruling Class

Luigi came from wealth and promise and all things elite. He did not merely do well in school; he was valedictorian at a smashing private school whose student body was brilliant to begin with. Some naysayers and nincompoops will castigate him as just another rich guy who went radical and will perceive, in his betrayal of his class origins, some sort of emotional malady.

Ah, but those tiresome talking heads don’t remember their history. The greatest revolutionary of all times was a man who abandoned the clan he grew up in to free the people oppressed by his clan. I am speaking of Moses, who grew up in the Court of the Egyptian Pharaohs and who later freed Egypt’s Hebrew slaves.

(Some people will state that since Moses was Jewish to begin with, he did not leave one clan to lead another, but Freud, in "Moses and Monotheism,” makes a convincing case that Moses may have been an Egyptian who decided to lead and become a part of the Jewish people. Indeed, part of the biblical story seems to try so hard to make Moses appear Jewish that it doesn’t seem credible. For example, Freud said that the Egyptian princess who found Moses in the water named him “Moishe,” which means, in Hebrew, to draw out of the water. Freud bravely asks: Why would an Egyptian princess use Hebrew language to name Moses? )

Of course, less cataclysmic rebels also left the ruling class to give succor to poor people. FDR and the Kennedys are fine examples of this tendency.

When Democracy is Moribund, People Turn to Violence

Of course, some of you might argue that since Kennedy and FDR brought about progressive change without heeding the maxim that all power comes from the barrel of a gun, we should be content to write weary position papers and campaign speeches and pompous letters to the editor to effect change. Take it from me, someone who has written oodles of stuff: Most things are forever unread. Action speaks. Bullets speak. Speech is disregarded.

Also, today’s era is smugger, crasser and more needful of a bullet straight between the eyes that the heroic era of Roosevelt and Kennedy. For example, Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House through much of the middle of the 20^th Century, was picking cotton when he was five years old. When he went to Congress, Railroad Corporations offered him free transit on his frequent trips between Texas and Washington, D.C. This man, who was raised in utter, dire poverty, refused free fares. He thought it would be unethical. In those days, when people subscribed to higher ethical standards, democracy could work.

By contrast, today we have a Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, who takes goods and services worth many thousands of dollars from people who have cases before the Supreme Court. He never even reported these gifts. It was unearthed by the press.

Furthermore, years ago the rich were much better human beings. They believed in something known as Noblesse Oblige, the notion that the rich should give something back. This desire to contribute was so strong that in 1962, 25 percent of the graduates of Harvard went straight to the army even though most of them could have grabbed jobs on Wall Street or seats in the law schools and medicals school of their choice.

Nowadays, almost no college graduates think of joining the army. And they don’t bother about the Peace Corp, etc., either. Indeed, on the first day of my freshman orientation at NYU School of Law, Wednesday, September 8, 1982, one of our professors castigated the students as a bunch of hifalutin liars. He said that 80 percent of essays, sent to the admissions office, were piled high with promises to fight for the public interest and that 80 percent of NYU Law’s graduates got jobs that were not even close to anything which could be confused with the public interest.

Very simply, today most people, male and female, are DISGUSTING WHORES. Do you remember the deaths at Sandy hook elementary school in Connecticut; about 21 babies, aged 5, 6 and 7, were slaughtered. Shortly thereafter, Congress voted on a modest measure which would provide background checks to keep madmen away from guns. The measure was defeated. Why. Because congressmen and senators vote on the basis of campaign contributions and couldn’t care less about 5-year-olds getting shot. Why do you think the Senate, which is filled with Republicans who despise Donald Trump, will vote for most of Trump’s nominees for the cabinet ? Because their constituents are Trump suckers, and if they don’t vote for Trump’s nominees they will be booted out of the Senate. And keeping their cushy Senate job is more important than the health and safety of the American people.

In this miserable era, in which our legislatures are composed of silly boys and girls and are bereft of men and women who are willing to take a stand, nothing can get done. Since the political system is frozen and unworkable, we must consider violence as an option.

Of course, bloviating politicians, religious personalities (whose job it is to justify government), and other assorted riff raff purporting to be la crem de le cream will tell us that violence never solves anything. If they really believed it, they would disband the army and the police and tell their private security services that their help is no longer needed. In fact, violence is one of the most useful and expeditious ways of getting stuff done. Whether you are referring to the destruction of Hitler or the birth of the American nation, you are talking about events that were sired by slaughter.

Business, distilled to its essence, is a species of Fraud, sometimes commits murder and what goes around comes around

Finally, I should note that I am not a complete and unrestrained egalitarian. I don’t believe we should all earn the same amount. Some people, obviously, do so much more. Fine doctors and lawyers often save lives. A surgeon who extracts infected appendixes from patients with acute appendicitis, and thereby saves patients from the agony and death of septic shock, deserves stunning, resplendent luxury. An attorney who frees the innocent from jail deserves a house so vast and airy that it may simulate the spaciousness of heaven.

However, the great majority of rich people don’t do anything of transcendent value, or of even ordinary, shlocky value. The great majority of rich people become rich because they are expert practitioners of bullshit. They buy dreck (garbage, shit) for 20 dollars and they convince some poor shnook to buy it from them for 50 dollars. That is Adam Smith, Republican conservatism and much of American culture distilled to its ugly incontestable essence.

People who have made tons of money through this unsavory practice do not earn this money as their gains are akin to theft. They have made a ton of money by selling shit for good bucks, by subtly misrepresenting the truth, by scamming others. Indeed, it is very hard to distinguish businessmen from mobsters.

This subterfuge is amplified in the case of Insurance companies, and at my old law firm, which often represented insurance companies, a partner repeatedly joked that policies of insurance were illusory, intricately drafted engines of confiscation which inserted, into each and every provision, a tricky, beguiling rat of a problem which gnawed its way into a customer’s pocket and left him flat broke.

As Luigi said, insurance companies are mobsters. They are greed and theft prettified with the politesse of Groton or Providence. Left hooks transubstantiated into curt but polite letters of denial. The Sopranos making huge contributions to Columbia (or the right members of Congress) and all murders forgiven.