On the Burst of Leftist Outrage Occasioned by the George Floyd case: Beware the Tribulations of the Next Few Years
By
David Gottfried
At this juncture, it appears that the prosecution is doing a commendable job of demonstrating the culpability of Derek Chauvin. That is all to the good: That killer-cop deserves unswervingly severe punishment.
This case, in conjunction with disgust for the reign of anti-democratic Trump, severe and growing income inequality, anger at the attempt by Neanderthal Republicans to restrict the right to vote and the natural rhythms of political change (Arthur Schlesinger opined that every thirty years or so America goes through a period of progressive change; according to his cycle, the change is long overdue), suggests that the walls of Jericho will come tumbling down in a new tidal wave of leftist change.
As an inveterate leftist, I am a bit thrilled. However, in the wail of every police siren, I hear the bellows and barks of crowds clamoring not for mere change but for revenge.
I am wary of the excesses we can almost certainly expect. In a word, people who have been oppressed are often not the darlings that liberals imagine them to be. In the liberal imagination, the poor are adorable poster boys for poverty. The truth, however, is often a very ugly sight.
Don’t get me wrong: To be oppressed and to be persecuted hurts like hell. I know. But there is something liberals forget: The oppressed person, in the course of being liberated, doesn’t want to merely savor freedom; he wants to give his tormentors black eyes.
Black people have been severely wounded by white racism. I do not believe they want to sit around a campfire and sing kumbaya. Some of them probably want to beat white people to a bloody pulp.
I see some of this happening in New York as we speak. The police will not crack down on people not wearing masks on the subways, and maskless drunks walk right into passengers’ faces demanding money, because some black politicos believe that police intervention means police brutality. My barber was threatened by black hoods the other day, and it took over an hour for the police to come to his place of business.
Very simply, I will never forget growing up in Brooklyn, New York in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Cohesive inexpensive neighborhoods of working class white ethnics (Jews, Irish and Italian Roman Catholics) were inundated with street crime, filth and rats.
In 1971, I had a severe vehicular collision (a NYC buss may have gone over my leg) and I spent close to a month in a NYC hospital. This was the hey day of the black power movement, and I literally cringed in fear in Coney Island Hospital. Upon leaving the ER and being sent to a ward, the doctor told me that the circulation in my lower right leg had to be checked very frequently (I don’t remember if he dictated every 20 minutes or every two hours). Upon arriving at the ward, I told a nurse that she had to check my circulation very frequently. The nurse, a black female classic – fat, loud, bossy, and dressed like Flip Wilson (a black comic who impersonated black women), but not as hot as Flip Wilson – shouted, “I ain’t gonna being doing that.” (She shouted at me less than an hour after I had learned that my leg might have to be amputated because the crushing wound might impede blood flow.) Another black nurse used to sit down near my bed at the end of her shift to shoot the breeze. She chain-smoked cigarettes, made me cough and told me hospital stories which always went like this, “We once had a boy like you, I don’t think he ever did walk again.” For some reason, I never understood – it might have been poor insurance or plain old sadism – I spent a week on an old folks’ ward after the acute phase of the accident. I was 14, and the second youngest person on the ward was 66. The nurses seemed to get their cheap thrills by menacing the largely Jewish geriatrics. They mocked the incontinent patients who pissed their bed, mocked their catheters, and in the psychic haze prompted by Demerol, I imagined that the nurses were enormous rats who had come from the sewer.
A few years later, my grandmother went to a nursing home. Perhaps, it was one of those nursing homes owned by Bernard Bergman, a miserable Jew who owned a bunch of filthy miserable homes where he warehoused his largely Jewish old folks. The day she was admitted, she was able to walk. Within a week, she was unable to walk and bore black and blue marks. (She was senile and said “Shvatza” in front of her black nurses)
(The Moral of the Story: If you get desperately ill and you don’t have money and a loving family to protect you, don’t spend your dying days letting a hospital get 5 grand a day from Medicare for mutilating your body and mind: Get plenty of groovy drugs, stock up on great movies and music, and go home and die on your own terms.)
But enough about blacks. This problem is ubiquitous. I believe that liberation is never a pretty thing. When a man is freed from bondage, he wants to whip the master who had chained him.
We can, perhaps, see this in the women’s movement. In 1994, many men witnessed, on the news, film footage of women cheering Lorena Bobbit, a woman who had cut-off her husband’s penis and thrown the member in a field. The feminist movement had told women to embrace their hatred of domineering men, and this probably inflated their hatred and made them bitches on wheels. (In any event, a few months later, the Democrats were shellacked in the off-year elections. This reminds me of something Norman Podhoretz said in “Breaking Ranks”: Politics is often influenced and shaped by emotional currents supposedly extraneous to politics. Podhoretz said the politics of the 60’s were to an extent shaped by the rebellious currents ignited by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Similarly, the sight of women cheering Lorena Bobbit made many men furious at feminists and Democrats. My ex law partner said that he would vote, for the very first time, Republican.)
Of course, we also see feminist revenge in the psychotropic poisoning of young boys with medications to combat their alleged hyperactivity (often just boyish vigor), the adoption of rules that enable schools to expel male students for allegedly “harassing” females without giving males the right to cross examine their accusers (Trump reversed these rules; I am sure Biden will reinstate this garbage), the proliferation of campuses where up to sixty percent of the students are female because so many guys are flunking out, female ownership of sixty percent of personal wealth in the United States and the upshot which is that no matter how many concessions they are given, the louder and more menacing their demands become.
This dynamic is also evident in the Mid East. In the seventies and eighties, Israel gave up the Sinai peninsula, and more recently Israel gave up the Gaza strip. Before leaving the Gaza strip, Israel installed green houses to enable the local Arabs to grow lucrative cash crops. Did the Arabs show any gratitude to the Israelis ? Did they show any increased willingness to consider peace ? What silly questions. When the Jews withdrew, the Arabs smelt blood and licked their lips, and Israel was frequently bombed by missiles installed in Gaza and able to go deeper and deeper into Israel. Similarly, when Israel withdrew from their positions in Lebanon south of the Litani River, Hezbollah filled-up the terrain with thousands of missiles which rained destruction on half of Israel. Things are a bit quieter now, but that’s because the Jews and the Arabs are united in their fear and enmity of Iran. Of course, most of the silly and stupid “left” thought that the all the problems in the MidEast were caused by Big Bad Israel as their empty minds knew nothing of the enduring and ancient conflicts between Arabs and Persians, Sunni and Shiite.
I don’t relish the use of cliches, but one cliché says it all: Give him an inch and he’ll take your life.