Progressives Must do Much More than Get Rid of Trumpers and Republicans
(The Emasculating Monstrosity that is Bourgeois Liberalism)
Progressives Must do Much More than Get Rid of Trumpers and Republicans
(The Emasculating Monstrosity that is Bourgeois Liberalism)
By
David Gottfried
(You may wish to bypass the first 109 seconds of this video as the beginning may seem maudlin or drippy.)
Trump and the Republican party are getting more odious by the moment. Unfortunately, sometimes that makes us become too nostalgic for the time when Democratic rule was incontestable. Very simply, search as you may you will never find an era when the democratic donkey gave us anything approaching Nirvana. Although the party’s mascot is the lowly and egalitarian ass, it’s eyes always glittered for diamonds and pearls.
There is a form of vegetation that must be uprooted and destroyed. Some people, euphemistically, will call it shrubbery. The poor people who suffer the thickets of this plague of plant-life will liken it to the hedgerows that almost stopped the allies from advancing beyond Normandy or the extremely dense vegetation that made GIs traverse Vietnam’s jungle floor at no more than a tenth of a mile in one hour’s time.
The thicket of pestilent plant-life I am talking about is the welter of government programs that purport to help the poor but truly hurt the poor. These programs are supposedly like plants that provide food, shelter one from the burning rays of the sun and provide decorous images to soothe or enliven our senses. However, these programs are like those plants that arrest your ambulation by ensnaring you in branches and tropical grasses that are taller than you.
Our liberal programs are the bounty of the overly esteemed welfare state. The welfare state is bourgeois liberalism’s gift to the poor. It is the gift that was invented by sneering, strutting supercilious dukes and dowagers on Park Avenue. It is a gift that one might give to a puppy who has just been spayed. It is a collar and a leash. It is why many poor people vote Republican.
Let me tell you how our benevolent welfare state kills people. I knew an indigent AIDS patient who was hospitalized from March 1994 until June 1994. While hospitalized, he was in the process of losing his apartment. While he was in the hospital, he had asked GMHC, aka the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, to post an ad, in their newsletter, indicating that he sought an apartment. He had asked that they post the ad in its March newsletter, its April newsletter and its May newsletter. Each month, GMHC forgot to post the ad. His ad was never posted.
Why did GMHC forget to post the ad for three consecutive months? It’s because of the first rule of philanthropic, social service work designed to help poor, fucked-up people who enable us to feel so superior:
Rule 1: Since I am such a wonderful, darling liberal, wasting my time helping fuck-ups like black people or gay people or disturbed people or people who are all alone, I am entitled to do my job in a thoroughly disorganized, negligent and fucked- up fashion.
Accordingly, when he was released from the hospital in June of 1994, he had to get an apartment immediately. He went to DAS, the department within NYC’s welfare dept that “attended” to the needs of AIDS patients.
The City of New York, as one might expect, did everything it could to hasten his death. First, he was told to go to the office on 14th Street, the office on 14th Street told him to go to the office on 34th street, the office on 34th street told him to go to the office on 30th Street and he was directed to about a dozen miserable offices after that.
Crotchety little bastards who think Joseph Biden is progressive because he has a “D” next to his name will contend that the aforementioned AIDS patient should have welcomed the exercise inherent in touring all of Manhattan’s welfare offices after having spent three months in the hospital on his back. However, this patient was emaciated, had zero T 4 cells (normal is 1000 per cubic millimeter of blood), had the beginning of a CMV infection of the eye (This requires INTRA-OCULAR ANTI-VIRAL INJECTIONS, OR NEEDLES INTO YOUR GODDAMN EYE BALL) and, in NYC, in June of 1994, we had a heat wave and for a couple or a few days the mercury hovered around 100 degrees. (And 100 degrees in NYC is like 85 degrees in the prairie states because we are so much more humid)
He wondered around NYC, in June 1994, like one of the Hebrew Slaves wondering through the Sinai peninsula after their exodus from Egypt. A couple of days before Yom Kippur (He was not Jewish), in September 1994, he died.
The welfare state’s ambit of errors is so broad and all-encompassing that it’s rather hard to know where to begin in attempting to chronicle its sins.
Let’s stick with housing and evictions for a moment:
In New York City, welfare will often pay a portion of a client’s rent check. Welfare simply transmits the money to the landlord. However, welfare, in its infinite negligence, or deliberate sadism, does not give the client any evidence or documents showing that it, welfare, sent money to the landlord.
The welfare client does not have any evidence that welfare’s portion of the rent had been paid.
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What ensues?
1. The landlord will bring a suit for eviction.
2. The tenant will run to welfare
3. Welfare will pay the Landlord a second time.
4. Welfare will institute what it calls “recoupment against its client.” Since welfare has paid a second time (because the landlord lied about not getting paid and because welfare, like the whole of government, bends over to take it up the ass from business), it will deduct payments to its client for necessities. So instead of having 100 dollars of spending money per month, the welfare client now has only 50 dollars per month
5. Welfare has effectively helped the Landlord by paying him twice and hurt the poor person, who has less to live on.
6. Meanwhile, the phony liberal media (which is really quite conservative because it understates and camouflages the persecution of the poor) creates the impression that welfare is a vast coddling bureaucracy letting poor people live high on the hog.
This supposedly indulgent welfare state did not increase the budget for AIDS patients, in New York City, by one nickel through the regimes of Fuhrer Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, David-pass-me-a-doobie Dinkins, Bulbous barbarous Blumberg, Il Duce Guiliani, and tacky pacman, Pataki. To my knowledge the budget was absolutely constant from 1989 until after Bill De Blasio became Mayor in January 2014. (De Blasio was perhaps the first politician, in New York, since Bobby Kennedy to care about poor people. And that’s why the media bad-mouthed him throughout his term.) More specifically, the Division of AIDs Services of New York City decreed from 1989, until 2014, that an AIDS patient, after his rent was paid for, was to have no more than 330 dollars per month for anything he might need, including utilities, transportation, food (food stamps is not enough unless you believe in subsisting on Ramen soup), clothes, orthotics, OTC medicines (aspirin, antihistamines, decongestants, bandages, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide and VITAMINS) etc. Needless to say, in this thieving, whoring city, where rancid milk is sold for six dollars a gallon, there is not a dime for cable TV, a book, a movie, a snack in a restaurant.
Of course, this poverty-stricken lifestyle is not exactly conducive to robust health. Therefore, very often poor people get sick and must avail themselves of what the media encourages you to believe is a wondrous array of health care services gushing with health and good cheer like gurgling brooks in the Garden of Eden.
Forget about the Garden of Eden. It’s more like medical care in a war zone.
Of course, it’s only medicine in a war zone for some people. It depends on where you rank in NEW YORK’S CLASS-BASED APARTHEID IN THE RENDITION OF MEDICAL SERVICES.
In 1963, or about 3 years before the enactment of Medicaid, The City of New York entered into agreements with its teaching hospitals.
New York City was and is famous for its magnificent teaching hospitals where brilliant professors teach young doctors. If you are being treated by a professor, your care is more often than not flawless and soon enough you will once again be playing polo like the society snots who are given deluxe care. (Some of these hospitals treat Arab royalty and they have been known to commandeer vast sections of the hospital which cater to all of their extravagant demands, such as the slaughter and roasting of a live goat in one of the hospital wards)
In any event, the teaching hospitals and New York City agreed, in 1963, as follows:
A) New York City’s teaching hospitals would treat New York’s poor patients for free
B) The doctors in training, in these hospitals, would be given a ready supply of guinea pig patients to practice on, the poor people of New York City.
Of course. the student doctors are supervised by the illustrious doctors who teach in New York Teaching Hospitals. But how close is the supervision. Of course, it’s variable. And sometimes it is practically negligible.
I have seen patients saved from the worst illnesses by doting teams of brilliant and compassionate doctors. And I have seen patients bloodied and scarred and debilitated for life by patent malpractice.
There are many other ways, in medicine and housing, and in many other fields, in which bourgeois liberalism evinces tis contempt for poor people. I invite the reader to meditate on this issue. For starters, think back to your school days. Remember the way the teachers used to speak to black students, with that unctuous, phony sugary voice that suggested that the teacher held the student in high esteem. My Mother was a teacher. She spoke to her black students as if they were Einstein risen from the grave. And then she came home and said they were stupid niggers. Also, I cannot help but remember my maternal uncle, a doctor. A woman gave him a gigantic doll for his daughter to show her appreciation for his supposedly good medical care. As soon as her face was turned, my uncle said that she was a poor, stupid fool. Yeah, she was a fool. She was a fool for ever liking or trusting my uncle the doctor.