Sarcastic Rhymes about Political People Who Get on My Nerves

Mar 17, 2022

David Gottfried

I thought I would give my readers a respite from my essays, which try to impart wisdom or what my detractors would call my carefully groomed and altered version of reality.

The veracity of a declarative sentence can always be questioned.

Most of the people who are writing about Ukraine and Russia are not there. They are writing hundreds or thousands of miles away from the action, and they are reading reports based on double and triple hearsay.

However, a rhyme can make one laugh, and alliteration can feel like a straight or a flush in poker, and metaphors are cognitive petit fours. So since you have had your meatloaf and mashed potatoes by reading my essays, you can now enjoy your verbal desert: A bunch of funny, sarcastic, snide poems about my political antagonists. This is desert, but the sugar is almost drowned out by the lemon zest.

I have had personal experiences with some of the following characters, and I have taken the liberty of inserting prefatory notes which recount the experiences and, in one case, non-violent altercation.

OUR GENTLEMENLY NEO CONSERVATIVES

David Gottfried

Preface:

THE DIRTY GOSSIP ABOUT NORMAN PODHORETZ: Norman was one of the first neo conservatives. From about 1969, when he wrote “Making It,” in which he excoriated “Taxi cab artists” and said that people should forget about trying to make a difference and just get a good salary, until he stopped writing, he said, in several articles and books, that he used to be friends with people like Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer but finally learned to become a fat and crass burgher with a fat wallet and a complacent, disinterested heart.

Norman used to be a liberal. Senator George Mc Govern offered an explanation for his political change: Mc Govern and Podhoretz were in a New York Watering hole or restaurant. Mc Govern commented on a woman sitting nearby, remarking that she was the ugliest woman he had seen in a long time. That woman was Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter. Podhoretz turned against Mc Govern and by extension the entire Democratic Left. Incidentally, Midge Decter (She called herself Decter to create the impression that she became a published author on her own) attained some small measure of fame when she wrote an article bemoaning what she considered the hordes of “disgusting” homosexuals and lesbians who frequented Fire Island, a beach community near New York City. But it’s understandable. As Mc Govern noted, she was a super ugly bitch so of course good-looking gay guys were her number one enemy.

This is the poem:

The red army did more for the Jews than every Hasid in Brooklyn.

And Podhoretz is a poison and a liar and a thief

They are talking in the campuses, chattering ignoramuses

Transmuting into fact their delusional belief

Woolfowitz never saw a wolf or heard a shot fired in anger

A nicely ivy pampered life of sweet Chablis and brie

Disraeli to Victoria, applauding all the regnant rich

He crafts a policy of imperial enmity

With minds so capacious, and homes gracious and quite spacious

They will entertain nothing but an idiot speck of spin

They are stalwart in conviction and have a predilection

To enlarge their Sadaam and make him Saladin

They’re elated that the nation, soporific and sedated

Has berated and deflated every inkling of a thought

And from this barren brain, mentally wholly lame

They have pruned and marooned any meaningful retort

Dainty, enervated, on divans they will have fainted

At belated realization that they’ve lost their sordid war

The world at large is heaving; the U.S. it is besieging

I behold the sizzling riots of a thrashing Thermador

GET THIS STRAIGHT: GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB IS PUBLISHED ONLY BECAUSE SHE’S IRVING KRISTOL’S WIFE

David Gottfried

Preface:

The inside story of Gertrude Himmelfarb: She was married to Irving Kristol. She chose the name Himmelfarb to create the impression that she got published on her own, when in fact she was pulled across the finish line with her husband’s coattails. She wrote a book in the mid 1990’s that expressed nostalgia and longing for the poor houses and the misery chronicled by Charles Dickens. I think the title of her book was something like “Victorian Virtues.”

She hailed the Victorian era because poor and oppressed people had the good sense to think of themselves as human toadstools. They had lots of guilt, and Himmelfarb, playing the part of the vindictive Jewish momma from Hell, thought bad boys and girls required very severe spankings ASAP.

She thought it was mighty fine that unwed Mothers were treated like excrement, and if their babies suffered as a consequence, that was the sort of collateral damage we should accept.

Here’s to you, Gertie:

Himmelfarb, Himmelfarb flies back in time

To teacups and colonies and England sublime

When everyone's verse was all tidy in rhyme

And on Sunday morn' all church bells did chime

But Himmelfarb, Himmelfarb, knows not the poor

She dreams of balls, titles and great gowns galore

And when an urchin dares knock at her door

She tartly exclaims what a messy eyesore

And Himmelfarb, Himmelfarb averts her gaze

Forgetting the soot and industrial haze

The meanness, the misers of a miserable maze

The dark and defeated of the capitalist craze

So Himmelfarb, Himmelfarb polishes the crystal

Seeing visions of splendor in slum-ridden Bristol

She won't stop pretending, not evening a bissel *

Then again, let's remember, she's wed to Irv Kristol

*(Bissel is a Yiddish word meaning little.)

I'M HIMMELFARB-HAVERSHAM OF CHARLES DICKENS MY DEAR

David Gottfried

I know nothing of the times of the day or the days of the year

I'm Himmelfarb-Haversham of Charles Dickens my dear

Join me on a broom stick to old London without fear

I'll be Mr. Newt's haughty hag of a seer

I'll wear grand clothes and take tea with the queen

And together we'll bitch, venting blue-blooded spleen

About the East End such a dastardly scene

Those riotous workers who we love to demean

And while we drink tea with our pinkies extended

And praise Herbert Spencer (Footnote 1) so well-recommended

Our system of class so staunchly defended

All of India unwillingly appended

We'll flick our ashes on the downtrodden poor

And step on wretched beggars groveling on the floor

We'll busy ourselves with fine galas galore

And sympathy and love we'll simply deplore

SUSAN SONTAG, NEW YORK’S BLOOMINGDALE'S INTELLECTUAL

David Gottfried

Preface:

Most of the people who profess to like Sontag never read her or anything about her. They just saw brief, breezy pages in “New York” magazine and other pseudo intellectual abominations which told them that she was a really chic and formidable bitch, and the New York glitterati is as in love with bitchery and witchery as a queen averaging three hours of Bette Davis movies per night. Hence, I call her a Bloomingdale’s intellectual. Of course, this appellation is really a bit of a steal from Lillian Hellman who said that the New York of her day suffered from too many “Broadway intellectuals."

In 1981, Sontag gave a talk at Workmen’s Circle (A left, Jewish organization) dedicated to the proposition that the gay rights movement should easily blend in with progressive Jews.

I begged to disagree, and I reminded her that her prior works posited a chasm between Judaism and Homosexuality. At the Workmen’s Circle forum, I noted that in “Notes on Camp,” Sontag said that Modern, Urban America was split between two contradictory ways of viewing the world: A) Jewish Moral Seriousness v. B) the Campy sensibility. For example, suppose a museum obtained a torture device from the Middle Ages. Those people beholden to Jewish Moral Seriousness would lament the auto da fe and the heretics beheaded by the Church of Rome. The campy crowd, by contrast, might discuss how the torture device might enliven a sado masochistic sexual orgy.

Sontag was not able to rebut my comment, and she awkwardly murmured that “Notes on Camp” had been written “a long time ago.” The audience was ready to put me in a torture device of their virulent imagination. They were appalled, utterly appalled, that I had the audacity and effrontery to challenge the star-studded incontestable Jewish American Princess of Queer Jewish Letters, her majesty Susan Sontag. Lesbians were heaving and harrumphing and shoving so much junk food into their throats it seemed clear they were about to bust their dirty Levis. Homosexuals in Jordache jeans (Jordache was the reigning Diva of Designer Jeans in those days) thought I was the male equivalent of Jezebel.

In any event, this one’s for you, Susie:

She leaped into the room

With genius she’d presume

Her ego was her groom

A braggart in full bloom

Her hair was frosted, grave

Her voice was poised, thought brave

She’d lead us from the cave

On a road she’d deign to pave

In the sixties she steered left

At fashion’s chic request

She’d drink Chablis with zest

Superlatives surpassed the rest

She claimed illness wasn’t metaphor

But called the white race cancer

With a febrile verbal score

She was a lie’s enticer

And then in Nineteen Eighty-One

She made a sharp turn right

Mr. Reagan had just won

And revolution seemed trite

And so in New York’s Town Hall

She said causes were passé

A loud political brawl

One should never dare display

She said it’s time one did one’s work

The stuff that’s monied and mean

Idealism was berserk

It’s time to make the trading scene

And New York got lots of latte stores

And rents rose like helium

We multitasked at lots of chores

Consigned to capitalist tedium

And when Serbia was attacked

She showed her enmity

In Sarajevo she staunchly backed

The Nazis’ progeny

And so now that she is dead and gone

The truth we must exhume

She spoke like an Oxford don

But rode a witch’s broom

DON'T BELIEVE ANYTHING JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (Footnote 1) AND QUICHEY LIBERALS SAY -- CLASS WAR IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN NEW YORK CITY CIVIL COURT

(Written after Judge Grayshaw rendered a decision from the bench, without bothering to read a single sentence of my 18-page memorandum of Law which cited about 20 cases which buttressed my position)

David Gottfried

Whom will you evict today Judge Grayshaw

Robed and feeling righteous your ugly paw

Will sign an Order notwithstanding the Law

Dispensing justice, ribald, rough and raw

And how much do the landlords pay

To keep you in their pocket every day

And what can a pauper pray or say

As your eyes glare like a satanic ray

And how do you fair in your palatial abode

I'm sure it is roachless and a la mode

Aloof at the end of an august road

With primping parapets that forbode

And strut and snicker and point below

To those whose lives are ridden with woe

And haughtily howl they won't overthrow

Gluttons of gold with a menacing glow

IT'S THRILLING, IT'S THRILLING, THERE IS ANOTHER TRILLING

Preface:

Lionel Trilling was a Jewish guy who taught English at Columbia University. He was the personification of bourgeois liberalism and a man who seemed to lead a crimped and cramped life. His Wife, Diana, was a run of the mill castrating Harridan from Hell. She was a sharp critic of the New Left, and I became almost physically sick when I read her tract, “We Must March My Darlings.” She displayed the bigotry of Archie Bunker, heated to a frenzy with the hysteria of Edith Bunker, contending that when Columbia students rebelled in 1968, she feared that blacks from Harlem would slit the throats of white professors. Her remarks about homosexuals, contained in an essay entitled “Our Uncomplaining Homosexuals,” were really strange and, needless to say, bigoted. She discussed various homosexuals, with whom she had nothing but the most shallow of relationships, said that they didn’t complain and concluded that homosexuals had no right to complain because her pet homos did not complain to her. In this essay, she talked like this: “I know a homo, and he does my hair, and he’s a very nice fruit, so why can’t all queers be good little fruits and do my hair.” Why was this published ? Because her husband was Lionel Trilling.

This is for you Bitch Diana:

It's thrilling, it's thrilling, there is another Trilling

Her name's Diana and she's meek Lionel's wife

A lioness, a loudmouth, licentiously she's swilling

Bourbon, by the bucket, and contemplating strife

That cabal, of commies, in Columbia so willing

To disrupt and corrupt a civilized, sweet life

Of gardened, partied, prickly prose instilling

An aristocratic posture, cutting like a knife

She glares, and flares, at the rebels' top billing

The student dissidents, bursting, beaming, blithe

It's clear, their politics, is making quite a killing

Turning staid ivy halls into rallies downright rife

Sorely shocked, Diana defrocks the “Maoists” who are milling

In the dorms, with lower forms, where the pot-smoking’s rife

She exclaims, with great disdain, why are these slobs not marching

To a military beat replete with drums and fife

Sent to savage and ravage in a jungle, toxic teeming

Vietnam, after the prom, for a blue-collar life

Diana bitches, like a witch, that those boys were always erring

Should have bellowed "tally ho" and killed red wildlife

We weren't nice, mincing mice, Hegels for Hubert Humphrey

Exalting all the wars like obedient German Boors

We believed, were not deceived, and were vehemently free

You may kvetch, like a wretch, but our surging spirit soars

---------------

Footnote 1: Herbert Spencer was a social Darwinist. Just as Darwin talked of the survival of the fittest, Spencer thought that only the economically fittest should survive. If A was richer than B, it was because A had finer progenitors and A should live and have children; B would be better off dropping dead. Consequently, he was opposed to charity since it was best if poor people simply died off. When he visited New York, his supporters hailed him with celebrations galore in which they smoked tobacco by rolling it in one hundred dollar bills to demonstrate that they were loaded and could not care less about the unfortunate. He visited New York in, I think, the era of the Titanic.

Footnote 2: In “The Affluent Society,” circa 1957, Galbraith said that America had solved the problems of production and scarcity, that the country for the most part had all the food, goods and services that it needed and that now we had to devote ourselves to problems like advertising and boring shit like curing the aesthetic blemishes of capitalism, yada, yada, yada. This Galbraithian garbage was gloriously shot to hell by two things that ushered in the 60’s: The documentary “Harvest of Shame,” which portrayed the persecution of migrant farm workers in this country, and Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” a revelatory book which showed America that in some parts of the country 1962 still felt like 1932.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

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