Sarcastic Rhymes about Political People Who Get on My Nerves
By
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
By
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
By
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
By
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
By
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)
By
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.
Carrie, I am glad you liked the use of the word bissel.
Enjoyed your poetry. Loved that you used bissel.