The Allure and Majesty of Violence

(The Trumpians Wage Holy Hell on Capital Hill)

The Allure and Majesty of Violence

(The Trumpians Wage Holy Hell on Capitol Hill)

By

David Gottfried

“I love the Sound of Breaking Glass”

Nick Lowe

“The Civil War, and the foreign one, have murdered liberalism in its official robes”

Andrew Kopkind, The New York Review of Books, 1967

“Hey, think the time is right for a palace revolution”

Mick Jagger/Keith Richards 1968

“To slice the poisoned heart of a judge and a priest

To storm a castle’s ramparts and make a king deceased”

                                                     David Gottfried

I have always had a contrarian streak.  When I was young, and grew up in the most conservative neighborhood in proletarian Brooklyn, New York, I was in love with radicalism.  Nowadays, I live in Manhattan, and I am surrounded by radicals, by people who are bluer than a persnickety aging lady with blue hair who subscribes to the Parisian motto “Think Left but live right.” And these precious liberals prick my sense of decency like a porcupine and push me further and further to the right.

I hate Donald Trump, and I think his supporters are utterly deluded pea brains.   However, for some reason, I really got a kick out of the storming of the capital by the Trumpians.   (I am listening to the TV as I write this, and I heard drippy, dreary Joe Biden lament that this is an insurrection.  Ah, but to me “insurrection” is such a beautiful word.) 

Very simply, I hate the way things are, and I welcome disorder.  I welcome disorder because if there is anarchy and madness the rich will suffer much, much more than the poor. And G-d do I want the rich to suffer.

Of course, the conventional wisdom tells us that Democrats and Liberals care more about the poor.  And I certainly understand that Trump’s major domestic policy consisted of giving the super rich everything they wanted, from huge tax breaks, to laxer environmental regulations, to the restriction of a worker’s right to time and half for overtime and to a million other things our brain-dead media, right and left, never discuss.

I guess I am so appalled and enraged by so many liberals because they purport to care about the poor but really favor the rich.   For example, although Republican Senator Grassley of Kansas thought hedge fund managers were unduly favored by a tax provision that allows their employment income to be treated as capital gains income,  it was none other than Senator Schumer who repeatedly come to the rescue of hedge fund managers.   Just as it was Bill Clinton who okayed the demise of the Glass Steagall Act, who decreed that derivatives would not be regulated, who gave the networks a 70 billion giveaway in connection with the transition to HDTV and who accelerated the transfer of money, from the poor to the rich, inaugurated by Empress Nancy Reagan.

The Democratic Party has adopted the regressive and reactionary policies of the contemporary left which is one massive bogus left.

TODAY’S LEFT IS A BOGUS LEFT BECAUSE IT SEEKS TO ERADICATE THE GREATEST CONTRIBUTION OF LEFTIST THOUGHT TO POLITICAL AFFAIRS.

The left, at its very best, said that people should not be united on the basis of race and ethnicity.  Instead, they should be united on the basis of social class.   Poor workers of Germany and poor workers of France should not fight each other because their rich rulers have consigned them to the trenches.  Rather, they should all fight their rich rulers, end war and share the wealth.

This may have been pie in the sky but at least the objective was benevolent and fine.  

However, the left of today forgot all about class consciousness and let’s say it and not be bashful about it:   Class WAR.   Of course, many rank and file Democrats are wise to this, but the decayed and decadent leadership of the Democratic Party steadfastly refuses to get the message that working class people are ready to burst.   The leadership of the Democratic Party is wedded to racial and sexual identity as opposed to class identify.   The leadership of the Democratic Party is a boring, abhorrent, perversion of  progressive politics whose major objective is putting a “sufficient” number of women, blacks, transexuals and homosexuals in  positions of authority, congressional delegations, school rosters etc.  I am sure that in a dystopian day not too far away, some imbecilic democrat will tell us that the Supreme Court must have four men, four women and one hermaphrodite. 

And that’s where the Trumpian throwbacks to another era come in.  They are, by and large, white men.  And I can tell you that as a white man the left has, at times, made me positively apoplectic with a rage. 

Because I am white and male and Jewish, they will tell me that I have gluttonously partaken of the privilege accorded to white men.   And this irks me.  I sincerely believe that I have had more grief and heartbreak than the majority of black people who live in New York City.

You don’t have to be black to sing the blues.  You can have insane parents.  You can have muscular dystrophy.    Hell, being short is enough to do it as studies show that among men there is a positive correlation between height and income.  Give short men affirmative action.   Hell, I knew an utterly brilliant girl at NYU law school who couldn’t get a decent paying job as an attorney.  She was short and fat and had terrific acne.  Give fat girls with acne affirmative action.  

Of course, white people have treated black people hideously.   Sometimes, it appears that white police officers kill young black men for sport.  However, there is a crucial component in America’s racial conflict that liberals seem to miss and Republicans are too stupid to talk about:

JUST AS WHITES OFTEN PERSECUTE BLACKS, SOME BLACKS FIND THAT THE HIGH POINT OF THEIR DAY IS FUCKING UP A WHITE MAN’S LIFE.  

When I looked at the Trumpians at Capitol Hill, I knew what sort of people they were.  I was looking at down and out white men.  Because they were down and out white men, they often lived with blacks, or were subjected to blacks, and they learned to despise blacks.   But enough abstractions.  Let me introduce you to the world of poor white people:

WE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO DIFFERENT FACTS BUT WE DO HAVE DIAMETICALLY OPPOSED EXPERIENCES.

Rich white people might know blacks who are deferential waiters, courteous chauffeurs, and self-abasing maids.  These white people find it very easy to maintain a rosy image of blacks.

Poor white people may endure blacks in prisons, where they will be gang banged and one or more of those black men have AIDS.  Poor white people may endure blacks in mental hospitals, where black orderlies delight in torturing the maladjusted to make them more maladjusted.    Poor white people in nursing homes may endure all manner of bossy, brassy, bitchy fat mommas who lacerate their egos every chance they get.  When poor white people apply for welfare, they may endure case workers who shout, as loudly and as conspicuously as humanly possible, that they are poor white trash.

Meanwhile, the lords and ladies of MSNBC and CNN et al will tell us that every black person is as lovely as Sidney Portier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”  

And the aforementioned effete and dainty lords and ladies will tell us that if a black person does not excel economically it is because of poverty.  Perhaps rich liberal white pussies will believe that (I don’t mean to seem homophobic in using the term pussies.  Indeed, I am gay.  I am using the term pussies because a certain type of white liberal is a nauseating stereotype of a homosexual), but I won’t believe the hogwash that all black educational deficits are caused by poverty.  My Mother starved in the great depression, and she got the highest score in all of New York State on her high school history regents.  Actually, I remember reading in the New York Times, in 1984, a report which related that black academic lags had little to do with poverty.  According to the article, blacks from families of four with an income of $40,000.00 a year had the same SAT scores as whites from a family of four with an income of $4,000.00 a year.  So blacks had to make ten times as much as whites to score as high as whites on the SATs.  

Interestingly enough, the apostles of racial togetherness hold that the more blacks and whites interact with each other, the more they will come to love one another.   Actually, the evidence proves that the opposite is true.  For example, in the 1984 and 1988 primaries, Jesse Jackson got his best showings, among white voters, in those states where there were very few blacks.  For example, Jesse Jackson won lilly white Maine.   White people in Maine, not having Overdosed on certain aspects of black behavior, found it easier to entertain air brushed, prettified views of blacks.   By contrast, whites in liberal New York City by and large could not stand Jesse.

In the very last paragraph, I alluded to overdosing on black culture.  I realize that this sounds racist.  But at the risk of being called a racist, I am going to write it as I see it.   

MY DAMNING THESIS ON AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE

Before I state my damning thesis regarding black culture, I will state the incidents that gave rise to this thesis:

A) I am sitting in a movie theatre watching  “Malcolm X.”   The theatre was virtually all black.   No one could hear a word that the actors were saying because the crowd kept yelling and screaming, “Right on, ooh, give it to that sucker,” etc.  But the words spoken by the actors did not count.  The words did not count because Ideas did not matter.

B) I am reading the New York Times.  The article notes that a black girl, at a rally for a famous black South African leader, said the speaker was wonderful even though she did not hear a word he said.  The words did not matter because thought does not matter.

C) I am listening to music that is all rhythm and no melody.  Rhythm says the same thing again and again and again.  It is repetition and constancy.   Mental activity, by contrast, involves change.  In syllogistic reasoning, we combine a major premise and a minor premise and we divine a conclusion.  Thinking takes you from point A to  point B.   However rhythm is a rebuke to change.  Rhythm says that we don’t need anything new.  We can just repeat the same damn noises again and again.  Black music, by limiting the role of melody and enlarging the role of rhythm tends to stifle, shackle and suffocate intellectual growth.

In any event, black people are sometimes quite insistent in  declaiming that they have their own culture.  I heartily concur.  And I am sorry if this sounds racist, but I believe it is a culture that is hostile to intellectual inquiry and is as boring and banal as one hundred consecutive breakfasts consisting of lard, toast and eggs.  

WE DON’T WANT TO GO BACK TO NORMAL                                                                                    

For most “progressive” people, the era before Trump and Covid was a blessed time of normalcy.

Although I recognize that Trump has been a brutal beast, and that Covid has been an ecological nightmare, things were pretty damn flawed before they came along. 

Before Trump and Covid came along, we were subject to certainties which were oppressively never-ending.

We knew that the fraud that is the State of California might forever be a fraud.   It is supposed to be the most liberal state in the Nation, and it is one of the richest states in the nation.  And an enormous proportion of the population is homeless.  Ergo, let’s not beat around the bush:  The progressives of California are lying through their teeth when they say they care about the poor.

We know that the States of California and New York had a nasty habit of transferring Covid patients from hospitals to nursing homes because the inclusion of covid patients gave nursing homes more federal dollars, from Medicare and Medicaid, and made them solvent.  Never mind that this murdered hundreds of nursing home patients by accelerating contagion. 

We know that there are so many, many examples of oppression, that have nothing to do with race, which liberals are content to ignore. Discrimination statutes forbid firing on the basis of race. But a worker who is neither black, nor a women, nor a member of some other minority, nor protected by a union contract can be fired, as the highest court in New York put it, for a good reason, or a bad reason or for no reason at all. And he can be fired with ample notice, or short notice or with no notice at all. And this, and a million other things, completely evade the attention of the political discourse which only asks how many blacks were chosen, and did he touch her on a date 27 years ago, and did he say the n word, yada yada yada — Oh please, all of you, just die.

I can give you dozens of examples of liberal lies and bullshit.  I think you get the point. In any event, I enjoyed the turbulence of the Trump rioters because if law and order broke down, and if the ensuing violence would make the Dow nosedive, I would be quite delighted.