The Democrats Need Street Fighters and Sewer Rats

The long, languishing history of fashionable liberal lassitude

By

David Gottfried

The New York Times just reported that Paul Weiss, an elite New York Law firm with sterling liberal bona fides, whose reputation glimmered and shimmered like Jackie Kennedy's jewelry at a luncheon with Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and other fashionable, feckless, liberals, just kissed Trump's smelly rear end and rolled over and played dead.

Although Paul Weiss had called on other progressive attorneys to join the “resistance” against Trump, Paul Weiss, who had portrayed itself as Bobby Kennedy going toe to toe against George Wallace, put on black face, sang “Dixie,” abandoned progressive projects and pledged to donate millions to Trump's favorite causes.

Also, we all saw lily-livered Chuck Schumer vote for the monstrous CR. And a week or two ago, the New York Times reported that ACT BLUE, the Premier fundraising tool of liberals and Democrats, is fraught with dissension and disputes and its fighting spirit has become delinquent.

This does not surprise me.

I first got a whiff of the problem — the domination of Democrats by affluent bicoastal elites who didn't give a fuck about concrete economic conflicts — on the eve of the 1980 election. While I was campaigning for the Democrats, an old Puerto Rican women said to me, “Who cares, the Democrats are rich too.”

And, MOST OF ALL, I will never forget the first day of freshman orientation at NYU law school, Wednesday, September 8, 1982.

Most of the speeches praised us and characterized we freshmen as charmed, brilliant, benevolent people unmarred by smugness or self interest.

And then one professor let it rip:

“85 percent of you portray yourselves as acolytes of Robert Kennedy whose heart belongs to “the starving masses,” and 85 percent of you get jobs in private enterprise where 90 percent of your work is done for corporations and very wealthy individuals.”

THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT IS ALL TOO OFTEN A CONGLOMERATION OF FASHIONABLE POSES, PROJECTED BY EGOCENTRIC DIVAS STRUGGLING TO CREATE AN AURA OF “COOL”

Let's face it. Liberal, leftist and “progressive” traits are very often nothing more than fashions used to simulate what one thinks will be a “cool” personality.

These so called momentous political commitments are borne, very often, of the silliest stuff of adolescence. I have known red hot Marxists whose so called profound politics was, in the beginning, the stuff of sojourns in suburban shopping malls.

From about 1969 to about 1974, every shopping mall, at least in the northeast, had dimly lit shops, scented with incense, decked out with “far out” Peter max posters, wild t shirts and cash registers manned by certifiable “hippies.” Some youngsters were so severely seduced by the paraphenalia of the left that in subsequent years and decades they always gave the left the benefit of the doubt.

Actually, Herbert Marcuse has explained how liberal ideas degenerate into silly liberal fashions in “One Dimensional Man” (1964). Let's take long hair on men:

IN the 50s, long hair was associated with beat poets and had a vaguely radical aura. BY 1970, long hair was associated with too cute phony rock stars like David Cassidy, and “unisex hair salons,” (the mecca for closet cases in the first half of the 70’s) would charge an arm and a leg to simulate David Cassidy’s luxurious locks on the most conservative corn bred dudes from”uncultured” middle America.

Also, and much more importantly, people got the meshugenah idea that having long hair, in and of itself, was tantamount to striking a blow for peace or progressive action. I don't think that people were daft enough to consciously contend that long hair was revolutionary, but I think that under the surface, in what is sometimes termed the “pre conscious,” such inane illogic abounds

Similarly, in 1977, punk rockers, allegedly, were raising hell with real ideological profundity. (When they veered toward explicit political ideas, they were downright idiotic. It's a pity. The Sex Pistols’ “God save the queen” has such an exhilarating beat it makes me want to throw bricks into windows. But the lyrics, contending that queen Elizabeth the second is a fascist, are insufferably stupid.) And punk rock’s vacuity and lobotomized air made it easy prey for commodification. By 1980, trendy stores on 8th street were selling ripped t shirts , bearing the word punk, for 375 dollars. Naturally, know-nothing nincompoop students sauntered through Greenwich village, in their au currant punk threads, so pleased to be disseminating a progressive gospel dedicated toward looking absolutely fabulous.

Of course, the very talented litigators who are combatting Trump’s venom are not childish simpletons immersed in inane things like punk.

Their ideas are valid. Their criticisms are right on the money.

However, their supporters, and their backgrounds, are too damn genteel, polite, whitebread and too damn obedient toward the law.

THE TRUMPERS MAKE ANTHONY SOPRANO LOOK LIKE SAINT FRANCIS.

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE ARSENIC (IF arsenic has a smell) Several reports in the press assert that Trump's foes have been threatened. A dem congressman from Cal, Eric Swalwell, was quoted in the ny times, about 10 days ago, as saying that some Republicans have been told that THEIR FAMILY MEMBERS WOULD BE HURT IF THEY DONT BOW TO TRUMP’S WHIMS.

Why are people pretending that Trump is legit. And I'm not going to detail the saga of his voluminous criminality because if you don't already know his record of crime and theft you are too fucking stupid to be allowed to vote. You should be made to march in a circle, until you collapse from exhaustion, shouting:

“Lock me up. I'm such a stupid ass that I thought America would become great again if we helped Russia fuck America, fired doctors who track ebola, Marburg, bird flu and other threats to America, fired meteorologists who track hurricanes and tornadoes because I'm an infant who thinks dying in a hurricane is romantic, and I think rfk Jr should run our nation's health because he has had such dissolute and depraved health habits that he has a dead worm decomposing in his brain (he publicly disclosed this)”

Although Trump's followers are so bereft of Grey matter that half of them seem eligible for admission to a mental hospital for the severely retarded, the big brass in the maga armies have all the intelligence needed to be the Godfather's goon squads.

Now I am not contending that we have to be goons too, but we must shed our ladylike cutesy courtesy and doofish decorum. We need to be like sewer rats.

We have all the intelligence we need. Indeed, we are so damn smart that most of the imbecilic fuckfaces in this country don't understand what we are saying

What democrats need: the yen and the zest to shove a knife deep into the hide of a maga parasite. (I better say I don't mean it literally or the cops may be pounding on my door)

In the wake of the tet offensive, Bobby Kennedy underscored the odiousness of our Vietnam policy by quoting an American officer who said, in regard to a village of 18,000, “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

I don't like to deviate from the moral clarion call of Robert Kennedy, but when dealing with the mafioso in the whitehouse, we must be prepared to be as vicious as Patton’s tanks destroying scores of German and Austrian villages a week.

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