The Left Fails Not Because of its Ideas But Because of the Personalities of Its Leading Proponents
By
David Gottfried
My posts have struck all the notes on the political spectrum from the vermillion red of Leon Trotsky to the fecal colored hues of European fascists. (As a Jew, I am astonished and sickened by my occasional attacks of right-wing rage.)
I think it would be worthwhile If I were to try to determine what incites my attacks of rightist wrath. Perhaps, this will shed some light on the rise of right-wing rage in society at large. Of course, one should be wary of hasty extrapolations, and I should not prematurely conclude that what inflames my inner Ezra Pound is the same thing that drives the world at large to the right.
Sometimes, something akin to a savage ocean undertow pulls people to the right. Often, this is not because liberal ideas are wrong. Rather, the character of liberals seems so shabby and, more specifically, nauseatingly phony.
I felt this in earnest in 1999 when Hillary Clinton was interviewed about her widely anticipated announcement that she would run for the United States Senate. She said that she was going to conduct a “listening tour” of New York State to determine what the people in New York wanted from government.
I don’t know how she suppressed her natural inclination to crack up with hysterical laughter at having told one of the biggest political whoppers of the century, one ranking only slightly behind Hitler’s contention that the Communists set the Reichstag Fire.
Hillary pretended that she was little Miss sweetness and light and was interested in the thoughts of common shmucks like you and me. Of course, she couldn’t care less about our ideas. For example, when she was a Senator, she did not even care what fellow Senators of her own party thought. In a revealing report, the New York Times related that when Senator Feingold (A Democrat from Wisconsin who sadly was axed by the electorate), at a private meeting, brought up the issue of campaign finance reform, Hillary cut him off by saying, “Get Real,” as campaign finance reform was to Hillary airy fairy fluff. Quite clearly, ideals and convictions are not real and must be forgotten, except of course when we are running for office when the likes of blubbery Bill Clinton will talk about feeling someone else’s pain or Hillary will fabricate listening tours. The voters considered her a cross between a dominatrix and a frigid ice queen and hated her so much that even the orange- haired human orangutang Donald Trump beat her (Yeah, I know she got three million more votes that Mafia Don Donald Trump, but she had to be pretty damn terrible to beat super shit head Trump by only three million votes – either she is really that terrible or half of America should be given remedial training for the mentally retarded.)
More importantly, Hillary’s fabricated respect for our intelligence and our views, betrayed by her comment that she wanted to conduct a listening tour, reflects the attitudes of most la di dah liberals.
For example, I had a Dominican friend, who looks like a very dark-skinned African American, whose teachers, in the New York City Public Schools and in the State University of New York, routinely told him that his work was good and that he was smart. After four years of college, he thought the American Great Depression occurred in the 1950’s, and he could not define the words “adjective” and “adverb” -- and he was an English major. He jobs since college have been low wage jobs that didn’t lead anywhere.
He suffered what many black students suffer from in school: While liberal pussy teachers. The teachers were unfailingly polite. The teachers complimented him assiduously and excessively. The teachers gave him the deference they would have accorded their superiors on the faculty. And the teachers ran whenever he approached, because even those consummate liars realize that their capacity to be disingenuous can start to wear thin.
If my friend had had a teacher who had cared, that teacher would have gotten angry, read the riot act and in such discipline and disfavor one can glimpse real love. Man, if you really believe that these kids can learn, you have to get down into the gutter with them, twist their arms, mentally beat them up and by the grace of G-d a mind will be born.
And do you really have to wonder why even some black people are beginning to believe that the pedagogy of Clarence Thomas’s Father, who believed in thrashing a child to make him do his chores, might be preferable to namby, pamby pussified liberalism.
(And, by the way, if you think that my constant use of the word pussy reeks of macho contempt for women, you ought to know that even those people who are supposedly the biggest champions of an assault on macho are really in love with male chauvinism.
For example, gay men supposedly deride, detest and seek to debase patriarchal power, but gay men, in large numbers, really want to get on their knees and worship a macho Daddy. If you don’t believe me, just survey some gay porn or visit a gay bar. The same thing can be found among lesbians:
When I was young, I was, for want of a better term, a “Dike Daddy.” Lesbians loved my looks, lauded my logic, bought me drinks and wanted to bear my children. (Apparently my stately English sarcasm and sagacity made them imagine that I was Virginia Woolf with a big dick.)
Sometimes I shared bed chambers with lesbians. I remember that when one lesbian used her strap-on dildo to fuck another lesbian, her voice took on the tones and vocabulary of Anthony Soprano or John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever as she would grunt and growl, “take it you fucking bitch, take my big dick up your fucking pussy, etc.”)
Of course, teachers, and other dopey liberals, really believe that everybody will get ahead, if you put a liberal democrat in charge of the nation, and so they have coined other dopey slogans to emphasize their commitment to equality, yada yada yada.
For example, I have been hearing, with increasing and nauseating regularity, phrases to effect that we will not leave anyone behind, or no one will be left behind, etc. Of course, they are fucking lying through their teeth (Of course “lying through their teeth” is a cliché, but almost everything said on MSNBC and CNN are nothing but a succession of soporific cliches, and they make plenty of money, so why the fuck should I try to write well.)
Education is designed to leave people behind. Of course, one of its roles is education. However, since the inception of the public schools in Europe and America, educators agreed that schools had a second function which was just as important as education.
That second function was tracking and manning the economy. Since people with IQs of 85 would not make good doctors, the purpose of school was to test and to track and to finally sequester the academic laggards in a dull and drab existence away from those students who were meant to be stellar sons of science.
Actually, the whole of capitalism is about leaving people behind. If your product is not good, your firm can go bankrupt and you can go hang yourself, for all Hillary Clinton and her “listening tours” are concerned. If you are not able to get a job, you can live miserably and pitifully, suffering the drastically reduced dole that became the law of the land when a Democrat, his lying, cheating eminence Blubbery bubba Billy Clinton was President.
(Man, I hate Bill Clinton almost as much as Christopher Hitchens did. I once wrote this little poem about Billy Butt Boy Clinton after it was reported, in the late 1990’. that he injured a tendon while playing tennis:
All the tendons in Clinton playing tennis
Like the tinsel on a trumpet for a present
Will quiver and quake
And suddenly break
He's the antithesis of cement
Without the fortitude of farina
All ferment utterly flaccid
He has not a spine
To stout whiskey wine
We imbibe and feel rather placid
When he speaks you smell the ribs
Of Lyndon Johnson's barbeques
With the hint
Of sickly mint
And Gomer Pyles pot liquor stews
David Gottfied, copyright, 1997)
The preceding poem underscores another feature of liberals that we fucking can’t stand: They are micey little half men who will never fight for what they believe. Of course, Bernie Sanders will fight. Bobby Kennedy would fight with the goodness of an angel and the savageness of a sewer rat. The sort of liberals I am taking about are the corporatist, conniving liberals who went to school to learn to speak in jargon-laden gobley gook, who learned to behave like the conformists of the fifties which an earlier left (Paul Goodman in “Growing Up Absurd,” Norman Mailer in “Advertisements for Myself,” Allen Ginsburg in “Kaddish,” John Lennon in “Nowhere man,”) skewered and savaged, and who soured the sexual revolution with too many kinks and fetishes and very little romance.
Their failure to fight is evidenced by, for example, the 2000 election. It was quite clear that Al Gore won the election. But liberals, pussies to the core, let Bush get away with theft. When Miami-Dade conducted a recount pursuant to the order of the Florida Supreme Court, a gang of Republican hacks staged a “riot,” terrified people doing the recount, and the recount was stopped. (Actually, the Republican operatives did not hit or strike anyone. They just screamed. But the Democratic cowards ran away and failed to conduct the recount.) To make sure the recount was totally aborted, Bush applied in the US Supreme Court for expedited injunctive relief to stop the recount.
Expedited injunctive relief is immediate relief before and without a trial. This sort of relief is so dramatic that usually people have to prove a lot: A) A wrong is being committed, B) that wrong is so terrible that it must be stopped immediately, and we don’t have time to first conduct a trial, and C) if that wrong is not stopped the wrong inflicted on us will be greater than the wrong or harm inflicted on the other side.
Okay, so what was the wrong being committed by Gore? Apparently, the GOP so masterfully convoluted the law that, essentially, they said that recounting the vote was a wrong. Actually, they phrased it a bit differently: They argued that the very act of a recount creates doubt about the validity of our electoral system, that doubt could lessen respect (or more accurately slavish acceptance of official bullshit) for our electoral system and so it is best to sweep everything under the rug. If one took the Supreme Court’s argument to its logical conclusion one would say that we should not investigate murders committed by Ku Klux Klan, the lie that was the Gulf of Tonkin incident which ensured our deepening involvement in Vietnam, and the fact that about 7 shots were fired and 6 people injured when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the Ambassador Hotel because investigations and examinations would prompt people to pause before genuflecting before imperial presidents, whether they be Democrats or Republicans.
Of course, plenty of pussy liberals protested the theft of the election. But they almost always pulled their punches and ran away whenever the police told them to disburse. There is a reason for this: They would never do a damn thing to offend their bosses. They were yuppies, and because they did not get their hands dirty when they worked, they considered themselves professionals. (There was a time when the term professional was reserved for doctors, lawyers and clergymen. Nowadays every pompous prick who wears expensive clothing at work, and has dainty, trendy affectations, considers himself a professional.)
In any event, these yuppies bow before their bosses. Accordingly, any political endeavor which might detract from their time bowing and scraping before their supervisors is nipped in the bud.
I had a “friend,” David S, who fancied himself a Stalinist. I had recruited him to work in my very short-lived organization “Westsiders Against Fascist War,” which we established to protest America’s war against Serbia. (I don’t have the time to explain our position, but the reason why we supported Serbia is not germane to the point I want to make: Liberals are Cowardly puffs and that’s why people hate them) Among other things, I organized a demonstration at Congressman Nadler’s New York office which condemned his support of American aggression. On the day of the rally, David S got scared, actually started to cry and ran away. (Actually, the rally turned out alright, got about 60 people to picket and march around his office, and received some press coverage.)
David S was, first and foremost, a child of New York’s sissified and cossetted suburbs of Long Island, a land of overprivileged weaklings who never had to sing the blues. A left led by these rich kiddies will always fall flat on its face.
Of course, there are plenty of things that the Left should be angry about and should be fighting for. However, when I listen to the patter and mindless chatter of liberals, I think I am listening to an urbane version of the National Enquirer. All I ever hear are the sounding of petty grievances half of which relate to sexuality: A woman was pushed in her school auditorium and so she claims sexual harassment. A woman, or a severely sensitive man-infant, was aghast at the heterosexual macho of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (I remember reading, about ten years ago, that a teacher wanted “Romeo and Juliet” excised from the curriculum as it was a “blatantly heterosexual play.”)
The left should be fighting because, in States like New York, a patient has only 1 year to sue a doctor for mistakenly leaving a foreign object in his body whereas a business has 6 years to sue for breach of contract. The left should be fighting because, as I speak, hundreds of thousands of patients are lying in urine-soaked beds in nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities because of our skewed and corrupt system of compensating medical professionals. The left should be fighting because of for profit juvenile detention facilities where the guilty have the locks and keys and the innocent are incarcerated. The left should be fighting because of illegal evictions. The left should be fighting the “employee at will” doctrine. And the news media is so intent on infantilizing the dullards and druggies of America that most of you probably don’t know what the “employee at will” doctrine is.
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