Trump, the Black Cat with Nine Lives, and a Re-evaluation of John Lennon
The parallels between Trump, and his liberal critics, and Adolf Hitler, and the condemned Jews
By
David Gottfried
I have two essays today. First, an essay about Trump which outlines one of the ways the greatest liberal antagonists of Trump might, ironically enough, make him president in 2024. Second, an analysis of the Beatles which proposes that it was Paul Mc Cartney, and not John Lennon, who promulgated the most important and profound ideas of the Beatles.
The parallels between Trump, and his liberal critics, and Adolf Hitler, and the condemned Jews
At the outset, let me be clear: I hate Donald Trump.
However, ironically enough, I think that the allegedly “liberal” media, which purports to offer a left-wing critique of the establishment but is firmly embedded in the establishment, may very well elect Donald Trump in 2024.
In particular, I am thinking of the utterly monotonous, brain dead, whining newscasts offered by MSNBC and CNN on television. They appear to be stalwart in their opposition to Trump, but they are music to his ears.
When I think of MSNBC and CNN, I think of what Hannah Arendt said about Hitlerian Anti Semitism in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Arendt said that antisemitism reached a fever pitch of doom not because people envied alleged Jewish wealth but because people had contempt for what they perceived as the Jewish inability to translate their wealth into political power or safety. Some Jews had lots of money (and plenty of Jews, such as my relatives, were starving), but all over Europe the Jews were disrespected, powerless, beaten in the streets and politically impotent. This contempt for the Jews prompted a desire to massacre the Jews.
Similarly, liberal litigators have been investigating and suing Trump since 2016. And he keeps getting off. This is making Trumpian America, and prospective Trump allies, contemptuous of the left opposition. They see the left opposition as ineffectual, weak and effete just as Europe saw European Jewry as weak and effete.
In opposition to my fears, you may say that now, at long last, the bell is finally getting ready to toll for the diabolical Donald. After all, the last two indictments against Trump seem factually and legally impeccable, wholly unassailable and utterly damning.
However, I still fear that Trump may get off.
I have this fear because I, and many other people on the left, were pretty damn sure that Trump would be zapped by Mueller in 2017 when Mueller investigated Trump’s collusion with Russia in the 2016 election.
A wealth of data showed that Trump probably colluded with Russia to subvert the 2016 election. First, it was clear that Russia wanted Trump to win: A) Trump’s first national security advisor got money from Russia and was classified, by United States Law, as an agent of Russia, B) Paul Manaforte, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, got millions from Russia which everyone knew was for illicit work because Russia camouflaged the transfers of money by tendering millions not to Manaforte directly but to his creditors (e.g. Russia bought real estate for Manaforte by tendering money directly to the seller’s counsel), C) The NY Times reported, on at least two occasions, that Trump has difficulty getting loans from conventional American sources because the corporations, he controls, have a propensity to declare bankruptcy to avoid debts. Therefore, Russia became his source of liquidity, and Trump has been getting money from Russia ever since his hotels in Atlantic City declared bankruptcy; and D) Jared Kushner and other Trump confidantes lied to the FBI about their contacts with Russia.
Also, it is clear that Russia endeavored to help Trump and hurt Hillary. Russians, masquerading as African Americans, corrupted social media and spread tons of dirt about Hillary Clinton. Among other things, Detroit and Flint, gold mines of Democratic strength in Michigan elections, witnessed a plummeting in turn-out, and the voters who opted not to participate in 2016 in large measure consisted of black voters. That easily swung Michigan into the Republican column. (Facebook and social media and Silicon Valley: How do I hate thee, let me count the ways…)
Later on, there was a new scandal: When Ukrainians asked the United States for assistance, Trump demanded that they first give him dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden. The lion’s share of the American foreign policy establishment believed that it was in America’s interest to help Ukraine and oppose Russia. But Trump did not care about what was in America’s interest. He only cared about his own interest. But that’s typical Trump: He once said that our soldiers were fools and dopes for sacrificing for their country. And guess what: All those Republican senators, who always sound so high and mighty about military service and patriotism, let Trump off the hook.
In any event, I was certain Mueller had nailed Trump. However, the Teflon Don got off scott free. Of course, I have always surmised that he got off because his friends, in the Mob, threatened to put key witnesses, or prosecutors, into cement shoes and throw them in the Hudson River. And for this, I am considered too extreme and paranoid to be taken seriously as a writer. Well, I consider my antagonists naïve. Hell, if politicians such as Lyndon Johnson can lie to the American people to induce us to send millions of our men to Vietnam, I am sure that Donald Trump, a man infinitely more odious than Johnson, wouldn’t hesitate to liquidate witnesses and prosecutors.
However, that isn’t the way things are seen in pedestrian Peoria, Illinois. In small town America, a fraudulently idyllic universe in which people are rendered politically childlike for life,1 people reason that the Mueller investigation died out because the Mueller investigation was just a fantastic fabrication crafted by effete intellectual snobs from the Upper Left side of Manhattan Island.
And, of course, MSNBC and CNN made matters worse when they went absolutely ga ga over Jean Carrol’s sexual harassment suit against Trump which resulted in a multi-million-dollar award in her favor. MSNBC and CNN were utterly agog with delight and reminded me of women who cheered when it was disclosed, back in the 1990’s, that Lorena Bobbit had cut off her husband’s penis. Of course, there is no real comparison between the cases as sexual harassment is always wrong and dismembering people is always wrong. However, the alacrity with which CNN and MSNBC shifted gears from Russia to a case of ass grabbing in a fitting room in a department store tended to trivialize Trump’s crimes against our democracy and made it seem that the media and the left just wanted to “get Trump,” for a good reason, or a bad reason or no reason at all.
Of course, there are many good reasons to put Trump in jail. I need not reiterate them. I only want to close with this:
I often have CNN or MSNBC on, in the background, while I work (This is to drown out the noxious noise of my nettlesome neighbors) Since 1976 – I’m sorry, I mean since 2016 – they have been talking about one thing all fucking day: The crimes of the living Devil and the latest incarnation of Adolf Hitler, the evil, evil Orange Man, the Donald. If we don’t lock him up soon, people are going to make him emperor just to spite MSNBC and CNN for their neurotic perseveration (psychiatrists define perseveration as a condition in which a person says the same thing, again and again, like a broken record)
Turning the conventional analysis of John Lennon and Paul Mc Cartney on its head
Most of us have been taught to believe that Mc Cartney was the melodic genius and that Lennon was the “deep thinker” of the Beatles. While Lennon, allegedly, was steeped in profound thoughts, Mc Cartney, we are told, was lost in a swirl of pretty, but meaningless silly love songs. Mc Cartney addressed matters of the heart, but of course matters of the heart are the stuff of seventeen-year-old girls’ diaries and cannot ever be the subject matter of good poetry (Tell that to William Shakespeare)
Actually, I think that one of Mc Cartney’s songs, by itself, without anything more, is enough to merit a Nobel Prize. I am talking about “Eleanor Rigby.: Eleanor Rigby addressed emotional pain and isolation, and pain and isolation are among the most pressing problems of our time.
These problems are not only the stuff of tear-jerker, human interest stories because lonely and miserable people have a propensity to attempt to cure their ailments through political extremism. They may become Trumpers. They may become Islamic militants. They may become Unabomber wannabes.
More and more data indicates that emotional aberrations are rising, steadily and furiously: The percentage of households that include only one person keeps going up. The percentage of adults, over the age of 40, who have never married, keeps going up. The consumption of psychotropic meds keeps going up. More and more airline stewards are attacked by irate passengers. The incidence of transgenderism among young women is simply skyrocketing. Whereas once the predominant ailments in the offices of adolescent psychiatry were anxiety and depression, now more and more teenagers feel constrained to cut themselves or suffer a host of dietary problems. This epidemic of mental disease leaves no demographic unscathed and has even penetrated the nursery, as more children are not being toilet trained on time, more children are bed wetters and more children are diagnosed as autistic.
While Mc Cartney was acutely sensitive to emotional pain, Lennon seemed to go downhill and forget the many ways in which emotional pain could manifest itself. While Lennon was cognizant of the subtle striations in the human heart in masterpieces such as “Nowhere Man” and “Norwegian Wood,” he became dull and monotonal after he self-consciously and proudly became a leftist activist. I agreed with his leftist activism. But his leftist activism, when set to music, became a pedantic, insufferable bore.
When melody and rhythm are hijacked to express a political point -- in the least ambiguous, loudest and most ponderous and heavy-handed way possible -- we are not listening to music. Rather we are in the company of a priggish, pugilistic music teacher insisting that we become good boys and girls and drink the courage-sapping Kool-Aid. I was totally against the Vietnam War, but if I have to listen to Yoko One rail against the Vietnam War, I think I’ll develop a strange desire to see John Wayne movies.
As he became more and more ensnared by the spell of Yoko Ono, Lenon’s political music made him sound like a smug, and slightly precious, obnoxious 14-year-old boy rebelling against his entrepreneurial parents. In what many people imagine was one of his most advanced and penetrating political songs, “Working Class Hero,” he criticized parents who gave their children “no time instead of it all” and seems unaware that the most miserable and disturbed teenagers have the most involved and engaged parents. As time passed, he felt impelled to imagine that his background was working class (a notion that Mc Cartney rejects) and that his problems arose from being working class. Apparently, he was middle class and did not have the guts to say that sometimes middle-class children can have troubled backgrounds (He was rejected by his mother and his Father and was raised by his Aunt Mimi).
Actually, Lennon was at his best when he is either achingly sweet and romantic as in
Or when his intemperate, intoxicated imagination takes over and he approximates an elegant, equestrian Cavalier of a Duke in “You’re a Rich Man,” or “Cry Baby Cry” or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
The immediately preceding paragraph is not supposed to be underlined — this is a formatting problem