Why Our Leaders Deserve Unmitigated Contempt

And some Morose Meditations as I Depart for the Hospital

By

David Gottfried

Tomorrow, I am checking into the Hospital. I am having back surgery. I dread this, and I have put it off for years because the results are often dreadful, but my once muscular and brawny body has waned and withered into ignominious and common ugliness made all the more apparent because I am using a fucking walker. How fucking Geriatric can you get. I still feel like I did when I was 19. The opening notes of “Brown Sugar” still make me want to throw a Molotov cocktail into a police station or the pentagon, but my body reeks of decrepitude.

But hell. If things really get bad, I can join my dear friend Luigi Mangione in blowing up a system that has lived too long.

Since Donald Trump is hammering the last nails into the coffin of Democracy, isn’t it time that capitalism, the thing that murdered democracy and all the glory that it promised, meet the grim reaper.

It is capitalism that killed our Democracy. I know that in America we are taught to believe that capitalism and democracy are positively correlated, but that is only a manifestation of something we learn in the study of abnormal psychology: When we find something is too unpleasant to conceive of, we believe the antithesis of the truth. It is too unpleasant to realize that capitalism promotes lying and tyranny so we imagine that it is the progenitor of all that is good.

This is how capitalism encourages lying (And tyranny, and the demolition of democratic norms and values):

In a capitalist society, one obeys one overriding commandment: Sell, Sell, Sell. To sell, one tries to please all the time. To sell, one lies about the defects in one’s products. One markets lies as gospel truths. One always tries to augment one’s bank balance. To boost one’s bank account, one kisses ass. To boost one’s bank account, one will call the most ludicrous, lying toad in the world beautiful if that toad has power.

And look at the Republicans of the United States Senate.

Almost all of them consider Zelensky infinitely superior to Putin.

And all of them will support Trump’s and Putin’s dismemberment and eventual destruction of Ukraine.

This is because they are weak, unprincipled, spineless cowardly capitalists. They have spent their lives embedded in and tied to capitalism and so toadying up to tyrants is their forte, smiling while lying is second nature, and selling their soul to the devil is their calling.

In America, we praise soldiers who risk dying on the battlefield to preserve our freedom.

And the Republicans in the Senate and the House won’t risk a rough election to take a stand for the truth as they know it.

We have often been told that America was wounded by the reforms of FDR, and his progeny, and the excesses of the 60’s and its infinitely more bombastic progeny. In other words, conservatives have said that America went downhill because the citizenry became too unmannered, unmoored, undisciplined — rowdy, rebellious and riotous.0

No, conservatives are dead wrong

And as America may slither off into its senescence, I cannot help but think that her greater problem is too much deference and not enough rebelliousness. The problem is we have too much damn respect for our leaders.

We have too much damn respect for Senators, who know Zelensky is right but who back Trump in condemning Zelensky. ⁹We have too much damn respect for Senators who vote in accordance with the demands of the NRA. We have too much damn respect for CEO’s who supply food additives which are illegal in Western Europe because they are carcinogenic, lie about the presence of asbestos in talcum powder and then flood our airwaves with ads telling us that we suffer from too much regulation.

So, in closing, I say this: Tell all the Mothafuckers in power to shove it. And wish me luck in the hospital.