Will the Saga of Donald Trump Teach America that Affluence is Not Next to G-dliness
Will the Saga of Donald Trump Teach America that Affluence is Not Next to G-dliness
By
David Gottfried
This country has always idolized the wealthy. Although America ostensibly rebelled against princely privilege when it established the Republic, it soon made millionaires its new kings. Perhaps it has something to do with our Calvinist, Protestant heritage. In any event, our chronic adulation of the rich is undeniable. Indeed, the philosopher William James said that America worships at “the altar of the bitch goddess success.” Henry David Thoreau opined that most Americans live lives of “quiet desperation.” Why were they desperate? Perhaps they were terrified of going to the poor house.
In my life, things really got rotten around the time Ronald Reagan became president. He was on a mission to make the nation regress to the era of Charles Dickens. Reagan’s ascension to power stimulated a rightward shift throughout our politics and culture. A few examples from the early 1980’s:
A) Susan Sontag, the veritable epitome of snooty intellectual chic, and someone who had once been seen as adamantly left-wing, said, in New York’s Town Hall in the autumn of 1981, that the time for activism had passed and that everyone should just “do their work.” Her numerous fans complied and activism atrophied. Over the next decade, New York rental prices rose like helium as the number of AIDS cases, duly ignored by the narrow-minded yuppies, leapt into the stratosphere.
B) Television reach new heights of grossness and gaudiness with the airing of Hosannas for the rich, including shows such as “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and “Dynasty.”
C) Ed Koch, New York City’s very vulgar Mayor, said that if one could not afford New York City, one should just leave. Meanwhile, while he lived in the Mayoral Residence, Grace Mansion, he continued to occupy his luxury apartment in Greenwich Village for which he paid a mere $237.00 a month in rent.
D) Bette Midler, at a ritzy gala of some sort, boisterously regaled the crowd by saying that she was investing in Krugerrands (the currency of South Africa), thereby extolling capitalism and racism in the same breath.
The Dickensian drive inaugurated by Reagan did not stop when that senile sadist left the White House. A conservative Republican congressman from New York’s Staten Island said, in 1995, that we should put the children of poor people into orphanages. Around that time, Gertrude Himmelfarb came out with a book, entitled “Victorian Virtues” if I remember correctly, which told us we should feel terribly guilty for everything from rock n roll to soul music to dungarees, ought to work as hard as a scullery maid in a lord’s estate and become as contrite and acquiescent as a servant on an English manor. (She was Irving Kristol’s wife and presumably used his literary status to create her career. Meanwhile, she used the word Himmelfarb, perhaps, to create the illusion that she was a self-made woman.)
Around the year 2000 (or after 8 years of the ultimate bullshit corporate Democrat, Bill Clinton), a new form of transportation made America’s metropolitan centers reminiscent of colonial outposts in Asia. These were carriages which were attached to bicycles. The bicycle was powered by the feet of the often poverty-stricken driver. They reminded me of rickshaws, and a huge proportion of New York’s populace seemed as penniless and downtrodden as the peasants of Hong Kong and Saigon.
I can’t list all the seminal cultural developments which demonstrate America’s fealty to what I might call Royalist Capitalism. So I will jump ahead to a year that would have incited a socialist uprising if the American people were sentient beings who did not listlessly wander in shopping malls, shoveling donuts into their ugly mugs and looking rather sedated and stupid because of their rapidly increasing blood sugar levels. I am talking about 2008.
I thought that Bernie Madoff would have finally taught Americans to revile rich people. He was hailed as a great investor, a man with many tens of billions of dollars, and a charming and kind soul to boot. His investment house was one big Ponzi scheme. Among the clients he ripped off were Holocaust survivors and Jewish charities.
Somehow the Bernie Madoff scandal did not make the steering wheel of state take the long overdue sharp left turn. Of course, there was something much more vile than Bernie Madoff. I am talking of the sickness in the stock market that had given us the crash of 2008.
Investors usually do not invest in factories or ennobling ideas or useful products. The princes of Wall Street consider that so passe. They play the options game. I hope I won’t bore you, but I fear that most Americans have only the haziest idea of what transpired on Wall Street. A very brief primer on the mechanisms that created the crash of 2008:
In Insurance Law, it is well-understood, from London, England to London Connecticut, and in all parts all over the Western world, that I cannot buy fire insurance on Joe’s home. If I got fire insurance on Joe’s home, I would have a vested interest in seeing Joe’s home burn down.
This wise principle of Insurance Law has no home in the Stock Market. And, for some sick reason, in the administration of Bill Clinton it was duly decreed that in the options market I am free to bet on another party’s failure. This set the stage for 2008.
Scads of sickening investors proceeded to buy credit default swaps in which they bet that sub prime mortgages would fail. Then, they, and their agents, modified the terms of mortgages to increase interest rates and do everything they could to induce default. The investors made money because homeowners defaulted on their loans. More broadly, Wall Street parasites made a killing by destroying the economy.
Republicans, and Democratic Party lackeys, claim that business stimulates growth. Actually, through options trading business induces widespread poverty. Rich people become rich by making other people poor. Capitalism is economic Schadenfreude pure and simple.
Finally, the potential that did exist, in 2008, for radical progressive change was soon eviscerated by the growing fascist reaction against Obama. Just as the French right was filled with hysteria and hate because a Jew, Leon Blum, was elected Prime Minister of France in 1936, American rightists were apoplectic with rage that Obama, a black man, had been elected President, in 2008.
Through the eight years of Obama’s presidency, delusional and primitive thinking became as ornate and bizarre as ancient Egyptian rites regarding the afterlife of the dead. First, they toyed with the notion that Obama had been born in Kenya. Then they told us that Obama would convene death panels to put granny six feet under. (No, Covid, courtesy of Trump, is doing that.) Then in a fit a paranoic reasoning that would have been the envy of Adolf Hitler, they told us that Hillary Clinton, and other leading Democrats and evil Hollywood celebrities, were selling children for sex. The children, it was said, were hidden in the basement of a pizza parlor in DC. This psychotic concoction is one part “South Park” and one part the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
At the end of Obama’ presidency, the nation, after having been mind- fucked by Fox News, was fully primed and pumped and ready to be fucked up the butt by Donald Trump.
And now the consummate capitalist pig is in office. I am too tired to recite the reasons he is so vile. Besides, if my reader does not realize that Trump is a moron, a psychotic (“I am a very stable genius”) a sociopath (“I can kill people at random on Fifth Avenue and get away with it”) and a pervert (“If Ivanka was not my daughter I would date her”), they need to take a test to determine if they have senile dementia, the same test that Trump got which he thought was an IQ test which revealed that he is a genius.
More importantly, Trump has no redeeming social value. Although some mentally ill people are artistic (Virginia Woolf, Robert Lowell, Vincent Van Gogh etc.), the only thing that Trump has created is his opus of Tweets. Although some people with low levels of intelligence, especially people with Down’s syndrome, are exceptionally kind and benevolent, Trump seems to make a concerted effort to be unkind. Although some people who are macho brutes have sacrificed life and limb on the battlefield, Trump has told us that venereal disease was his Vietnam. Trump, quite plainly, rejoices in being a shithead, asshole and douchebag.
If Donald Trump --- along with Bernie Madoff, Mayor Rudest Rudy the human rodent, and so many more shmucks – haven’t taught the American people that wealthy people should be spurned, scorned and afflicted with confiscatory tax rates, I don’t know if anything will.